On 5/4/2020 6:27 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
Le lun. 4 mai 2020 à 14:15, Lawrence Crowell
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> a écrit :
On Sunday, May 3, 2020 at 10:14:10 PM UTC-5, smitra wrote:
On 03-05-2020 23:09, Philip Thrift wrote:
> The SSH
>
> https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/2/247
>
> still lies in the "information turn" that plays in physics
today.(IT
> FROM QUBIT, etc.) - a rejection pf materialism in favor of
idealism.
>
> It is more interesting to me to stick to the vocabulary of
> materialist* physics - particles, fields, interactions,
forces - but
> to approach CONSCIOUSNESS AS PURELY MATERIAL - adding a new
> force/interaction/particle/field as needed (like a sixth
force/field).
>
>
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Field_theories_of_consciousness
>
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_consciousness
>
> etc.
>
> * or physicalist
>
> @philipthrift
Physicalism is a dead end. The hard problem of consciousness
and other
philosophical problems can be considered to be no-go theorems
against
physicalism. Abandoning physicalism solves all these problems
in one
fell swoop. But that also opens the door to wrong theories as
people
engaging with non-physicalist theories can too easily
advertise their
pet theories because they don't suffer from all the diseases
physicalist
theories suffer from. The bar has to be set higher, I would
like to see
a derivation of the laws of physics, not some vague argument
that it is
consistent with QM and unitary evolution but a lot more detail
than just
that.
Saibal
I think more likely this mean the hard problem or qualia are
illusions. I have far more confidence in physics than I do in
hopeful ideas about qualia, which are psychological form of elan
vital thought in previous centuries to underlie biology.
Either you have no quale, and then as a zombie... it could mean
something (but not to you), or you have, and if a theory cannot
account for that, it miss the things it purpose to explain.
When you say "psychological form" you're talking about a quale... I
don't see how that could be explained away...
I think the problem here is with the word "explain". Yes, physics will
never explain quale. But physics doesn't explain matter, or gravity, or
entropy either. Physics is regarded as successful because it makes good
predictions, and that allows manipulation of things. Look at the
controversy over the interpretation of quantum mechanics. We have
drastically different "explanations" of what is happening...which have
zero effect on the application or usefulness of the theory. And that's
exactly the same situation with regard to consciousness and qualia.
Chemistry and biology have a lot of of good "explanations" of quale in
the sense of being able to predict them and manipulate them. Sure, it's
no where near as deep as physics explanations which reach down to
sub-atomic level. But physics aims for depth and bypasses the complex
problems of biology as accidents of evolution, mere geography problems.
There's no reason to suppose that chemistry and molecular biology and
study of brain structure and AI will not reach the same depth of
explanation of consciousness. And it still won't "explain" quale, but
it will manipulate them and reproduce them in AI and people will forget
all about how mysterious they were...just like they have forgotten elan
vitale.
Brent
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