Seeing red

[emjay]

I don’t see how a materialist can justify dividing all of physical reality into discrete objects and distinguishable processes, each with unique features, without either 1) taking those divisions for granted or 2) tacitly relying on universal attributes that transcend particular instances as defining criteria.

This is ultimately my problem as well with my own materialist position. Thanks to Jormungandr I now have much better clarity on how things can be things at different levels of description... and thus it's much more clear to me now what Rhythm meant earlier when he called me out on separating the system from the hardware. I mean I understand it, and rely on it in my thinking, but it wasn't explicitly clear to me until now. For instance in a computer, any piece of software can be understood at multiple hierarchical levels of abstraction... all the way from the user experience right down to how it is ultimately manifested in the hardware - without which it could not exist - but which is at the same time, independent of any particular form of the hardware... once you've got the concept of, say, storage it doesn't matter what medium you use as long as it can fit in the system... be it an SSD, and HDD, a memory stick etc.

The same thing with the brain. But my problem is that one of those levels of descriptive abstraction appears to be us. But not just in consciousness as it is experienced phenomenally but also, in my understanding/theorising at least, at the neural network level which I fully believe - based on both how it works and how it is organised - could fully mirror the representations differentiated and integrated in consciousness... including the sense of self; the apparent homunculus. In other words it seems to me that the neural network does exactly the same process of descriptive hierarchical abstraction as we do in consciousness in our attempts to understand it Just as 'we' model the world in thoughts and ideas, the neural network is modelling that same world and reaching exactly the same conclusions, and those conclusions are what is represented in phenomenal mind.

So from my perspective there are two equivalent but different 'descriptive hierarchical abstractions' , ie models, representing mind - the neural network and consciousness - and the only logical conclusion I can draw from that is that they are one and the same. So if they are equivalent it stands to reason that if we for the sake of argument remove phenomenal mind from the equation and look only at the equivalent neural network model... the philosophical zombie part... then it is doing exactly as we are... it has a representation of the self - the we's and I's of this post - and it is trying to understand itself in neural network terms but is having difficulty settling - if you'll pardon the deliberate pun - on an explanation. Indeed perhaps by representing itself it has created a paradox that it (and thus 'we') can never resolve until we (and thus the network also) make the leap that the two are the same thing... that phenomenal mind is, or should be, the same neural representation... or should at least be associated with it... as our understanding of NN mind.

The dualist position takes a lot more for granted than I do about the responsibility of the 'homunculus'. Stereotyping, bias, fear, desire, belief, understanding, memory, learning, focus etc... all these things I look at in terms of neural network dynamics and are things the neural network is more than capable of modelling by virtue of it's very nature. And all these things are differentiated in consciousness. And by their absence following brain damage or experiments, more of these differentiated states are becoming apparent every day, such as the inability to recognise faces as Benny mentioned earlier. And the sense of will, with say Tourette's Syndrome, or people who are incapable of feeling pain etc. All with neural correlates.

So either we're a completely separate, disembodied mind that happens by extraordinary coincidence to process data in the same manner a neural network demonstrably can and does as a matter of course - i.e. stereotyping etc - and that again by extraordinary coincidence changes to the underlying neural network that it has laid claim to - even as simple as taking a Paracetamol - coincide with changes in experience in predictable and expected ways in that mind, OR we are that network.

You mentioned strawmanning earlier and I don't want to do that. The above is what I see as an extreme dualist position - one where the mind is absolutely separate from brain. But I don't know where you stand on the question... how much independent responsibility you ascribe to the apparent homunculus (and therefore conversely how much influence the brain has) or whether you even equate a soul with a homunculus in the first place (it has been my assumption that you do, apologies if that is wrong)?

As for me, I came into this thread not believing in a homunculus/soul (and I still don't) and believing that at most all it could be was a tiny speck experiencing it all but not influencing it in any way, and thus, incapable of having a 'personality' of its own because all of that is accounted for in the brain in my view, would be exactly the same in everyone and thus could not be held accountable to God for what the neural network did. At that point the only thing it could possibly be to me was the part in consciousness that notices (or not in some cases) the absence or presence of stimuli whether 'out there' in the world or 'in here' in the sense of our meta-awareness of our own perceptions and channels in consciousness... the part that notices the pain disappears after taking Paracetamol or the part that is distressed finding that it can see without seeing in the case of Blindsight... lacks the confidence that having perceptions seems to provide. But now, thanks to this thread, I'm convinced more than ever that even that is a representation in the network, which finds itself mirrored in phenomenal mind or more specifically as phenomenal mind.