RE: Can Consciousness Best Be Explained by God's Existence?
March 30, 2014 at 12:39 am
(This post was last modified: March 30, 2014 at 12:59 am by MindForgedManacle.)
@Rayaan Where did Rasetsu ever claim that the god(s) she believes in are somehow an explanation for consciousness? Perhaps best to read her post thoroughly. 
Anyhow, the moment I saw the name "Hamza Tzortzis" I knew the facepalms were coming. This guy is often a troll who goes around to well known atheists, shoves cameras in their face and tries to pose "Gotcha!" questions to them for publicity (such as PZ Myers and Dawkins, though Aron Ra pwned him rather well). He further has shown in other instances that his understanding of certain philosophical issues is very incomplete, despite going on to make bold proclamations about them. For example, he's claimed that Hume's Problem of Induction is a problem for atheists but not for Muslims (or at least not for Abrahamic theists), which is laughably stupid.
Anyway, I love when apologists bring up supposed "science of the gaps", because most of the time they are being completely stupid and just going for a rhetorical point. If someone says that the fact that a given phenomenon is not [well] understood and thus we should continue our pursuit of understanding it via science, they are not saying "We don't understand it, therefore science", which is what God of the gaps refers to (but applied to God obviously) that theists are charged with. The point obviously being made is that given the phenomenon in question isn't well understood and that it appears to fall within the purview of science to explain, we should pursue our endeavors so that we can get an ACTUAL understanding of it, by which we can move on. God of the gaps arguments are nothing like this. Hence why when applying such arguments to, say, cosmic fine-tuning or consciousness we leard nothing at all.
Not sure I agree. As someone who studies computer science (though not A.I. specifically, I admit) and philosophy, I think the load is going to be on philosophy (and has been, largely), at least for awhile. There's effectively no historical reasons to dispute this, as ALL of the sciences developed out of the relevant philosophical disciplines after philosophers made sufficient clarifications and progress towards exactly what they were talking about, and had the proper tools to get at that phenomenon. Examples include physics (from Aristotle to Newton), biology (Aristotle to Darwin (perhaps)), psychology (completely founded by philosophers in the 18th-19th century, building on David Hume's foundation), linguistics from philosophy of language (from St. Augustine to Wittgenstein, transitioned to science by Noam Chomsky mainly).
If we don't have a sufficient understanding of what we're talking about (we don't on this issue), then the science on it is going to be quite wanting; turns out, the science on it [consciousness] is wanting. To paraphrase Dan Dennett, "There've been number of books on consciousness in the past several years by eminent neuroscientists, and most of them are pretty dreadful." Given Dennett's almost unparalleled expertise on both the science and philosophy involved here - he is both a scientist and philosopher after all 
- and the fact that he's often claimed to be a bit down on philosophy (I disagree), I think we have good reasons to think he's right on this.
People in the field of A.I. have long been trumpeting that they are "Soooo close!" to creating a conscious being that it's a little dispiriting. I remember reading an article that detailed how some A.I. researchers in (I think) the 80's had a program that could do something like output basic, but coherent, stories in English, and so they believed it right to say it was conscious. I hope I don't need to explain what's wrong there.
Bah, I'm rambling. Basically, I think real progress will be made on the problem of consciousness once we have the necessarily philosophical grounding on what we mean by 'consciousness', coupled with sufficiently developed scientific investigation, but not before.
Anyhow, the moment I saw the name "Hamza Tzortzis" I knew the facepalms were coming. This guy is often a troll who goes around to well known atheists, shoves cameras in their face and tries to pose "Gotcha!" questions to them for publicity (such as PZ Myers and Dawkins, though Aron Ra pwned him rather well). He further has shown in other instances that his understanding of certain philosophical issues is very incomplete, despite going on to make bold proclamations about them. For example, he's claimed that Hume's Problem of Induction is a problem for atheists but not for Muslims (or at least not for Abrahamic theists), which is laughably stupid.
Anyway, I love when apologists bring up supposed "science of the gaps", because most of the time they are being completely stupid and just going for a rhetorical point. If someone says that the fact that a given phenomenon is not [well] understood and thus we should continue our pursuit of understanding it via science, they are not saying "We don't understand it, therefore science", which is what God of the gaps refers to (but applied to God obviously) that theists are charged with. The point obviously being made is that given the phenomenon in question isn't well understood and that it appears to fall within the purview of science to explain, we should pursue our endeavors so that we can get an ACTUAL understanding of it, by which we can move on. God of the gaps arguments are nothing like this. Hence why when applying such arguments to, say, cosmic fine-tuning or consciousness we leard nothing at all.
(March 29, 2014 at 11:49 pm)FifthElement Wrote: Philosophers will never solve the "problem" of consciousness.
Only science can. ( LINK <--- Click Me)
And when they do, programmers will take over... Birth of the AI is inevitable. Nobody knows when exactly it's gonna happen, but when it does it will be the greatest achievement of human kind and gods enemy No.1
Not sure I agree. As someone who studies computer science (though not A.I. specifically, I admit) and philosophy, I think the load is going to be on philosophy (and has been, largely), at least for awhile. There's effectively no historical reasons to dispute this, as ALL of the sciences developed out of the relevant philosophical disciplines after philosophers made sufficient clarifications and progress towards exactly what they were talking about, and had the proper tools to get at that phenomenon. Examples include physics (from Aristotle to Newton), biology (Aristotle to Darwin (perhaps)), psychology (completely founded by philosophers in the 18th-19th century, building on David Hume's foundation), linguistics from philosophy of language (from St. Augustine to Wittgenstein, transitioned to science by Noam Chomsky mainly).
If we don't have a sufficient understanding of what we're talking about (we don't on this issue), then the science on it is going to be quite wanting; turns out, the science on it [consciousness] is wanting.
To paraphrase Dan Dennett, "There've been number of books on consciousness in the past several years by eminent neuroscientists, and most of them are pretty dreadful." Given Dennett's almost unparalleled expertise on both the science and philosophy involved here - he is both a scientist and philosopher after all - and the fact that he's often claimed to be a bit down on philosophy (I disagree), I think we have good reasons to think he's right on this.People in the field of A.I. have long been trumpeting that they are "Soooo close!" to creating a conscious being that it's a little dispiriting. I remember reading an article that detailed how some A.I. researchers in (I think) the 80's had a program that could do something like output basic, but coherent, stories in English, and so they believed it right to say it was conscious. I hope I don't need to explain what's wrong there.
Bah, I'm rambling. Basically, I think real progress will be made on the problem of consciousness once we have the necessarily philosophical grounding on what we mean by 'consciousness', coupled with sufficiently developed scientific investigation, but not before.
