On naturalism and consciousness

[FallentoReason]

I remember doing a thread like this over a year ago now, but I thought it might be best to start with a clean slate, and see how we go. Also, I really like discussing this topic especially on an atheist forum because being in the minority is more fun. Here we go:

I don't believe consciousness can be explained by way of a naturalistic account. Why? Because I don't think particles have it in them to act in such a way as to recreate what we mean by consciousness i.e. our thoughts, beliefs, attitudes etc.

Let's use an example; my belief that spoons are curved. So to make things easier, let's call this belief p. Now, how can we possibly arrange particles in such a way that they would express p? How could some physical arrangement *ever* describe p? I don't think it's possible to physically arrange particles in such a way that would then inherently possess the belief that other sets of particles - aka spoons - have the property of being curved.

Maybe we could place a spoon on the kitchen counter, and put beside it a piece of paper pointing to it, saying "curved". But I wouldn't say the particles of lead forming the word "curved" are arranged in a way that make them hold p. The reason being that it takes an already conscious being *to make that connection*. The already conscious being has the ability to give meaning to such an arrangement of lead, and mind you, it has to be a being that speaks English. Therefore, in no way is the arrangement of lead inherently a beholder of p, since not even all conscious beings can arrive at that conclusion to begin with.

As we can see, for a particle to be "about" another particle, consciousness is a prerequisite... almost as if it weren't made up of particles in the first place

[Lucanus]

Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Thoughts, beliefs and attitudes stem from the connections the neurons in your brain make after having an experience and consist of the flow of electrical charges in the brain. The brain is then capable of recalling past information by activating the same areas that were activated during the experience, thus creating memories.

You are then capable of explaining your experience to other people, whose brains will make similar connections and will activate similar areas.

I'm sorry I can't quote anything precise atm, I'm on my phone, but there are countless neuroscience articles that say more or less what I wrote, and those are obviously better and more fleshed out than this post

[robvalue]

My opinion:

Consciousness is an illusionary side effect of the working of brains (and perhaps other things). I don't believe we have free will, I think we are just bound by the laws of physics. There's nothing different about us to anything else that makes us somehow able to "choose" when no one would claim that our individual atoms/quarks/whatever are actually making choices. (At least I don't think they would.)

My only "evidence" for this is that I feel more and more like an observer to myself. I don't take credit for what most of my body does, nor even most of what the brain does. I think the last little bit in the brain that seems like it's making choices is where all this comes in, but it's not real. I feel as if I am watching myself make choices, seeing what I will say next.

The fact that consciousness seems so real makes this hard to swallow, but it's my best guess for now pending more evidence.

[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.

[stonedape]

The p analogy was confusing as shit bro. I'll take a crack at it though. Your consciousness is all in your fucking head. I have no idea what particles have to do with anything on the subject. Until I can hear a reasonable explanation, I don't care. I know your identity and personality can be attributed to a few biological factors. Living circumstances and psychology certainly play a role. Does that mean you don't have free will? FUCK NO! I've totally seen people clean up their act, turn themselves around and grow the fuck up. I've seen people deteriorate from a humble well adjusted individual to a sheepish ego maniacs.

[Michael]

As a scientist I think most often using a materialistic framework, especially regarding anything biological. So the position of 'consciousness is a product of matter' is almost axiomatic in biological pursuit.

And yet, I have to say, I find the opposite argument, the philosophy of idealism, equally compelling, that what we call matter is a product of consciousness; matter only has any meaning within consciousness.

But while I am well versed, experienced, and trained, in the methods of the materialist, I am almost completely unskilled as an idealist. I perhaps just catch glimpses of truth about which the idealist has a much greater depth of understanding.

I'd like to think there is benefit to understanding in exploring both paths: consciousness from a naturalistic philosophy, and naturalism from an idealist philosophy. I'm not convinced that they must necessarily be mutually exclusive; I suspect that they may be complementary.

[bennyboy]

For those who have produced, and inevitably will continue to produce, "it's in the brain" as an explanation for consciousness, I would say two things:
1) You can assume that everyone already knows what you're saying, and should infer that there's a deeper philosophical argument. If you are explaining the basics of brain function, you might want to consider that you aren't "getting" the point of the OP.
2) Being convinced in a physical monist model has caused you to ignore the addage: "correlation is not causation." Nobody (I think) doubts that there's a very strong relationship between the brain and the content of mind. This is very different than understanding why mind exists and what it is about any arrangement of particles that supposedly causes it to come into existence. Even a perfect correlation between brain function and qualia does not serve as an explanation for how a mind comes into being.

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And yet, I have to say, I find the opposite argument, the philosophy of idealism, equally compelling, that what we call matter is a product of consciousness; matter only has any meaning within consciousness.

I put it this way. We need to explain all experiences-- those which are clearly internal, and those which are related to the objective world which we all share. Physical monism has a serious problem-- viewing ideas and experiences as physical is a totally broken view-- because it adds to physical monism the exact property that it is designed to circumvent: subjective awareness. An idealist monism has no such problem. All our physical interactions and knowledge exist for us only as experiences anyway. Even doing science, even listening to a professor talk about physical monism, even looking at cells under a microscope, or smashing atoms. . . all these are experiences.

Physicalism requires explanation for mind, but has no good explanation, while idealism requires merely classification-- those ideas which are personal, and those which are shared by others; in idealism, the physical universe and all its interactions are still perfectly consistent as ideas rather than entities. Idealism is therefore the simpler model.

[FallentoReason]

Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Thoughts, beliefs and attitudes stem from the connections the neurons in your brain make after having an experience and consist of the flow of electrical charges in the brain. The brain is then capable of recalling past information by activating the same areas that were activated during the experience, thus creating memories.

Sure, but all we've ever been able to do is point to the parts of the brain responsible for certain aspects of our consciousness, such as the ones you've mentioned. But can you point to the area of the brain where you yourself exist, where your 'soul' resides?

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My opinion:

Consciousness is an illusionary side effect of the working of brains (and perhaps other things). I don't believe we have free will, I think we are just bound by the laws of physics. There's nothing different about us to anything else that makes us somehow able to "choose" when no one would claim that our individual atoms/quarks/whatever are actually making choices. (At least I don't think they would.)

My only "evidence" for this is that I feel more and more like an observer to myself. I don't take credit for what most of my body does, nor even most of what the brain does. I think the last little bit in the brain that seems like it's making choices is where all this comes in, but it's not real. I feel as if I am watching myself make choices, seeing what I will say next.

The fact that consciousness seems so real makes this hard to swallow, but it's my best guess for now pending more evidence.

I'm not so sure that determinism plays a role here. For all we know, we could be brains in a vacuum experiencing an already determined universe. It still doesn't take away from the fact that consciousness isn't something produced by said universe.

[ignoramus]

Aren't we all over philosophising this whole concept a little too far.
Before you know it, we're going to start suggesting that we didn't evolve from apes!

The natural phenomenon called intelligence does have a negative side effect! this!

[FallentoReason]

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.

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The p analogy was confusing as shit bro.

"p", in philosophical terms, stands for a proposition, as does q,r,t etc... in this case the proposition was that 'spoons are curved'.

I'll take a crack at it though. Your consciousness is all in your fucking head. I have no idea what particles have to do with anything on the subject.

And what's in your head is chemicals i.e. the "particles" I was essentially referring to. Maybe I should've used the word "atoms" to make it clearer..

Until I can hear a reasonable explanation, I don't care. I know your identity and personality can be attributed to a few biological factors. Living circumstances and psychology certainly play a role. Does that mean you don't have free will? FUCK NO! I've totally seen people clean up their act, turn themselves around and grow the fuck up. I've seen people deteriorate from a humble well adjusted individual to a sheepish ego maniacs.

Free will is a separate discussion altogether. The discussion being held in my OP is that I don't think brain chemicals can be *about* other atoms out there in the world, such that we can call that arrangement of chemicals a "belief".