From physicist Rob Sheldon, our physics colour commentator, on what’s wrong with the latest new theory of consciousness. That’s the one by Anil Seth that walloped through here quite recently, namely,
Researcher: Never mind the “hard problem of consciousness”: The real one is… “Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind”
Sheldon:
The key point in this article is in this sentence:
But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem).
Restating it, they want to use materialistic biological metrics to describe consciousness without philosophical definitions.
You know, stick a rock in a maze and count how long it takes to solve it. Stick a mouse in a maze, and count the seconds to solve it. Describe the difference as “consciousness metric”. Now replace the maze with a mirror, and see if the rock knows smacks into the mirror or avoids it. Do the same for a mouse. Measure the change in acceleration (force divided by time), and call that a “mirror metric”. Etc.
You will quickly find that all that such “pragmatic” approaches really do is convert explicit definitions into implicit ones that are harder to root out.
If such pragmatic or common sense approaches worked, we would be breeding talking mice or at least programming artificially intelligent computers by now.
Or maybe even conscious rocks?
See also: Psychology Today: Latest new theory of consciousness A different one from the above.
What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness
and
Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness?
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The hard problem, a few notes:
David Chalmers is semi-famous for getting the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness across to lay people in a very easy to understand manner:
Simply put, the hard problem of consciousness is subjective conscious experience. i.e. For the body to send a signal of pain and to subjectively experience the pain are two vastly different things.
Here is a cartoon that gets the point across very clearly
Daniel Dennett, an atheist, puts the insurmountable problem for material explanations like this,,,
And there you have it folks, absolute proof that when you deny the reality of your own mind you have in fact lost your mind! 🙂
That atheists have no clue how subjective conscious experience can possibly ’emerge’ from a material basis is made clear in the following quotes:
Of related note to subjective conscious experience, it is interesting to note that “quantum theory entails an irreducible subjective element in its conceptual basis”:
In fact, the subjective conscious experience of ‘the now’, as understood by leading philosophers at the time, played a large role in denying Einstein a Nobel prize for his newly discovered ‘physical time of relativity’
There are many lines of evidence from quantum mechanics, contrary to what Einstein thought possible for experimental physics, indicating that consciousness must precede material reality:
Here is one of my favorite lines of evidence indicating that consciousness must precede material reality:
As well, a strong case can be made that the consciousness that must precede material reality must possess infinite Intelligence in order to have the causal adequacy to ‘collapse the wave function’
Verse and Music:
Is Sheldon saying mice aren’t conscious, or that rocks are less conscious?
At what point do clueless analogies become self parody?
The mouse is conscious, it shows this by an interpretation of its environment, and an avoidance of things that can harm it; the rock doesn’t.
Biological sytems evolve to survive, avoid harm, and perpetuate; rocks don’t.
If this is the level of ID thought at present, one must ask the question; ‘What fertile fields of research does this thinking lead to?’
I understand scientists trying to uncover the mechanisms within the brain that make you, you. What I don’t understand is the ID theory of trying to cover this up!
Actually the last sentence of the post above explains everything neatly; “On Christ The Solid Rock I Stand.“
Thanks BA explicit religion is always welcome and telling on this ‘science’ site!
– What is, under materialism, “the mouse”? If by “the mouse” you are referring to a conglomeration of particles, then what is the ontological difference with a rock? In what sense is it prudent to refer to a conglomeration of particles as one thing?
– What do you mean by “conscious”? Self-awareness?
These are the two criteria of being conscious?