Comments on: On discovering you’re an android

By: Gornahoor | On discovering you’re not an Android

Gornahoor | On discovering you’re not an Android — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 05:41:57 +0000

[...] at Gene Expressions, we learn this alarming fact: The idea that the self, or the conscious mind, emerges from the [...]

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 04:13:40 +0000

Re: “If there were strong evidence of some form of life after death then this would certainly argue strongly against the sufficiency of neuroscientific materialism.”

I would say it certainly would argue against materialism, but not necessarily against the materialist view of the brain. It would just require a God to re-image the previously extant brain model, much like installing software on a new computer.

By: ejgagen

ejgagen — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:37:14 +0000

IMHO we (as humans) cannot understand objectively what it is like to be humans. We are all ‘inside the box’ as humans together. it’s simply impossible for us to make any reasonable hypothesis of what is happening or how subjective conciousness works. The moment we loose our subjective conciousness we loose the ability to try and analyze it. The moment we gain it, we are bound by it’s limitations and unable to see out of it. A physical analog to this would be an insect born and raised in a cave trying to describe sunlight – it simply has no ability to formulate a way to describe it, because it’s to far away from it’s experience.

By: Kristoff

Kristoff — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:44:51 +0000

Adrian, you have a brain, a teacup doesn’t. If you remove your brain, you’ll be as sentient as a teacup.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/

By: Once again, there is no soul (‘outside the brain’) « Econstudentlog

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 16:43:01 +0000

[...] Read all of it here. [...]

By: kjmtchl

kjmtchl — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:11:45 +0000

I wonder about that. I know all the arguments and they are intellectually fairly compelling, but I still have the feeling something has been missed. If we don’t have “real” free will we have something that seems like free will that needs to be explained. I don’t just mean the feeling that we (our conscious selves) are in control of our decisions – I agree that a lot of that is post hoc rationalisation of decisions that our subconscious brain has taken and then made us aware of. But the fact remains that we do take conscious decisions – there patently is some measure of conscious control that needs explaining. I do not believe this is simply always an illusion. I think free will is a real emergent property of the human brain, though I have not the foggiest idea how it could possibly emerge. I suppose it might be a semantic difficulty – if, by free will, we mean an incredibly sophisticated level of autonomous and reflective cognitive control over decision-making in any given context, emerging from a system that integrates all the information entailed in the complete current state of our nervous system, then I think we have it. I am not sure that would satisfy the full philosophical criteria for free will (where it could be argued that if you knew the complete current state of our nervous system it would be possible to accurately predict our behaviour – i.e., the system is completely deterministic), but it’s good enough for me.

By: jamie b.

jamie b. — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:32:06 +0000

Even among those who accept that the mind is just the activity of the brain, belief in free will seems pretty common. It seems to me that free will will be the last superstition to die.

By: kjmtchl

kjmtchl — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:29:56 +0000

Of course it is hard to prove that a cup of tea is not having a subjective experience but I don’t see any good reason to expect that it is. There is nothing about the cup of tea that a subjective experience would help explain. On the other hand, we clearly do have subjective experiences and, yes, neuroscience still cannot explain them. Some would argue that once we have explained all the bits and pieces and processes involved in generating them that, actually, there won’t be anything left to explain – I am not sure I buy that argument. It has been compared to “life” and you could say that once you explain all the molecular and cellular biology of, say, a bacterium, you have explained life (without ever really having defined it – in fact, the term becomes moot at a certain point).

An interesting question, though, is considering whether things a little closer to us than inanimate objects have subjective experiences and what they are like. Do chimps, dogs, newborn babies, fish, flies have subjective experiences? They clearly encode information about the external world and internal states, including memories of past experience but do these constitute the same type of “felt” experience? Some would say our capacity for introspection and metacognition is what sets us apart – we not only have these signals encoding this information, we have signals telling us we have those signals and can think about them in an abstract way.

While we do not yet know the answers to these questions, all of them are empirical questions – I see no convincing theoretical or philosophical reason to suggest they are not in principle answerable by scientific inquiry.

By: Adrian Ratnapala

Adrian Ratnapala — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:19:29 +0000

You are right that neuroscience explains why the human experience is rich. But it does not explain why there is any experience at all. We assume (perhaps wrongly) that matter like the tea in my cup and even the cells in my feet have no subjective experiences of their own. We also believe (probably rightly) that brain processes are just the same kind of stuff obeying the same physical laws. Yet my brain processes correspond to real, subjective experiences. I am concious. This particular(assumed) difference between tea and me is left unexplained by neuroscience.

Neuroscience does explain why I am smarter than my cup of tea, as can be observed by looking at our external actions. That’s good, but it doesn’t make the question of internal experience go away. Perhaps this question is what you mean by “…we cannot conceive of how a mental state could arise from a brain state…”.

Actually I don’t think this is so hard to conceive: my guess is that all physical process correspond to subjective experiences. Decartes had other ideas. The really hard thing is to put any such guesses to the test. Science, which strives to explain the objective phenomena might deal itself out of the game when it comes grappling with inherently subjective ones.