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Split Thread Science cannot explain consciousness, therefore....

Belz... said:
...snip..


That's hogwash; essentially a way to make consciousness outside of the realm of science. As it turns out, science has no problem with consciousness.
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At the best it is a "god of the gaps" argument and really it is nothing more than saying "I am a special being" exactly like the christian who believes in a soul.
 
Belz... said:
Not at all. The term "qualia" is a reference to "quanta" in QM to suggest that experiences have some quality that is ineffable and, dare I say, immaterial. Since experience is a process and not a thing, the concept of qualia is superfluous.
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I remember you! Weren't you one of the ones arguing you could make a conscious brain out of ropes and pulleys?
 
Belz... said:
Aren't they, now? Well, I know of at least one that is.

Of course awareness feel special. It's meant to. But it doesn't mean that it is. A self-referential process of the brain. No added entities required.



That you know of. I mean, probably not, but that doesn't mean that your self-awareness is special and has extra entities. After all, there's quite a bit of levels of consicousness in the animal world. Is there a threshold where qualia magically appear?



That's hogwash; essentially a way to make consciousness outside of the realm of science. As it turns out, science has no problem with consciousness.
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Ah, I look forward to hearing the causal scientific explanation as to how brains are conscious...
 
Belz... said:
You underestimate the unfalsifiability of the Hard Problem. Of course it would create qualia, since you'd experience something. Out of thin air, too!
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It's rather easy to falsify, akin to the one white raven, I don't have these qualias.

I learnt something new last year that let me recast why I think some people cling to the HPC (apart from wanting to be special), we were discussing this on the forum from when it first started - 2002 and I never twigged on that my "experience" of consciousness is quite different to most people. I simply don't have this "experience" of redness, these strange qualia are foreign to my consciousness.
 
Fudbucker said:
I remember you! Weren't you one of the ones arguing you could make a conscious brain out of ropes and pulleys?
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If you can reproduce the same process, you reproduce the process. It's tautological. Whether you can do it with pulleys and ropes depends on how precisely consciousness arises in a brain. Perhaps it requires some of the chemical stuff that's in there, but the point of the ropes and pulleys analogy is that to illustrate that you don't need magic.

Fudbucker said:
Ah, I look forward to hearing the causal scientific explanation as to how brains are conscious...
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Yes, because if I don't have the exact answer, it means you can conclude that it's magic.

No, appeal to ignorance is still a fallacy.
 
Darat said:
It's rather easy to falsify, akin to the one white raven, I don't have these qualias.
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Yeah but that's like saying that there isn't a teapot around saturn. You can say it but it doesn't falsify it unless you check. I don't know how you could ever show that the qualia isn't there. You can only say that it's superfluous.

I learnt something new last year that let me recast why I think some people cling to the HPC (apart from wanting to be special), we were discussing this on the forum from when it first started - 2002 and I never twigged on that my "experience" of consciousness is quite different to most people. I simply don't have this "experience" of redness, these strange qualia are foreign to my consciousness.
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As I've noted in other threads over the years, sometimes when I'm essentially looking in the distance and thinking about nothing, I kind of zone out and lose my sense of distinct "self". Just serves to show that it's essentially just an illusion.
 
Belz... said:
If you can reproduce the same process, you reproduce the process. It's tautological. Whether you can do it with pulleys and ropes depends on how precisely consciousness arises in a brain. Perhaps it requires some of the chemical stuff that's in there, but the point of the ropes and pulleys analogy is that to illustrate that you don't need magic.



Yes, because if I don't have the exact answer, it means you can conclude that it's magic.

No, appeal to ignorance is still a fallacy.
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So no explanation then, and a tacit endorsement of conscious brains made out of ropes and pulleys.

Underwhelming.
 
Fudbucker said:
So no explanation then, and a tacit endorsement of conscious brains made out of ropes and pulleys.
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Why do you need an explanation? Haven't you already made up your mind that it's magic anyway? I've already told you that I don't have a precise idea. And when you read my post telling you that an appeal to ignorance is a fallacy, you went right to that appeal anyway?
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
I have to confess that I've only read the last couple of pages, so perhaps I've missed this, but is there any evidence at all for a "consciousness field"? If not, then why isn't the current scientific understanding enough?
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When people here (anywhere) talk about such things as a "consciousness field", apart from them producing any actual (real) evidence, do they ever explain what might cause or produce any such field of consciousness?

In the published research from psychology, neuroscience and medicine (which are the three subject areas that have published most of the research on "consciousness), the evidence is very clear and widely (universally?) agreed to show that the effect which we experience as conscious awareness is simply caused by the normal chemical and electro-chemical functioning of the brain (interacting with the rest of the nervous system). There's masses of published evidence explaining that. But afaik there is no published evidence for any "field" of consciousness outside of the brain.

What does exist, however, is quite a large number of people (mainly theists, some philosophers, and rather a lot of people who are simply very distrusting of modern science), who think that human conscious awareness is such an amazing mystery, that they cannot conceive of any possible answer so mundane as to be explained in a lab by science ... and they have a strong predisposition to believe instead that it must be something with a mystical or supernatural explanation ... the more you question those people, the closer & closer their statements get towards some kind of God claim ... e.g., see this YouTube film of Sean Carroll and a guy named Steven Novella in a debate against two other people who are claiming that so-called Near Death Experiences (NDE) are evidence of conscious intelligence existing outside the body as a permanent force after death ... notice that as the debate goes on it becomes more-&-more clear that they are actually making a religious claim (the claim is actually saying that consciousness has been placed into the human body by God, i.e. as a soul, and that it leaves the body unchanged after death ... it goes to heaven!) -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEeDCmEqv9o


Here also is a very nice/useful book reviewing and explaining current research in this field -

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Consciousn...pell&keywords=consciousness+stanislas+dehayne
 
I do not think that qualia and quanta are related as Belz claims they are. Qualia pertains to individual subjective experience and references
neuroscience while quanta pertains to units of energy at the subatomic level and references physics. So they are not connected in any way
Just because some words share a common root or syllable does not mean that they are related to each other and this is one such example
 
Belz... said:
If you can reproduce the same process, you reproduce the process. It's tautological. Whether you can do it with pulleys and ropes depends on how precisely consciousness arises in a brain. Perhaps it requires some of the chemical stuff that's in there, but the point of the ropes and pulleys analogy is that to illustrate that you don't need magic.
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You can even do it with a bunch of rocks...

Dave
 
Belz... said:
I might be wrong but I always took it to be a term they made so that it sounds like "quanta", given all the QM-related woo, in order to make it sound more legitimate.
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"Quantum" was a relatively mundane scientific term up until the early 1900s, when it was discovered that radiation appeared to be quantized, and exploration began of what would come to be known as "quantum mechanics".

"Qualia" had been around for a while as a term of art in philosophy by that point. It settled into its modern definition around 1929, arising from usage published by influential academic C. I. Lewis.

I suspect that it's a case of convergent etymology, rather than Lewis wanting to tie his philosophical works to QM's coattails.
 
NDEs take place exclusively within the brain while the subject is still alive and are not evidence of anything other than an altered mental state such
as a dream or an hallucination. And they are not scientifically credible for they are first person subjective experiences that cannot be independently
verified. They are also a classic example of an experience not actually being what those experiencing it think it is. Senses are not always absolutely
reliable and is why verification is always required. And claiming NDEs are evidence of the afterlife is simply invoking a God Of The Gaps type fallacy
 
baron said:
I'd say qualia is the experience of the perception. The perception can - and indeed has - been measured, but there is no method, even theoretically speaking, to measure qualia. Hence, some say it doesn't even exist, which I find literally incredible.

There was a recent experiment where impulses in the brain were re-engineered into images, based on pattern recognition data built up over earlier experiments, so a person could look at an object and from the electrical activity of their brain alone, an image of that object could be displayed on a monitor. This is dealing with perception. The qualia is the feeling of how that object is experienced in consciousness.
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So would you consider that the perception is the qualia, where does the difference lie?

How does a visual perception differ from the experience of the visual perception?
 
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