On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

Because the individual parties are subsets of a greater whole. When I say the universe is idealistic, I'm not claiming that I made it with my mind, or that only what I personally can experience is able to exist. That's solipsism.

So you and I are figments of some larger mind. I find this even harder to swallow.

What's this "figment" stuff? You are comfortable with physical objects being a subset of a physical framework, and yet you think that ideas cannot be subsets of a framework of ideas? This seems like special pleading.

These mind subsets still do not explain consistency and repeatability between the subsets.

Why not? It is in fact the organizations of ideas in your mind that you call "consistency." How do you know any physical property or function is consistent? You remember it, and compare it with new experiences. But there's no special reason why the Matrix, or the Mind of God, or a BIJ-generated world couldn't have internal consistencies worth noting.

I don't know how a mind works; I'm not a neuroscientist. More importantly, I don't need to explain how a mind works to understand that there is more than one.

No, but if you want a physical model to be a sufficient account of human experience, you must be able to explain why there is more than zero. So far, there's not even a vaguely good account of how a purely mechanical system arrives at the ability to subjectively experience.

As far as a possible physical explanation of a mind arrising from physical mechanisms, read up on neural networks. It's a general algorithm that can learn and make predictions. It's used to buy and sell stock in the stock market. Also, it's based off how the neurons in our brains work.

I not only know of ANNs, I've done some programming with them myself. ANNs are interesting in that they can allow a system to adapt to its environment via "punishment" and "reward," and I think it's very likely that even a simple algorithm will be able to lead to Turing-passing machines, via brute force, in our lifetimes, especially if people on the internet can be drawn into providing feedback "punishment" and "reward." (for example by having a couple hundred million people rate iterations of a computer-generated song)

However, they say very little about the philosophical reality of subjective minds-- specifically, why there are subjective minds rather than an absence of them.