Nonpareil
The Terrible Trivium
No, no. You see, you've proved that you are sane by noticing it, and now you are contractually obligated to remain active in the thread in order to keep coherency levels above the prescribed minimum.
Materialism - Devastator of Scientific Method! / Observer Delusion
- Thread starter Nick227
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No, no. You see, you've proved that you are sane by noticing it, and now you are contractually obligated to remain active in the thread in order to keep coherency levels above the prescribed minimum.
Aridas
Crazy Little Green Dragon
Yeah... after this pathetic observer = one who observes crap, where even a complex set of systems that is generally classified as a person that demonstrably meets the criteria required to qualify as observing somehow doesn't quality as an observer, I think there's really nothing more that even needs said. Nick227 seems to want to claim the equivalent of "hands" not existing because you can't point at the specific finger that makes the hand. Nick227's arguments can pretty much be put in the dismissed and ridicule-worthy bin.
Even if perception is inherently biased and not directly veridical, which I was under the impression that anyone who has dealt with the subject much considered a reasonably likely possibility, especially under certain circumstances, such a case would not meaningfully impact the scientific method, contrary to Nick227's empty assertions. Unless, of course, the bias/distortion was sufficient that everyone's ability to understand reality at all was notably impacted, which still wouldn't actually help Nick227's attempted argument, much less his suggestion to redirect massive amounts of resources to neural research. What would even be the point of diverting the resources to that at all in that case? No information obtained would have any more trustworthiness than the information gained about those things that he's trying to call into question. It's a little like getting rid of a wart by killing the person it's growing on and then recommending that the dead person run a marathon to prevent it from growing back. Nonsensical through and through.
Separately, to reply to kellyb, one of the main issues with defining consciousness, at last check, was really a philosophical one, namely, determining where the "cut-off" is or what traits and at what level of those traits actually counts as the border between not conscious and conscious. Arbitrarily putting that border at any particular "spot" will fairly certainly lead to hosts of objections to little actual gain, except when used in the specific context of whatever experiment is being run as a way to help make the results more understandable.
Even if perception is inherently biased and not directly veridical, which I was under the impression that anyone who has dealt with the subject much considered a reasonably likely possibility, especially under certain circumstances, such a case would not meaningfully impact the scientific method, contrary to Nick227's empty assertions. Unless, of course, the bias/distortion was sufficient that everyone's ability to understand reality at all was notably impacted, which still wouldn't actually help Nick227's attempted argument, much less his suggestion to redirect massive amounts of resources to neural research. What would even be the point of diverting the resources to that at all in that case? No information obtained would have any more trustworthiness than the information gained about those things that he's trying to call into question. It's a little like getting rid of a wart by killing the person it's growing on and then recommending that the dead person run a marathon to prevent it from growing back. Nonsensical through and through.
Separately, to reply to kellyb, one of the main issues with defining consciousness, at last check, was really a philosophical one, namely, determining where the "cut-off" is or what traits and at what level of those traits actually counts as the border between not conscious and conscious. Arbitrarily putting that border at any particular "spot" will fairly certainly lead to hosts of objections to little actual gain, except when used in the specific context of whatever experiment is being run as a way to help make the results more understandable.
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Indeed, it is a fools errand to argue with anyone who "has dismissed the very concept of reality, and in doing so dismissed the very concept of evidence or any ability to obtain it". But that's precisely why we should not waste time discussing the details of their claims with them, unless and until they do provide genuine evidence.
Because that is precisely the position that philosophy and religious belief were in when, from around 1600, Galileo and others began to discover what we now call science as a genuine way of explaining everything, where previously those other methods of philosophy and faith belief had always failed.
Really those methods failed because they were (and are) fundamentally dishonest (to put it bluntly), in fact arrogantly dishonest. That was the element that science changed - where philosophy and religion had relied entirely on individuals believing that they had special powers of great insight and could therefore understand and explain everything merely by thinking about it, what science did instead was to abandon that idea and do things as objectively as possibly by making measurements and gathering data. Only after that, to "philosophise" by thinking about what the best explanation of the data might be, and then to try testing the explanations with further independent objective methods. Science succeeded because it was not so arrogant as to assume that anyone could obtain all understanding just by their beliefs and intellectual musing of the mind.
So that is an argument which science has already won. If Nick227 or anyone, thinks they can obtain the answers merely by philosophising (or by religious faith, which is actually a very similar approach), then they are trying to resurrect a lost battle with ideas from the time before Galileo, rooted in the beliefs of pre-biblical times and the Greco-Roman philosophers.
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MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
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A real let down for someone eloquently posing as a philosopher, to present a definition that would fit the PIR sensor in my shed: It observes me entering, observes the level of ambient light, and makes a decision on whether to turn on the light.
Hans
This seems like a pretty lousy mischaracterization of religion and philosophy, neither of which requires its adherents to divorce themselves from the goings on in the world around them. In fact, both are concerned with exploring just those things.
Here's some free content in a philosophy journal to show you what I mean:
https://www.pdcnet.org/jphil/free
And some stuff from religion: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/blog/25139-christians-vs-the-big-questions
I think you have to be careful with how you interpret these things.
As I'm pointing out, theories of consciousness where perception is understood as "neural representation" now abound. They are everywhere and evidence accrues that this is the way forward. For example...
* neural predictive coding has been discovered
* we can trigger oobe's by fiddling with the brain's TPJ. If you can shift the apparent locus of perception like this, then how can perception be veridical? It can't.
* it's the only way to explain certain optical illusions at a neural level.
So, scientists studying consciousness are moving, it seems pretty much en masse, to this viewpoint. It's essentially a form of panpsychism, where everything is understood as possessing a degree of consciousness. This does not mean, however, that everything is a "conscious agent" to use Don Hoffman's term.
Neuroscience is now moving into a terrain which could be termed "extreme counter-intuitive." It's a place where you need the capacity to model something that fits the data, but which seems to be pretty much 100% impossible to be true, based on how things seem to our own mind. This is not an area many skeptics are comfortable with, as is highly evidenced by this thread.
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Aridas - you are just presenting a False Dilemma.
What I'm saying is that you have to assess the impact of these revelations emerging from neuroscience. It is not black and white. It is not that all science is necessarily meaningless, or necessarily valuable. We need to assess the situation.
I watched Don Hoffman present his Interface Theory of Perception a couple of times online. On both occasions he demonstrated that fitness would always win over accuracy, in terms of how the brain evolved to create neural representations. And then immediately jumped from this point to asserting, essentially, that we have no clue what reality looks like. But it's not black and white like this. You can't just jump to this conclusion.
Traditional science is hammered by these revelations. It means that Plato's Cave is essentially correct (though there's no one actually in the cave!). Scientists and skeptics who actually understand the issue (seemingly not many on this thread) are in shock. But the truth is that it is not black and white. I'm saying we need to put a lot of research into neuroscience at this juncture because that's the only intelligent way forward.
Nonpareil
The Terrible Trivium
Oh, so you are yet another one who heard the Koch soundbite without actually bothering to read the context in which it was said.
Koch, Tononi, and the various other neurologists to whom you presumably refer are not panpsychists. Unfortunately, they are also not trained political experts, so they sometimes say ridiculous things that get grabbed onto and run away with. This is one of them.
The phrase "panpsychist" was used to describe a position similar to but not at all equivalent with traditional panpsychism, where quite a few more things are conscious than most people would realize - but not everything. In fact, the whole point of Koch's work on the integrated information theory of consciousness is that it would give you an explicit means to adjudicate what is and is not conscious.
Is this theory necessarily correct? I haven't the faintest idea. But there is absolutely no scientific grounding for traditional panpsychism, and no serious student of neurology or consciousness would ever say that the field is moving towards acceptance of it.
Don't just mine for sound bites and pretend you have an argument.
What "real" events and processes have been discovered and genuinely explained by either religion or philosophy? After all, religion has had perhaps 5000 years trying it, and philosophy perhaps 3000.
Science has discovered and accurately explained, at a very rough guess, many trillions of important if not absolutely vital things that we need and use every day in this universe. What is the score so far for philosophy or religion?
Well imho they are both "pretty lousy" subjects. With "pretty lousy" methods of trying to claim "ways of knowing" anything. Way's which after many thousands of years, were eventually shown by science to be deeply flawed and completely inadequate.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Mojo
Mostly harmless
asydhouse
Master Poster
No thanks. You failed to address my points at the beginning of the original thread where you made unsupported statements as if they arose from what you'd already said, and I explained my objections to your unsupported extrapolations.
You ignored my questions a couple of pages ago when you insisted that all science go on hold until… somehow we determine what an observer is, or what's a mind, or something, even though there's no reason behind such a suggestion.
Judging by the number of pages in which you have failed to develop beyond insisting rubbish like that, I have lost interest in the arbitrary special pleading of your thoughts.
I find the other posters such as Nonpareil far more interesting, so I'm sitting back following his contributions instead.
tsig
a carbon based life-form
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Why is neuroscience exempt from this "devastation of science"? If science is faulty then the neuroscience you are basing your arguments on is also faulty.
tsig
a carbon based life-form
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Well, I haven't heard this soundbite.
What I understand about IIT is this... the degree of consciousness that a system is deemed to possess is directly proportional to the amount of non-localized information that is held within it, this being represented by the letter phi. This to me does sound like essentially a form of panpsychism.
Well, I'm not sure that that's correct, but feel free to correct me. I understood that IIT is asserting "degrees of consciousness" that can be measured empirically, or at least hopefully measured at some point in the future. Maybe it also asserts some form of "threshold value" at which consciousness happens, I don't know. Does it?
I'd be highly surprised if it's correct! It's proceeding from some whopping great assumptions. However, it seems to me that there's likely a strong link between information binding and consciousness.
I'm saying it's moving towards an acceptance that neural representation is what's going on in phenomenal consciousness. Thus, for example, perception is the brain creating evolutionarily-useful representations.
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Hlafordlaes
Disorder of Kilopi
So it seems the issue is indeed the old anti-realism debate about mind-dependence of reality and the post-empirical quandary that brings about under certain perspectives.
The idea of neural representation, in and of itself, is not the end of the story. Rather, it is. The beginning starts with analysis of gradually more complex neural systems while tracking the behavioral nature of the organism, and in humans can include tracking real-time signals and responses, as opposed to more cognitively massaged high level perception. And while visual and auditory cognitive post-processing adds a great deal to experienced perception, this seems to be quite less in the case of touch. A sudden pin prick gets an automated response, although it can be followed by an ensuing high level response to the event.
If we are using neuroscience to make claims, these must include the instances where we can reliably track fully rote stimulus-response events that only later inform experience and perception, if ever. Generally, there is 'processing' going on, and a wide range of conscious and unconscious activity, with agent behavior corresponding to both, not just the conscious level.
In short, the anti-real argument cannot be made on the basis of neuroscience alone; it is not a supported conclusion, as there are simple non-modeled responses to external stimuli, not just high-level conceptual and fully-modeled conscious experience.
You can make the case for anti-realism, of course, but just not by saying there is no observer. Once again, 'observer' is a concept that comes from outside neuroscience, and one may be remiss in going on a wild goose chase to find a neural correlate. Probably for starters because the concept, even if found valid, is likely to be a composite of more basic elements. At any rate, better to go from the science to the models, which might be more easily done if not tripping over what are more literary and philosophical terms.
I think it was Tsig just above who stated that this, or by extension any other, conclusions are not possible. There would be no one to make them in the case of no observer.
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Nonpareil
The Terrible Trivium
This is true (EDIT: and is essentially the soundbite I was referring to, though that one was Koch saying the same thing). This is also, however, one of the main issues raised with the theory, and the way the phi-value in question is to be interpreted. As this is still very much a work-in-progress field - the bleeding edge of consciousness research, in fact - I expect that there will be a lot of work done on this, whether it turns out to be fully true or not.
But we are getting sidetracked. The main issues:
This is true.
This is also true.
However, precisely neither of these things in any way indicate that there is no such thing as an observer or that science does not work.
You are still making completely nonsensical leaps.
Hi Hlafordlaes,
What I'm saying is that the ongoing discussion as to whether perception is veridical or representation is shifting as research data accrues. And it's moving to the latter. And that as this happens so there needs to be an updated evaluation of the implications for science. I'm being pragmatic essentially.
Thank you. that's interesting
You mean "conscious" if the non-existing observer sees it, and "unconscious" if the non-existing observer doesn't?
I'm not making an anti-real argument, though. I'm saying we need to investigate because this shift towards perception being neural representation could have a considerable knock-on effect.
I agree.
A few have tried, from William James onwards. I agree you're not likely to get a result!
Oh no! You're falling at the last hurdle!
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Nonpareil
The Terrible Trivium
You have yet to coherently explain how.