Materialism - Devastator of Scientific Method! / Observer Delusion

[TheAdversary]

Actually, even following my argument, Dennett probably is the Einstein of consciousness. Einstein wasn't right about
everything, either. But where would we be without them?

 

[Dancing David]

Personally, I'd be pretty surprised if time existed outside of the workspace

Again, definitions, photons do not traverse a million light years in an instant

 

[The Man]

'Consciousness seems to be a particular kind of self-referential information processing.'

I argue that this is always an infinite regression, a sophisticated version of the Homunculus argument.
the 'Self-referential' part is where the regression occurs, if you actually try to write the program.
That's why I'm not convinced until you can show me the source code for something like this.

"an infinite regression" to what? A self-reference? Now one might argue that is is circular and infinite perhaps in that regard that output gets fed back into input, but that's what a feedback loop does.

Actually, I do agree that 'self-referential' seems to be an essential component of the peculiar phenomenon we call
'consciousness'.

I guess the meta-arguing does help.

Memeplex 3.12.4 r12 BEGIN
If consciousness is just information organization of a peculiar, self-referential, kind,
and you can't write an actual program for this, then that's the contradiction that shows
that the first premise is false, if we hold that writing such a program ends in contradiction; turns out to be
impossible.
If the source code is not delivered on this, the materialists have not all-overthrown, as they falsely advertise.
Memeplex 3.12.4 r12 END

Nope it would only be a contradiction if the assertion was “We can write an actual program for this” but then you find out “you can't write an actual program for this”.

 

[Fudbucker]

Again, definitions, photons do not traverse a million light years in an instant

From the frame of reference of a photon, it instantaneously travels billions of light years.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-ba...otons-experience-time-94756eab8bf9#.cjiqkiqdh

 

[Nick227]

Maybe for you “when you observe inside you find” you just aren’t, well, “observing”. However that is simply being self-inconsistent.

No. There's observation, but the sense that someone is doing this is being created memetically. It's an artifact of using language.

Paying attention to thoughts creates two subtle effects which end up convincing the brain there is some observer of consciousness...

1) Thought narratives constantly suggest the presence of an "I" - a personal self - who is the subject of experience. See Dennett - centre of narrative gravity.

2) Paying attention to thought makes it seem as though someone is thinking. It's a subjective sensation that persists only while the mind attends to thought. When not attending to thought, the raw sensation of life (phenomenology) is still present but it's clear that it's not really happening to anyone.

This is how a memeplex comes to exert influence in a human brain. It's a trade-off. The brain is programmed to try and get certain evolutionarily-derived needs met. The memeplex offers a way to assist.

All good, until you want to know what's actually true. At that point you need to be aware that this memetic sense of personal selfhood is not actually real.

If you don't understand this, if you don't appreciate the massive significance of this, then you will likely end up like Dave Chalmers or Giulio Tononi - essentially just a memeplex trapped in its own programming, trying to understand consciousness whilst still clinging to an illusion.

 

[Nick227]

Memeplex 3.12.4 r12 BEGIN
If consciousness is just information organization of a peculiar, self-referential, kind,
and you can't write an actual program for this, then that's the contradiction that shows
that the first premise is false, if we hold that writing such a program ends in contradiction; turns out to be
impossible.
If the source code is not delivered on this, the materialists have not all-overthrown, as they falsely advertise.
Memeplex 3.12.4 r12 END

Rogue Memeplex #1 to Memeplex 2.0 - I couldn't write source-code to save my life. This does not demonstrate that Type A Materialism (to use Chalmers terminology) is wrong, merely that I never learned to write source-code (and have precious little drive to learn). Sorry.

I have no Ph.D, I can't write source-code, and I couldn't tell you about Information Theory. But I can personally guarantee you that Dan Dennett was far nearer to the truth in 1991 than Chalmers, Tononi, Hoffman or any of the other panpsychics and wannabes are in 2015.

How can I guarantee this? Because this brain is subjectively aware that no Observer can exist. It can see right through the illusion. I can sit here and watch it day in, day out. So when I read a paper in which the writer starts from the premise that there "must be a self which experiences consciousness," as Tononi for example does, I just laugh. I can't take the guy seriously because he's starting from an assumption that I have first-hand ongoing knowledge to be incorrect.

 

[Nick227]

Again, definitions, photons do not traverse a million light years in an instant

Not in the workspace, sure. But who knows how a photon is outside of there?

 

[Nick227]

+Fudbucker I regard Dennett's theories as beneficial delusions, containing lots of truth. And giving lots of impulse
to fields like AI that produced lots of cool stuff, but in the end there's the Homunculus in your recursion(s).
You can understand the brain better of you ignore consciousness, but you can't explain it away.

TA,

Like many people, you're accusing Dennett of ignoring consciousness, or explaining away consciousness. But this is simply not true. He's explaining consciousness fine. But in his explanation there no room left for a self which is supposedly experiencing consciousness.

This is the real issue for you guys. Not consciousness itself.

And the mind, when faced with Dennett's explanation, screams out, like a small child, "But what about me!? What about me?!"

 

[JoeMorgue]

Not in the workspace, sure. But who knows how a photon is outside of there?

"How do you know magic doesn't make it act differently when you're not looking?"

That's the level we're at folks.

 

[catsmate]

In the post-Dawkins world, The Observer has become the new God. An untested belief system prayed to daily.

Not really.

"How do you know magic doesn't make it act differently when you're not looking?"
That's the level we're at folks.

Indeed.

 

[The Man]

No. There's observation, but the sense that someone is doing this is being created memetically. It's an artifact of using language.

Again technically it is being created neurologically and can be altered through chemicals and neurological damage or changes.

Paying attention to thoughts creates two subtle effects which end up convincing the brain there is some observer of consciousness...

So observing thoughts convinces one that they are, well, observing thoughts, amazing.

1) Thought narratives constantly suggest the presence of an "I" - a personal self - who is the subject of experience. See Dennett - centre of narrative gravity.

Ah so thinking creates the thought of one’s self, again astounding.

2) Paying attention to thought makes it seem as though someone is thinking. It's a subjective sensation that persists only while the mind attends to thought. When not attending to thought, the raw sensation of life (phenomenology) is still present but it's clear that it's not really happening to anyone.

Again observing thoughts leads to the thought one is observing thoughts. “When not attending to thought”? When who or what is not “attending to thought”? The brain? Parts of the Bain? The parts of the brain that generate a sense of self? So now you have district states “attending to thought” and “not attending to thought” but apparently insist on no, well, attendant(s). Just trying to change up the language doesn’t eliminate the inconsistencies.

This is how a memeplex comes to exert influence in a human brain. It's a trade-off. The brain is programmed to try and get certain evolutionarily-derived needs met. The memeplex offers a way to assist.

All good, until you want to know what's actually true. At that point you need to be aware that this memetic sense of personal selfhood is not actually real.

If you don't understand this, if you don't appreciate the massive significance of this, then you will likely end up like Dave Chalmers or Giulio Tononi - essentially just a memeplex trapped in its own programming, trying to understand consciousness whilst still clinging to an illusion.

Massive significance? Simple word games don’t change the fact that it is just another way to say that the sense of self is constructed in the brain by neurological interactions while apparently just trying to deliberately ignore that sense of self and the neurological interaction of the areas of the brain that contribute to creating it, the one basic trick of a magician, deliberate misdirection.

 

[The Man]

Rogue Memeplex #1 to Memeplex 2.0 - I couldn't write source-code to save my life. This does not demonstrate that Type A Materialism (to use Chalmers terminology) is wrong, merely that I never learned to write source-code (and have precious little drive to learn). Sorry.

I have no Ph.D, I can't write source-code, and I couldn't tell you about Information Theory. But I can personally guarantee you that Dan Dennett was far nearer to the truth in 1991 than Chalmers, Tononi, Hoffman or any of the other panpsychics and wannabes are in 2015.

How can I guarantee this? Because this brain is subjectively aware that no Observer can exist. It can see right through the illusion. I can sit here and watch it day in, day out. So when I read a paper in which the writer starts from the premise that there "must be a self which experiences consciousness," as Tononi for example does, I just laugh. I can't take the guy seriously because he's starting from an assumption that I have first-hand ongoing knowledge to be incorrect.

In the rabbit out of the hat analogy, the rabbit actually comes out of the hat. The trick or illusion is getting the rabbit into the hat without anyone noticing. Here and in a previous post you assert to essentially watching the rabbit being constructed in that hat. That doesn't make the rabbit go away that makes the need of a trick or illusion go away, how the rabbit gets into the hat. To do this you again refer to your own sense of self (the rabbit) to try to insist that it is not the trick that's the illusion but the rabbit. I doubt you could be any more self-inconsistent if you tried.

 

[Dancing David]

From the frame of reference of a photon, it instantaneously travels billions of light years.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-ba...otons-experience-time-94756eab8bf9#.cjiqkiqdh

That is irrelevant to the objects outside the photon, there are other processes.

A photon if capable of observation would notice that its position had changed and that would also mark time for it. Even though it is in a state where time does not 'pass' the distance traveled does however

 

[Dancing David]

Not in the workspace, sure. But who knows how a photon is outside of there?

Um, I am not sure of your language usage. Your statement is not understood by me

 

[Myriad]

1) Thought narratives constantly suggest the presence of an "I" - a personal self - who is the subject of experience. See Dennett - centre of narrative gravity.

Dennett's center of narrative gravity essay rests on one very questionable assumption. He posits a robot equipped with sensors and actuators that allow it to interact with the world and other beings (e.g. asking for help if trapped), and he also posits it possessing the computational capability to create narrative, including autobiographical narrative, from that interaction. But he also declares it non-conscious, using phrases like "clanking machinery" to make the idea that the robot could possibly be conscious sound absurd.

He has, most likely, thereby entangled himself in a contradiction. He has essentially re-invented the p-zombie in mechanical form. That is not a coherent concept, if the computational process of creating narrative (including autobiographical narrative) from interaction with the world is what consciousness actually is. Or if consciousness is a necessary component of that processing ability.

Ultimately, the idea of a self comes not from some memetic illusion, but from the evolutionary process from which the cognitive processes in question arose. Evolution requires competitive interactions between replicating organisms. If there are no competing replicating organisms with varying traits, then there can be no evolution. Since evolution is a historical fact, organisms must exist.

We instinctively associate the self with an organism. ("He hit me" generally meaning that someone struck my material body, not that he struck the ongoing computations in my neurons.) The self is not necessarily the organism, but it refers to the organism, and it originated and derives its function from the organism's participation in evolution. The computation that writes this post receives direct sensory input from only one set of sensory organs, actuates only one set of muscles, and has memories of interaction with the world only by those means. There is nothing misleading or inaccurate about calling any or all those things "my self."

That's why I asked, in all seriousness, where the illusory-self-causing "memeplex" that you claimed "crawled into [someone's] head" crawled there from. Of course you couldn't answer, because it the memeplex you describe couldn't and didn't come from anywhere else. It was there first. In biological history, it was there before the first nerve cell evolved.

 

[Kid Eager]

...... and getting back to the topic of the thread (again): Nope, still nothing here that invalidates the scientific method, nor gives special dispensation to woo.

 

[Myriad]

...... and getting back to the topic of the thread (again): Nope, still nothing here that invalidates the scientific method, nor gives special dispensation to woo.

Correct. My post addressed the first four of the five bullet points in the OP, particularly the fourth, which is where my basic agreement with the first three points ends and the chain of reasoning breaks down. (Put more succinctly: selfhood is not an arbitrary illusion that happened to emerge from evolution; it is instead a particular case of organism-hood, and organism-hood is necessary for evolution to occur in the first place.)

The implication for the fifth bullet point follows fairly obviously.

 

[annnnoid]

No. There's observation, but the sense that someone is doing this is being created memetically. It's an artifact of using language.

Paying attention to thoughts creates two subtle effects which end up convincing the brain there is some observer of consciousness...

1) Thought narratives constantly suggest the presence of an "I" - a personal self - who is the subject of experience. See Dennett - centre of narrative gravity.

2) Paying attention to thought makes it seem as though someone is thinking. It's a subjective sensation that persists only while the mind attends to thought. When not attending to thought, the raw sensation of life (phenomenology) is still present but it's clear that it's not really happening to anyone.

This is how a memeplex comes to exert influence in a human brain. It's a trade-off. The brain is programmed to try and get certain evolutionarily-derived needs met. The memeplex offers a way to assist.

All good, until you want to know what's actually true. At that point you need to be aware that this memetic sense of personal selfhood is not actually real.

If you don't understand this, if you don't appreciate the massive significance of this, then you will likely end up like Dave Chalmers or Giulio Tononi - essentially just a memeplex trapped in its own programming, trying to understand consciousness whilst still clinging to an illusion.

Your argument basically boils down to...something you call 'you'...somehow (you don't explain how) has the capacity to understand that something called 'you' does not exist.

Leaving aside the obvious absurdity of such an observation...what is it that exists if 'you' do not?

 

[John Jones]

Your argument basically boils down to...something you call 'you'...somehow (you don't explain how) has the capacity to understand that something called 'you' does not exist.

Leaving aside the obvious absurdity of such an observation...what is it that exists if 'you' do not?

HAHAHAHAHA!

 

[MRC_Hans]

Dennett's center of narrative gravity essay rests on one very questionable assumption. He posits a robot equipped with sensors and actuators that allow it to interact with the world and other beings (e.g. asking for help if trapped), and he also posits it possessing the computational capability to create narrative, including autobiographical narrative, from that interaction. But he also declares it non-conscious, using phrases like "clanking machinery" to make the idea that the robot could possibly be conscious sound absurd.

He has, most likely, thereby entangled himself in a contradiction. He has essentially re-invented the p-zombie in mechanical form. That is not a coherent concept, if the computational process of creating narrative (including autobiographical narrative) from interaction with the world is what consciousness actually is. Or if consciousness is a necessary component of that processing ability.

Ultimately, the idea of a self comes not from some memetic illusion, but from the evolutionary process from which the cognitive processes in question arose. Evolution requires competitive interactions between replicating organisms. If there are no competing replicating organisms with varying traits, then there can be no evolution. Since evolution is a historical fact, organisms must exist.

We instinctively associate the self with an organism. ("He hit me" generally meaning that someone struck my material body, not that he struck the ongoing computations in my neurons.) The self is not necessarily the organism, but it refers to the organism, and it originated and derives its function from the organism's participation in evolution. The computation that writes this post receives direct sensory input from only one set of sensory organs, actuates only one set of muscles, and has memories of interaction with the world only by those means. There is nothing misleading or inaccurate about calling any or all those things "my self."

That's why I asked, in all seriousness, where the illusory-self-causing "memeplex" that you claimed "crawled into [someone's] head" crawled there from. Of course you couldn't answer, because it the memeplex you describe couldn't and didn't come from anywhere else. It was there first. In biological history, it was there before the first nerve cell evolved.

Excellent.

Hans