(side note: there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states)
Is trying to figure out how the brain works by looking at synapses and blood flow and electric fields similar to trying to see how an iPhone works by looking at transistors and electric fields?
* https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108%2802%29... Can a biologist fix a radio?
* https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
Does anyone have a term for this from philosophy of science literature?
If you want to ruin your day, you can try and parse through the SEP page on reductionism. It's a doozy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/
Would they get another iPhone if they break the first one?
The task is no different than any other scientific endeavor, from biology to physics: they'll keep poking and prodding at it in different ways, making observations, accumulating and discarding hypotheses, until some kind of coherent and useful model becomes apparent. Hell, given sufficient supply of iPhones, this would be much easier than figuring out the brain - there's lot of value in short feedback loops and being able to do meaningful experiments on the cheap.
> Is trying to figure out how the brain works by looking at synapses and blood flow and electric fields similar to trying to see how an iPhone works by looking at transistors and electric fields?
They would be looking at that (after speed-running the relevant part of the "tech tree" to understand fields and transistors), and importantly, how it correlates with observed behavior such as ChatGPT saying something, or crashing the weird fire-breathing demon plane???! simulacra in Grand Theft Auto V. Same is the case with intelligence, except we're not free to circuit-bend people the same way the 1923 scientists would be with their iPhones, due to ethics and stuffs.
Would it still be possible without Boolean Logic (1847)? Of course they'd have to realize that it applied. [1]
Earliest possible date they'd be successful might be post-Leibniz in the 1690's. [1]
Of course, there's an argument to be made that it'd not be possible before Alan Turing's work in 1935/1936-ish. On the other hand, in 1923 you'd already have most of the ideas that lead to Turing's insights.
It's not plain correlation. It's long been experimentally demonstrated that you can circuit-bend[0] an animal or a human live, by poking in their brain[1]. If in those cases, altering brain state creates/affects behavior and mental states, then there isn't really a place for a non-physical-stuff consciousness. If it existed, it's demonstrably overridable by purely physical interventions, which implies you could just make a physical-stuff consciousness, at which point why postulate a non-material one?
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending
[1] - Then there's obviously alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, that have a slower onset.
However, if you're an alien and you don't know the exact workings, you might conclude that alcohol affects cars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_(psychology)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_a_negative
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness (that which is actually being described) - see also: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
If there is a way to prove it is necessarily exhaustive, I would like to hear it.
I'm generally ok with beliefs, provided they are realized as such.
I disagree. For example: how can humans operating on scientific principles so consistently stack hundreds of "just" beliefs on top of each other to achieve things like landing things on the moon, as just one very old example?
I suspect there is more to it....I believe that all beliefs are not equal, and I'll go even further: some beliefs are true, and some beliefs are not true.
> using probability for the math is a way to account for uncertainty
That "account for" has a different meaning than "perfectly resolve" seems highly relevant.
> instead of rounding everything up or down to impossible standards of "true" or "false"
Of the two of us, who is rounding things up or down to an artificial truth?
It's like assuming that the driver creates a spark in order to initiate combustion within the car, because the aliens haven't observed an instance of the car starting without the driver present.
But doesn’t seem in any way explanatory of consciousness itself, i.e. the owner of the brain’s awareness of those state changes.
I think this points at the somewhat nebulous definition of consciousness, which at its core seems categorically separate from the phenomena that can be experienced (and manipulated by poking at the brain) within it.
This is why some have theorized that everything is conscious, and the human experience of consciousness just happens to be particularly rich and complex due to the complexity of the human organism. This would suggest that a sufficiently advanced computer could also be conscious, with the specific experience mediated by the architecture of the computer.
(I’m not endorsing this position, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to help separate experiences in consciousness from consciousness itself).
You are right that on naturalism there isn't really a place for non-physical-stuff consciousness. And yet, the existence of non-physical-stuff is the one thing I am most sure of, the one and only thing I have access to. So the challenge is to explain it (or explain it away). As you say, there's no place for it in a naturalist view of the world, and I agree.
But they could be. Elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned computer science is effectively a branch of physics now, because we can connect computation with thermodynamics, and e.g. put lower bounds on amount of energy required to perform certain computation. Therefore, if you consider experiences to be "execution", some specific computations done by our brains, then they still are physical things. Might be tricky to point and prod at them in the structure of our brain, but physical concepts that are smeared over space or time are nothing new - think e.g. waves, whether EM waves or mechanical waves or virtual waves, think of the boiling soup they make out of their medium, and how e.g. Fourier transform can tease them all apart anyway.
Which it seems to me to boild down to the assumption that intelligence and/or consciousness are computable. Which is a possibility, but we should keep in mind that we don't have any proof of this yet, only plausible-sounding arguments.
Why would anyone think that is true? The problem I find with responses like yours is that I think you haven't understood or fully appreciated what it is I'm pointing to that needs explaining. There's something real here that needs explaining or accounting for in a full theory, and an explanation like this doesn't even touch on it. In the full story of "what is experience", there is absolutely without doubt a computational side. But there is an aspect of experience, the 'felt'-ness of it, or the phenomenology, the qualia, that is not explained even in part by reference to computations or any other physical process.
There's just nothing like that, no precursors of it, to be found in the physical world. It's not the computational side of experiences, but rather the what-it's-like-ness of it.
Here's an example of it: what, given naturalism, explains the redness of seeing red? This is not a question about the wavelengths of light, or light hitting the retina, or processing in the brain that leads to the brain states that correspond to having that experience. This is a question about what it's like to see red -- the experiential side of the experience, as opposed to the physical causes of it. Why, given naturalism, would we think that anything experiences (first person perspective) anything at all?
Technically, software isn't exactly physical either, of course. It works with information contained in physical states, but isn't -technically- itself physical.
Arguably this can be demonstrated by moving it to a different physical representation (magnetic, optical, diode charges, dynamic memory cells; little endian, big endian; AMD, Intel, ARM, Turing Machine In Game Of Life, Minecraft Turing Machine) without affecting its behavior or functionality.
I don't think there's anything particularly mysterious about this kind of phenomenon, per-se.
You could grok the behavior of the software by poking at the hardware its running on for long enough; but it might be more useful to split the problem into separate layers that are easier to reason about. (Hence the need for reduction and emergence)
This does not follow. The altering of brain state affects behavior; from this we can deduce that there is a correlation between the two, and that there is a causal link between the two. We can't deduce from this that they're the same thing or that one is reducible to the other: this is illogical.
More generally, it is illogical to claim that brain states are the same as mental states (thoughts). There are several reasons for this. One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thought "2+2=5". The correctness of the former and the wrongness of the latter refers only to the thought's content, not the physical brain state. If thoughts are nothing more than brain states, it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct -- that is to say, it's a thought that conforms to reality -- and that the other is incorrect. A particular state of neurons and chemicals cannot per se be incorrect or incorrect. If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain.
If it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct and another is incorrect, then of course nothing we think or say has any connection to reality. Hence the existence of this disagreement, along with the belief that one of us is right and the other wrong, presupposes that your position is wrong.
No amount of neurological study will undermine this argument. More generally, describing one aspect of reality in greater and greater detail doesn't gainsay those who claim there are other aspects. You can describe the inner workings of the brain in as much detail as you like -- it is nonetheless logically certain that human thought is not reducible to brain states, even though it obviously correlates with them.
> If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain.
Of course there is. Computation. Observation. A correctness of a thought isn't a function of thought itself, it's a function of thought and reality. Correctness of a thought is not a physical label. It's not a state. It's something you evaluate, something you compute with respect to knowledge you observe.
The way I see it, you're confusing a thought with computed properties of it. There is no privileged notion of correctness and nature does not put XML tags with correctness score on neurons.
I agree with this, although I think it's more precise to say a thought is correct insofar as it conforms to reality.
> Correctness of a thought is not a physical label. It's not a state. It's something you evaluate, something you compute with respect to knowledge you observe.
This appears to be illogical. The correctness of my thought (that is to say, whether it conforms to reality) is one thing; my evaluation of its correctness is entirely different. Further, correctness must be a 'state', or property, of a thought: otherwise you undermine your own argument (see below).
> nature does not put XML tags with correctness score on neurons.
I agree with this. But this supports my argument. An arrangement of neurons (or anything physical) cannot be correct or incorrect. But a thought can be correct or incorrect (you must think that, because you must think you're right and I'm wrong about this disagreement). Therefore a thought cannot be reduced to an arrangement of neurons (or anything physical).
How does this make sense? There is some divine being that only sometimes looks at the actual synapses to decide if it should feel nauseous or happy?
It's a debatable position in philosophy against the reductionism OP is describing, and maybe a bit magical but I'd find it the more interesting of the two positions to hold.
That view states, as you describe, that somehow the whole is more than just the sum of the parts. I reject that. Instead, my claim is that if the only parts you have are physical parts, you will not get consciousness. You need other parts too -- specifically, mental/consciousness parts.
(although, this sounds closer to a dualist view, while my view is more idealist)
> If you fully understood the laws of physics at an atomic level, would it be sufficient to recognize a cpu as turing complete if you see one?
This is testable if you take an alternate universe with very few laws. Somewhat canonically, do you understand a Turing machine built in Conway's Game of Life if you understand the 2 rules of that game. (Or 4 rules, depending on how you count).
The only way to understand it is to play the game.
Much like there is no divine being that decides "I'm going to make this dense star a black hole", a black hole and the attached phenomena are consequences of matter and forces interacting.
Emotions are thoughts (brains and the attached phenomena) are consequences of matter and mind interacting.
One possibility: the experiences that God gives me at any moment are what they are because of the state of my brain. This isn't a sometimes thing, but an always thing. I see or experience what I do because of the state of my brain, but not only because of the state of my brain.
The problem is that the physical states alone don't entail anything about the experiential -- nothing about the phenomenology. The physical explanation leaves out things that are real and need explaining.
> physical stuff can never explain consciousness
These statements seem contradictory to me, can you elaborate? Also, you don't provide your reasoning for the second statement. Why do you believe that physical stuff can't cause consciousness? What is your definition of "physical"?
And I have a thought I would like to share here, an attempt at arguing for why it might be impossible for a physical pure materialistic model of the world to explain consciousness
In a pure physical materialistic world, we can represent everything as laws, interactions between materials, guided by a set of rules. That's it.
If we had a absolute knowledge, we can represent those rules, all of them, as a set of mathematical and logical equations.
I reduce the material world to a mathematical world of rules and laws, an abstract world.
Saying consciousness could arrise from a pure material world, is akin to saying the mathematical equations and laws, combined, can be conscious. As in, there is a system of rules that if tuned in a certain way can think. Since rules are abstract, and by definition rules don't think. No combination of them no matter how complicated can think
The initial rebuttle I have in my mind is that "well you are conflicting the system with the objects governed by it", I feel there is a better way to phrase the initial proposal to address this issue, but I just wanted to throw this idea out there
You look at all the proposed laws of the universe, and they involve things like energy, mass, time, position, work, etc, as inputs or outputs. No equations have inputs of these sorts of natural quantities and outputs that entail consciousness or that first-person experience.
We can see from these equations how things like tree leaves blowing in the wind, or mountains, might arise. These things involve motions and mass and things interacting with each other. While we might not be able to paint the full picture, we can see that the inputs and outputs of those equations are the right kinds of things that might plausibly lead to mountains and leaves blowing in the wind, at the right scale.
We can't see from these equations anything that might plausibly lead to the first-person experience, the what-it's-like to be something.
Note that the naturalist cannot then just inject these mental/consciousness related parameters into their equations. That would amount to a form of dualism, and destroy their project. What I think the naturalist needs to do is somehow explain away consciousness, because I don't see any path they could take to explain it in purely natural terms. They need to deny that there's anything here that needs explaining at all.
Source: neuroscience MS (dropped out after defending to become a software engineer)
At the moment we have absolutely no idea of what basic organisation (of synapses) it stems from, something we could build upon, nor any idea of the general organisation of the whole system that make the consciousness an emergent property
- It is simple enough to be reachable by a dumb, brute-force, random-walking, incremental process of evolution;
- It scales well, conferring survival benefits from the start, and at every point of the way, from the first neuron, up to the human brain;
With those in mind, it absolutely makes sense for us to find a relatively simple compute/organizational system and scale it all the way to consciousness (or a set of those that scale together) - because that's exactly how evolution must have done it, since it's structurally the only thing it can do.
(Even artificial) evolution sometimes does really weird things.
https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs4601/refs/papers/es97thompson... (page 399) "Fig 7 [...] The cells shaded gray cannot be clamped without degrading performance, even though there is no connected path by which they could influence the output"
Like a brute-force enumeration running on a supercomputing platform, it's mighty, but it's also simple.
Also, the process is simple. The output not so much.
Taking it a step further though; Of course evolution happened to the very mechanisms by which biological organisms evolve.
Because of course it would.
(eg.
* Eukaryote -> Meiosis : This is obviously a means to create/tailor Variation. (Evolution ~= Variation->Selection )
* Reproduction in Metazoa in general, with all kinds of complex methods to exchange DNA.
* Vertebrates. Just. Vertebrates. (specifically: Sexual reproduction thereof.)
* Simple but still strange: Viruses with multiple reading frames. Sure they successfully evolve, but it's never going to be straightforward!
)
I'm not an expert in this field, but from what I heard brute-force natural selection is the naive explanation we're given in school. There are many more factors at play other than random chance: e.g. there is also sexsual selection. Sexual selection selects some characteristic that isn't necessarily an advantage in the current environment, but it is somehow preferred by the opposed sex. According to some research, the reason why we lost the bone that other primates have in their penis is due to sexual selection.
It helps to understand that in some situations, a search algorithm with some level of randomness can arrive at a solution faster than a systematic/random approach, on average. In other situations, a search with added randomization might be slower, but its ability to escape local optimae (to some degree) means that it is much more likely to find the global optimum (or at least a better local optimum :-P ).
Compare also: Monte-Carlo methods.
https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html
“What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked.
“Evolution.”
“Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.”
Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?”
“Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking.
“With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.”
“On the contrary,” Daniel assured her. “I’ve been planning this for twenty years.”
“Evolution,” she said, “is about failure and death. Do you have any idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo sapiens? How much suffering was involved?”
“Part of your job would be to minimise the suffering.”
“Minimise it?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as if this proposal was even worse than blithely assuming that the process would raise no ethical concerns. “What right do we have to inflict it at all?”
Daniel said, “You’re grateful to exist, aren’t you? Notwithstanding the tribulations of your ancestors.”
“I’m grateful to exist,” she agreed, “but in the human case the suffering wasn’t deliberately inflicted by anyone, and nor was there any alternative way we could have come into existence. If there really had been a just creator, I don’t doubt that he would have followed Genesis literally; he sure as hell would not have used evolution.”
The moment you've used the term “brain”, you'd already detached that thing from the rest of the body (without which it can't function — just like a spherical cow can't really live in a vacuum), drawn its borders, set limits to its functions, and so on. The same with “synapses”. So by stating that those mental objects are “real”, you've simply found that X equals X, that those things are exactly the same as they are defined. Their evident presence here is no different from the evident presence of demons inside the possessed people in the past.