Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

I am a trained and published scientist that has worked in academia but if I received such a letter of course I wouldn't be mocking. It wouldn't be professional of me. But this is a discussion forum and so I can express what I truly feel about such concepts. Academics also express themselves more freely at conferences.

I've been to conferences where they have discussed consciousness and qualia. Even when someone has gone up and talked about qualia, they always try to define what they mean.

You simply cannot make any progress at all without doing so. This is why qualia is such a useless term. It's a quagmire.

Only if you insist that there's no value in anything you can't define in scientific terms.

By ANNs I assume you mean the classic kind with back propagation, activation functions and learning rules? That is an extremely simplistic model that is not biologically plausible. I suggest that you read Christoph Koch's Biophysics of Computation to show quite how complicated a single neuron actually is. It's computational complexity far surpasses a whole artificial neural network. Then try putting the biologically plausible neurons, with dendritic trees, neuromodulators, leakage and a local learning rule in a network that self organises. That will give you an entirely different view point on how the brain functions. Doing so really brought it home to me how the brain is a naturally occurring physical system.

Okay, that's all fine, but we're still stuck. The brain has many levels of context, from the coordinated whole to brain parts, then neurons, then the chemistry, then QM particles. Is there a "critical mass" at which there was no mind and suddenly there is? Or does it scale all the way down to nothing, with the essence of mind therefore being a property at the most fundamental level? See, my problem isn't with the idea that the brain is somehow related to or responsible for our human consciousness: the way we feel, think, hear, etc. It's with psychogony that I have doubts.

--edit-- Yes, it was classical back-prop ANNs. Even at that time, though, it was already pretty obvious that whatever a machine could "think," the exact pathways involved would be inscrutable to outside observers due to the overwhelming complexity. It's very simple to really get what's "going on" as soon as you get any kind of complexity in the feedback loop