On naturalism and consciousness

[Lucanus]

But our neurons do it all the time... I don't understand why one should go out of his way and try to special plead metaphysics into existence. So far, the materialistic mindset is the one that gave us all of our understanding of the world. Why should we not even try to explain consciousness with it?

You can try to explain anything with anything. But trying to explain consciousness with a model which is almost deliberately designed to ignore consciousness doesn't seem like an approach likely to yield meaningful results.

But then what can we resort to? Souls, spirits and gods? Please tell me, because to me it looks like what humanity has been doing since the dawn of time with things it could not understand.

If you think a mechanical explanation is sufficient to explain consciousness, then you have to actually make that explanation. You don't get to just wave at the brain and say, "Well, obviously, it's happening in there somewhere." Maybe it is, or maybe correlation isn't causation.

My pointing at a materialist solution doesn't mean I am capable of giving a fully detailed explanation of how it works. I'm just saying that given the (very limited) evidence we have, materialism cannot be thrown out of the window so hastily.
I agree that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but realistically, where else should we be looking for consciousness?

[Mudhammam]

realistically, where else should we be looking for consciousness?

The pineal gland!

[Lucanus]

Descartes always has some words of wisdom...

[pocaracas]

Ftr, your example it's one of classification.
I'm on my phone, so you're going to do the googling. Search for support vector machines. These are among the best to perform classification jobs.
On the other hand, Artificial Neutral networks can reproduce anything they're trained to do... and can interpolate over their training set quite easily. So you don't need to train it with every outcome in mind, just general cases and the network gives a pretty good guess for the correct answer to a new case that can be a mix of the training cases.

I think the biological brain is an ever learning neutral network with a lot of classification mechanisms thrown in the mix.

A cool example of how good we are at classification is letters. You can identify the same letter for a multitude of fonts and handwriting.

I wasn't describing a classification job. I was talking about the fact that we as sentient beings hold these things we call "beliefs", amongst other things in our minds. And in a nutshell, what this means for the naturalist is that this "belief" must be the relation of brain chemicals to something about the external world, such that these chemicals express a belief - a proposition - p. And as I've outlined in the OP, this seems near impossible to me purely from a naturalistic p.o.v.

Your belief that spoons are curved is akin to a classification of the object "spoon" with the qualifier "curved". That's why I started with "your example", and not "your proposition".

These "beliefs" you want to claim are impossible to hold as brain chemicals and structures.... why can't they be?
If beliefs can't be held in the brain, then how can memories? visual memories, conceptual memories, textual memories, etc...

Given how Alzheimer's disease affects the brain it seems inevitable that memories are held in the brain.
Can you otherwise explain how memories are formed in the brain?
The concepts we hold can be thought of as memories, too... they too should reside in the brain.
Concepts such as beliefs... I know of no disease that affects this sort of mental constructs alone, so I cannot say for sure that they're in the brain, but I see nothing hinting they're anywhere else.
Actually, brain damage can lead to a different set of beliefs... isn't there a person who had split personality and one persona was religious while the other was atheist?

[robvalue]

I agree my response wasn't very good in answering the question as stated, so I'll go back and cross out the bits about free will, and update it with more relevant comments:

I feel the most likely case is that consciousness is an illusionary side effect of the working of brains (and perhaps other things, perhaps everything). I don't think it actually "exists" anywhere. If this is true, it kind of removes the whole question of where or what it is. I have no evidence for this of course, it's just what I feel. Awkwardly, the reverse also seems that it could be true, that consciousness is the only thing that "exists".

I guess I subscribe to solipsism in the extreme case, where even "I" (whatever part of me is not physically explained) am a figment of my own imagination. But this is useless in that it can never be used to prove anything, and I have to live as if I don't believe it. This subject messes with my head like no other, in that I can never be happy with what I think about it. What I have written above doesn't sound very convincing even to me, but it's the best I have for now.

The very ideas of existence and reality are ones which are hard to think about and harder to define, though. I think most scientists now accept that we can only analyze a version of "reality" as experienced through our filters, and that we can never see or test actual reality. I think with consciousness this is somehow doubly impossible, we cannot remove ourselves from it, we cannot break through the 4th wall.

But we shouldn't give up, and should continue to try and figure these things out. Below is the most amazing guy I have seen talk about the subject, for those who have not seen him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcR8-Sq8dZk

[Angrboda]

Your theory of meaning doesn't only have to account for how matter is not inherently about things,

That would be trying to prove a negative. How can I show you that no matter how you arrange atoms, you won't ever form my belief that "these nachos are tasty"?

That's your problem for taking on the claim that matter can never have intentionality. It's not my fault you've chosen to make extraordinary claims.

it must also explain how thought is inherently about things.

Well, like I stated, I thought it was quite intuitive. I mean, "thoughts" are just that: a metaphysical relation between the 'soul' and some aspect of the universe. If they're not that, then I don't know how we as conscious beings would go about business seeing as this is our *only* way of acting upon this universe.

(emphasis added)

Then you simply don't know. You don't know how matter does it, and that the soul "just does" is a lousy argument. You're simply at an impasse.

Until you can do that, you're left with the rather unsatisfying "it just is." If that's all the explanation you have, then I'd suggest that all you've done is push the question one step back. Like dualists who assert that souls "just do" have free will, what you've done is little more than beg the question. You've given a respectable sheen to your argument from ignorance; you've distracted your interlocutor from the fact that you lack as much in the theory of meaning department as she does.

If we have shown that consciousness from matter "just isn't", then what's left on the table?

And we're back to arguments from ignorance. You haven't shown this. That you personally don't know how matter can solve the problem gets you nothing.

I'll defer on laying out my theory of meaning just yet, other than to say that I think meaning is a property of systems, not isolated parts. So "qū xiàn" isn't inherently about curved objects, its meaning is a consequence of it being embedded in a system; the word itself has no meaning apart from the system. In short, nothing is "inherently" meaningful or inherently "about" something else. That's an illusion.

Like I said, I think language is a different topic altogether.

I was talking about both. And I think it's the same problem in both. If you can't show with rational argument how a thought is "inherently about" something else, you're simply at an impasse. You don't know how souls do it, and you don't know how matter does it. Maybe it's because your "intuition" about intentionality is simply wrong.

Basically, you have a theory of meaning. You need to demonstrate that your theory about thoughts having inherent intentionality is correct before you go banging on your neighbor's theory. You haven't done this. You've just assumed it. That's pretty much begging the question. I think talking about the language question makes sense because it's a smaller version of the same problem, without all the distraction of folk psychological theories about "consciousness."

[The Grand Nudger]

Well there you go; the arrangement of particles only expresses a "belief" about spoons merely because an already conscious being is superimposing their *own* beliefs on what those particles represent.

No consciousness is required, only input. In our case, that input is sensory (and particularly so with regards to whether or not there are spoons, and whether or not the object "spoon" is curved) - and there are plenty of "non-conscious" analogues to that sensory input. "Spoons are curved" could, for example, be an output of a mechanical system. It's not difficult to describe a spoon or a curve in binary, or that spoons are curved.

My point was that when you break it down to the elementary parts of this "belief", there is actually nothing there to tell you about this "belief". You're taking for granted the fact that the set of electricity/pixels that you see have to be given meaning by you, the already conscious being.

I'm most definitely not, you've decided that the variable p has that meaning -and you are a conscious agent, sure. That doesn't mean that's the only way to arrive at such a definition of p.

Strawman. I said the electricity/pixels are entirely meaningless, not the proposition we defined at the beginning, which obviously by human convention actually means something.

The electricity/pixels could be "about" whatever we wanted them to be, sure. They could also be "about" spoons being curved - and we simply aren't required to make that so. In our case we are involved, obviously.

I do not think any computer is conscious, which is precisely the point. And therefore, how can we say a computer could even hold a *belief*, if there is no conscious entity to be found?

We can say it because you defined a belief as the statement p that equals spoons are curved. Computers can and do hold and handle such variables. It's exactly what they are built to do.

I think we need to be more critical in our thinking here. Computing isn't "about something". Computing is metal, plastic, and possibly more complex materials coming together in such a way, that certain causal relations are able to grab electrons, make them zip through copper strips, and produce an array of pixels on the screen, of which *we* interpret however we like, according to our needs. But a computer never knew "about something". It never held the "belief" that e.g. calculation #12 meant the mining project was at risk of a collapse. All it ever was and did, was simply act as a mega-advanced system of pulleys and levers, crunching out simple logic at speeds conveniently faster than what we can do it at. Nevermind consciousness!

You're telling me that we need to be more critical whilst you draw a line in the sand that may not exist at all, and definitely does not exist -as you expressed it-. Perhaps there are better ways to communicate what it is you mean? Computing -is- metal and plastic (but it can be rocks or string, or it can be nuerons). We do interpret them however we like but that's because we're directing the flow of work. We needn't direct that work (or even be able to interpret it), and the machine will still be able to handle data. That data will still refer to something, it will still be "about" something. Consider the following.

If I attach a pv cell and a scale to a single Nand gate, that binary output will be "about" whether or not there is light hitting the cell -while- a weight is on the scale. 1, (in the case of nand) is the proposition "there is either no light, or no weight, or both" 0 is the proposition that there is both light and weight. I don't have to be there to read the data. The assembly could have been in a black box manufactured by another. When I see that binary input change, it will be "about" something even if I am unaware of the specifics.

How is this in any way different from "spoons are curved"? Spoons are curved, in the simplest machine language possible, could be expressed as the binary output of a single gate in the same way that my example above determines whether or not it's inputs describe something that has both light, and weight. Now, I'm not trying to tell you that this is how -we- do it (but the argument can be made)...I'm just trying to express to you that it -can be- done this way. Perhaps particles and atoms don;t account for whatever it is you are referring to in your own thoughts, and the process you use to reach them, but they most definitely -can be- "about" something - and this can't be made any more plain than in machine language - wherein there is no requirement that we (or any conscious agent) be present. The inputs, the data handling, and the outputs, are a function of the machine - literally built into it's architecture (and the architecture determines the language, different architecture- different language...think about what that means for "meaning".....btw). We give those things the meanings that we find useful when we write programs, but the programs aren't actually required to do that sort of work (and, in the case of computers, the programs wouldn't run without the underlying mechanical architecture and machine language). Case in point, a computer actuall has to translate our programs, our language - into it's own, then do the work, then retranslate it back into -our- (higher level) language. It takes our "meaning", translates it into it;s own "meaning" performs the operation, and then translates it back into our "meaning" so that the data is useful to us (but even if it didn't translate it back, the data would still be there, a function will stiull have been performed on the operation - are spoons curved; yes, 0 or 1 depending on the gate). In the barest possible sense, if you simply can't accept that machine language can be about some object "x" it is -at least- "about" logical operations. No matter how you slice it, particles and atoms are capable of being "about" -something-. They have the ability to describe their meaning (even if you don't think that it means the same thing that you mean, or that it's somehow different from how you arrive at meaning, or how you describe meaning...and why wouldn't it be..different architecture, different language, eh?)- and without this ability we couldn't compute at all.

The simplest way to explain this is that an output of 1 on an and gate "means" that both inputs are 1. It doesn't matter what those inputs are, it doesn't matter where they come from, it doesn't matter what we do with that output- and it doesn't matter what the gate is made out of.

[FallentoReason]

Your belief that spoons are curved is akin to a classification of the object "spoon" with the qualifier "curved". That's why I started with "your example", and not "your proposition".

I realised possibly on page 2 or so that my example wasn't the best to use, because it's more of a thought than a true proposition. But anyways..

These "beliefs" you want to claim are impossible to hold as brain chemicals and structures.... why can't they be?
If beliefs can't be held in the brain, then how can memories? visual memories, conceptual memories, textual memories, etc...

Given how Alzheimer's disease affects the brain it seems inevitable that memories are held in the brain.
Can you otherwise explain how memories are formed in the brain?
The concepts we hold can be thought of as memories, too... they too should reside in the brain.
Concepts such as beliefs... I know of no disease that affects this sort of mental constructs alone, so I cannot say for sure that they're in the brain, but I see nothing hinting they're anywhere else.
Actually, brain damage can lead to a different set of beliefs... isn't there a person who had split personality and one persona was religious while the other was atheist?

Correlation doesn't mean causation; yeah sure, memories are found in the brain, but that doesn't directly imply that a set of particles are in relation to something external in the world - whether past or present. I forgot who I said this to in this thread, but it seems to me like our memories could be seen as books at a library and we as the conscious being are the person browsing through the library accessing different books. Therefore, we're still at square one: a bunch of particles arranged in a particular way (the books) can't be arranged in such a way as to represent "beliefs". It takes an already conscious being to give meaning to these particles, but particles don't intrinsically hold any "belief".

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That would be trying to prove a negative. How can I show you that no matter how you arrange atoms, you won't ever form my belief that "these nachos are tasty"?

That's your problem for taking on the claim that matter can never have intentionality. It's not my fault you've chosen to make extraordinary claims.

What?? Don't you see how silly your request is..? Tell me how you can *show* someone that something is impossible. This discussion is about something practical; the arrangement of particles into beliefs. If it so happens to be impossible to actually achieve this, then how can I show you practically that it's impossible?

Well, like I stated, I thought it was quite intuitive. I mean, "thoughts" are just that: a metaphysical relation between the 'soul' and some aspect of the universe. If they're not that, then I don't know how we as conscious beings would go about business seeing as this is our *only* way of acting upon this universe.

(emphasis added)

Then you simply don't know. You don't know how matter does it, and that the soul "just does" is a lousy argument. You're simply at an impasse.

It's not just a matter of knowledge, likewise with square circles: I don't know what that would look like, but that's irrelevant because it seems to be impossible to produce such a thing. Same business here.

If we have shown that consciousness from matter "just isn't", then what's left on the table?

And we're back to arguments from ignorance. You haven't shown this. That you personally don't know how matter can solve the problem gets you nothing.

There's nothing for me to show, as showing a negative is a rather impossible task in of itself. And as for knowledge, same thing applies as above.

Like I said, I think language is a different topic altogether.

I was talking about both. And I think it's the same problem in both. If you can't show with rational argument how a thought is "inherently about" something else, you're simply at an impasse. You don't know how souls do it, and you don't know how matter does it. Maybe it's because your "intuition" about intentionality is simply wrong.

Basically, you have a theory of meaning. You need to demonstrate that your theory about thoughts having inherent intentionality is correct before you go banging on your neighbor's theory. You haven't done this. You've just assumed it. That's pretty much begging the question. I think talking about the language question makes sense because it's a smaller version of the same problem, without all the distraction of folk psychological theories about "consciousness."

There's no rational argumentation needed to show that 'thoughts are inherently about something', because the simple negation of that statement shows you how non-sensical it would be otherwise.

Maybe you'll understand my point if we drop the 'inherent' bit for now and say, 'thoughts are about something'. If we can agree on that, then we can also agree that 'thoughts aren't about something' certainly can't be the case. Well, now considering that a thought *not* being about something means a 'thought' is now a trivial idea (as a thought not being about something means a 'thought' is all but an empty word) it must mean that the entire essence of what we call a 'thought' *must now be* that it's about something. Ergo thoughts are inherently about something.

[FallentoReason]

Well there you go; the arrangement of particles only expresses a "belief" about spoons merely because an already conscious being is superimposing their *own* beliefs on what those particles represent.

No consciousness is required, only input. In our case, that input is sensory (and particularly so with regards to whether or not there are spoons, and whether or not the object "spoon" is curved) - and there are plenty of "non-conscious" analogues to that sensory input. "Spoons are curved" could, for example, be an output of a mechanical system. It's not difficult to describe a spoon or a curve in binary, or that spoons are curved.

And why-- what about such a mechanical system that tells you there's a "belief" there? Blow up this mechanical system to proportions bigger than us, so that you can physically walk into this system and see the "gears cranking". Could you point to the "belief"?

My point was that when you break it down to the elementary parts of this "belief", there is actually nothing there to tell you about this "belief". You're taking for granted the fact that the set of electricity/pixels that you see have to be given meaning by you, the already conscious being.

I'm most definitely not, you've decided that the variable p has that meaning -and you are a conscious agent, sure. That doesn't mean that's the only way to arrive at such a definition of p.

Yes, p has that meaning because *I* - the conscious agent - gave it that meaning. The project here is for particles to inherently posses beliefs on their own.

Strawman. I said the electricity/pixels are entirely meaningless, not the proposition we defined at the beginning, which obviously by human convention actually means something.

The electricity/pixels could be "about" whatever we wanted them to be, sure. They could also be "about" spoons being curved - and we simply aren't required to make that so. In our case we are involved, obviously.

I do not think any computer is conscious, which is precisely the point. And therefore, how can we say a computer could even hold a *belief*, if there is no conscious entity to be found?

We can say it because you defined a belief as the statement p that equals spoons are curved. Computers can and do hold and handle such variables. It's exactly what they are built to do.

But again, computers are given something by us and then after thousands - possibly millions - of basic calculations, they causally spit out an output, of which *we* give meaning to. So again, can you point to the belief within the mechanical system? The only times I can point to it are before and after causal relations, within the mind of the conscious agent.


and p.s, I'm still working my way through this chunk:

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I think we need to be more critical in our thinking here. Computing isn't "about something". Computing is metal, plastic, and possibly more complex materials coming together in such a way, that certain causal relations are able to grab electrons, make them zip through copper strips, and produce an array of pixels on the screen, of which *we* interpret however we like, according to our needs. But a computer never knew "about something". It never held the "belief" that e.g. calculation #12 meant the mining project was at risk of a collapse. All it ever was and did, was simply act as a mega-advanced system of pulleys and levers, crunching out simple logic at speeds conveniently faster than what we can do it at. Nevermind consciousness!

You're telling me that we need to be more critical whilst you draw a line in the sand that may not exist at all, and definitely does not exist -as you expressed it-. Perhaps there are better ways to communicate what it is you mean? Computing -is- metal and plastic (but it can be rocks or string, or it can be nuerons). We do interpret them however we like but that's because we're directing the flow of work. We needn't direct that work (or even be able to interpret it), and the machine will still be able to handle data. That data will still refer to something, it will still be "about" something. Consider the following.

If I attach a pv cell and a scale to a single Nand gate, that binary output will be "about" whether or not there is light hitting the cell -while- a weight is on the scale. 1, (in the case of nand) is the proposition "there is either no light, or no weight, or both" 0 is the proposition that there is both light and weight. I don't have to be there to read the data. The assembly could have been in a black box manufactured by another. When I see that binary input change, it will be "about" something even if I am unaware of the specifics.

How is this in any way different from "spoons are curved"? Spoons are curved, in the simplest machine language possible, could be expressed as the binary output of a single gate in the same way that my example above determines whether or not it's inputs describe something that has both light, and weight. Now, I'm not trying to tell you that this is how -we- do it (but the argument can be made)...I'm just trying to express to you that it -can be- done this way. Perhaps particles and atoms don;t account for whatever it is you are referring to in your own thoughts, and the process you use to reach them, but they most definitely -can be- "about" something - and this can't be made any more plain than in machine language - wherein there is no requirement that we (or any conscious agent) be present. The inputs, the data handling, and the outputs, are a function of the machine - literally built into it's architecture (and the architecture determines the language, different architecture- different language...think about what that means for "meaning".....btw). We give those things the meanings that we find useful when we write programs, but the programs aren't actually required to do that sort of work (and, in the case of computers, the programs wouldn't run without the underlying mechanical architecture and machine language). Case in point, a computer actuall has to translate our programs, our language - into it's own, then do the work, then retranslate it back into -our- (higher level) language. It takes our "meaning", translates it into it;s own "meaning" performs the operation, and then translates it back into our "meaning" so that the data is useful to us (but even if it didn't translate it back, the data would still be there, a function will stiull have been performed on the operation - are spoons curved; yes, 0 or 1 depending on the gate). In the barest possible sense, if you simply can't accept that machine language can be about some object "x" it is -at least- "about" logical operations. No matter how you slice it, particles and atoms are capable of being "about" -something-. They have the ability to describe their meaning (even if you don't think that it means the same thing that you mean, or that it's somehow different from how you arrive at meaning, or how you describe meaning...and why wouldn't it be..different architecture, different language, eh?)- and without this ability we couldn't compute at all.

The simplest way to explain this is that an output of 1 on an and gate "means" that both inputs are 1. It doesn't matter what those inputs are, it doesn't matter where they come from, it doesn't matter what we do with that output- and it doesn't matter what the gate is made out of.

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It seems like my enthusiasm to discuss isn't what it used to be :| so I'm getting through things a lot slower since I came back. But it will be answered for sure

[pocaracas]

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These "beliefs" you want to claim are impossible to hold as brain chemicals and structures.... why can't they be?
If beliefs can't be held in the brain, then how can memories? visual memories, conceptual memories, textual memories, etc...

Given how Alzheimer's disease affects the brain it seems inevitable that memories are held in the brain.
Can you otherwise explain how memories are formed in the brain?
The concepts we hold can be thought of as memories, too... they too should reside in the brain.
Concepts such as beliefs... I know of no disease that affects this sort of mental constructs alone, so I cannot say for sure that they're in the brain, but I see nothing hinting they're anywhere else.
Actually, brain damage can lead to a different set of beliefs... isn't there a person who had split personality and one persona was religious while the other was atheist?

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Correlation doesn't mean causation; yeah sure, memories are found in the brain, but that doesn't directly imply that a set of particles are in relation to something external in the world - whether past or present. I forgot who I said this to in this thread, but it seems to me like our memories could be seen as books at a library and we as the conscious being are the person browsing through the library accessing different books. Therefore, we're still at square one: a bunch of particles arranged in a particular way (the books) can't be arranged in such a way as to represent "beliefs". It takes an already conscious being to give meaning to these particles, but particles don't intrinsically hold any "belief".

Ever wonder why fMRI is so much better than a CAT scan when trying to map the brain?
What does one do that the other doesn't?
Hint: one goes for structures, the other goes for dynamics.

The structures or particles in a processor, inside your computer, are the same whether the computer is on or off, right? Something is happening in there, when it's turned on, right? There's a sort of flow of electrical signals, which, in certain sets, represent certain operations.
It's this flow, these operations, that we see as the working processor.

The working brain should be no different, albeit more complex and, as yet, not fully understood. We don't even know how to group the flow of electrical signals into simple operations, but we can map a few higher operations to certain areas of the brain.... that's what we get out of fMRI.

A belief is an assumption about the world, in the face of missing information. Assumptions are operations that our brains carry out quite efficiently, I'd guess...

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Extra: Have you ever heard of Milo?
The kid from Project Natal, which has since been renamed Kinect: