It IS all physical. It's also an unimaginably complex fucking shitload of tiny physical objects working incredibly quickly. If your brain was big enough to see the parts working like little gears of a clock, it would probably be planet sized, or something like that. Huge.
I would EVEN say it doesn't raise any interesting philosophical questions. Are computers silicon, or magic? Is a book paper, or magic? Is the economy magic, or a bunch of people buying shit everywhere?
Knowing that the brain is physical doesn't make me question myself or doubt control over my life or any silly shit like that. Yes all of my actions are technically "predetermined" by the Big Bang, but not in an interesting way, at all.
Semi-related, if you made a giant brainlike calculator out of water pipes and valves and shit, and asked it a question, then turned all its pipes and valves for a while... it would probably just say "please kill me."
I've come to think that the great consciousness mystery is a psychological one: why are human beings so obsessed with the consciousness mystery? Why do we need so much to believe that we are special?
Should this super AI come to be, I expect it to give the problem of consciousness the same amount of thought we usually give to other people's bowel movements.
When something else is conscious, or something else has a mind, that's the same thing.
You do understand, you said it yourself! Because they have no free will to not have the problem!
I can't blame you though. You had no choice.
BTW,you are the first person I know who admits being a Compatibilist. I don't understand how you can rationally take that position.
Not really - I'm determinist, but I just know the difference between "Things are technically predetermined" and "I'm being forced to do something, like at gunpoint." As in, it's not demoralizing because that makes no sense.
I like it when my brain makes a decision, and I don't care that my brain isn't pulling decisions magically from a mysterious dimension full of floaty ghosts.
Um why? Most humans don't do that.
The point is I think people would expect pretty mundane things from a giant "mechanical" brain, but as described, it would be very unpredictable and complex. It would do things that instantly make the experimenters uneasy.
If this complex behavior can be explained using only 302 neurons, I have no doubt that the complexity of human behavior and consciousness can be explained using 100,000,000,000 neurons.
If I start from the assumption that I am mistaken about what I think consciousness is--that maybe it doesn't exist at all the way I think it does--then I don't have to worry about how matter gives rise to it. I can focus instead on trying to understand where my definition went wrong.
Humans have never lacked for opinions or explanations about what natural things are, or how they got that way. But in the practice of science, these must yield before empirical evidence.
As you note, there is a huge amount of evidence that consciousness is physical. But there is no objective evidence that I experience consciousness as you define it. You just have to take my word for it--and so do I. But maybe I'm wrong.
It's true for the worm as well. You can't understand everything about the worm without emulating the other 600 or so cells, and putting it into environments similar to what biological worms occupy. The lego mindstorm worm is interesting, but it's hardly the natural state of the worm.
It doesn't seem possible. Our brain, like the rest of our bodies, develops from a single cell. It's DNA (maybe also some other markers) that directs the differentiation of every part. So DNA is where the blueprints of that huge mess would be.
I believe that self-organization is a better way to explain how mind emerges. There's a basic try and error mechanism with strong rewards. The rest is the result of a life of learning.
And it also got to work on it with a hundred billion stars with earth-like planets, in each of a hundred billion galaxies, and (maybe) in a basically infinite space of universes. All in parallel with infinite time to play with.
Is it so far-fetched to postulate that humans will hit our limits before getting this far?
It is like searching the ocean for something that by all accounts should be in the ocean, and deciding that perhaps the thing cannot be found, despite having large portions of the ocean still to search. It is too early to make that claim.
I'm not saying that there are not smug philosophers or scientists or just internet nerds that will declare the problem solved, clearly it is all in the brain and there is nothing magical to it but I think they would be incorrect. Modern physics is incredibly esoteric and shares more with meta-physics than what we tend to observe (which classical physics can explain satisfactorily for the most part). I don't think being physicalist is any impediment to having spirituality and and a sense of wonder about the universe and our place in it - the main difference to me is that we can't just accept a deus ex machina and call it a day. That may sound condescending but it isn't a choice for me personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism
Either everything exists in the material world, or it doesn't. There's really no way of avoiding that binary. If you think there's something else, that is by definition supernatural.
[1] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/
[2] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/
[3] - Wikipedia tends to be a pretty horrible source for reading about philosophy, so I don't like to link to it for this. The plato.stanford.edu site is better, at least for Analytics, not so much for Continentals. So I hesitate to link to it for this either. Better to just go to the primary source material, or take a course at one of the rare schools which focus on Continental thought, so you don't get the wrong idea by learing about Continental philosophy from Analytics who all too often see Continentals contemptuously as "not philosophy" or as just some version of Analytics, both of which miss the point.
[4] - Though some, particularly some Christian Existentialist thinkers have in fact interpreted Heidegger's thought from a Christian perspective. But that view, as most any other about Heidegger, really depends on who you ask. Many others interpret Heidegger's thought strictly non-theistically.
Consciousness might not be reducible to the material, or the material could all have a conscious component. There might be other things, like societies or biology, which are strongly emergent. Or maybe there is no material world. Maybe it's all mental. Perhaps there is a third substance, a neutral monism giving rise to mind and matter.
Maybe the noumena is beyond human categorization and perception. Perhaps our experience of the world is such because we are the animals we are, and not because we have access to reality in itself. Man is the measure and all that.
And on and on. There are various anti-realists debates. There is Humean skepticism of causality. None of these issues need invoke the supernatural, although they don't necessarily rule it out. David Chalmers can propose consciousness as an additional feature of nature which is nonphysical (tied to informationally rich processes like certain mental or computational states), without proposing any supernatural element.
First, how others perceive your words usually matters more than the precise definitions you have in mind. If I describe myself as believing in the supernatural, it has a lot of connotations I don't want.
Second, the possibility that consciousness (in some sense) could be built into physics themselves. So it doesn't contradict that the brain is made of subatomic particles, but the workings of the universe have more correlations built in that could work at different levels. Something I think is comparable is that many cosmologists think that the arrow of time, which events come before which, can be explained by a universe with initial conditions of extreme low entropy. So there's nothing within the universe that explains why the initial conditions were like that, but it's a real property of our universe.
Maybe consciousness could be an end state that the universe is progressing toward. Is that really so much weirder than working from an initial state of extremely low entropy?
If God exists, there's no reason there couldn't be new phyisics describing how his world works.
Is anyone exploring this third way at all?
EX: People making decisions based on eye tracking not matching up with the subjective experiences. Or the classic you chose not to do something, but your arm is already in motion and you can't stop it fast enough.
Interesting. I thought that "free will" was utterly debunked by the economy :). Not to mention the advertising industry, which is basically applied exploitation of the limits of human "free will" :).
And if you have any piece of evidence, you can be sure the people at the nearest physics dept will love to hear it.
You are not wired up to understand the low level effects, it's simply not a useful. At the same time it does describe how it feels, if we started using firing of C fibers instead of Pain people would assume they understood what was going on.
The thing that irks me about this is how it reinforces a common (and in my opinion, false) dichotomy: either you believe the mind is explicable in terms of ordinary physics or you believe in a soul and are therefore religious. I feel like there should be a third way, one that admits something vital is missing from the physicalist picture but doesn't make up a story about what that thing is. There is a huge question mark at the heart of neuroscience -- the famed Explanatory Gap -- and I think we should be able to recognize that question mark without being labeled a Supernaturalist. Consciousness is weird!