Perhaps I am of the sort you speak of, I feel philosophically content with the idea it’s atoms and other particles all the way down and there’s some pattern that gives rise to consciousness… and believe that everything is conscious to different degrees… perhaps this is naive? Love to hear any suggestions for reading to challenge this viewpoint if it is obviously flawed in some way
I mean, not "look at the Conway's Game of Life, and extrapolate from that, we are nothing but this". This is not a proof, right?
What I mean by "damn if you try" is the fact that consciousness in the current state of things is unreachable. Anything you can say about it is unfalsifiable. It's as if it doesn't exist (although everyone experience the phenomena every day).
So it's quantum that gives rises to atoms, and then quantum stops there. Above that layer, it's atoms. Then above that layer, chemistry takes the torch, and so on. If you need something about "mind", it's on the psychology layer or something, and it's built on previous ones (evolution, chemistry, etc).
There is no room to talk about consciousness in this arrangement, so the problem is tucked away as "emergent" (other word is "illusion"). Meanwhile, there are phenomena that definitely happen (you feel conscious, don't you?) that would benefit from having an explanation, even terminology that is not poisoned.
Indeed. Subjective feelings of "contentment" or "satisfaction" are irrelevant, as this is a matter of having an explanation that holds up. And materialism or naive atomism don't. They fall apart very quickly under examination. This isn't some wishy-washy speculation of some schizophrenic time cube guy who thinks we live in the Matrix. This is well understood metaphysics.
(And I urge careless readers to pay attention to the use of "naive". I am not claiming atomic theory does not tells us something about matter. Naive atomism is a kind of unsophisticated interpretation of matter as essentially just a collection of highly desiccated, ball-like things bouncing around, full stop.)
> This is not a proof, right?
There is a great deal of magical thinking that likes to pretend it is "scientific" by dressing itself in scientific jargon.
> It's as if it doesn't exist (although everyone experience the phenomena every day).
It doesn't exist to the wrong methods, just as sound doesn't exist to the eyes or color to the ears. The insane denial of consciousness is well exemplified by eliminativism. Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist doubles down and refuses to face the incoherence of his position, and proceeds to deny the very things he was supposed to explain in the first place.
> There is no room to talk about consciousness in this arrangement, so the problem is tucked away as "emergent" (other word is "illusion"). Meanwhile, there are phenomena that definitely happen (you feel conscious, don't you?) that would benefit from having an explanation, even terminology that is not poisoned.
Consciousness is one of those "the buck stops here" sorts of things.
For many phenomena, you can sort of get away with passing the buck by deferring to something else. By "getting away with", I don't mean you actually succeed in circumventing the fallacy that's being committed. I just mean there's a certain pretense of knowing that can be maintained in the face of criticism and demands for explanation. "Oh, it's really this other thing, see?" But when you hit one of these walls like consciousness or existence or knowledge, it all unravels. All the filth that's been swept out of sight is now piled up behind that last door. This is where performative contradictions surface with vigor. "I am aware that I am not conscious." "I do not exist." "No statement is true." The incoherence is often comical, so comical, in fact, that people might even refuse to believe they could possibly be guilty of committing something so silly, so it can't possibly be true!
Oh, but it is true...
>> Love to hear any suggestions for reading to challenge this viewpoint if it is obviously flawed in some way
As an intro, I might suggest Feser's "The Last Superstition" [0]. It's a book for philosophical beginners written during the height of the relatively brief but noisy New Atheist craze of Dawkins fame. The style is polemical (which is not typical of Feser's works; in fact, he didn't really want to write this book to begin with, and only wrote it to combat the obvious intellectual mediocrity of the New Atheists). Some of the polemic - a response to the polemical style of the New Atheists - might therefore feel a little dated, but perhaps not. What's good about it is that it surveys the basic philosophical errors Dawkins and co. commit and these intersect with what you seem to be interested in.
Feser has also written another beginner's guide to the "Philosophy of Mind" [1] which addresses mind questions more specifically than the first book. Both are very approachable.
He has also written two books of a more sophisticated nature on the philosophy of science [2] and on the notion of soul [3]. I would recommend these, along with his manual on metaphysics [4], to those with some more philosophical chops and interest. There are, of course, many other professional philosophers in this field who write about similar topics (Oderberg, for example, and his "Real Essentialism" [5]), but Feser is well known for his lucid style and clarity, as well as his pedagogical suitability.
Techie people, myself included seem chronically unable to understand why people prefer inefficient, higher level tools over the efficient low level ones.
Low level tools require an investment of time and brainpower to configure. Consider the time it takes to set up a dishwasher- research, buying, installing, reading the manual. Vs telling your humanoid robot “go wash the dishes”. People will pay a lot more and put up with a lot worse results in exchange for that kind of simplicity.
In a better world we would all be craftspeople and invest time into more efficient things but that ain’t human nature
Yes, but there's also a limit. For the dishwashing, consider that you can already exchange money for a maximally efficient, maximally flexible solution: you can hire someone to do your dishes. How much would you pay for a live in, automata like servant who washes all your dishes for you? What about if they could do many other things? $1k? $5k? $100k? What about the maintenance? What're the ongoing costs like?
Sure, if a dishwasher is $1k and the robot has a high success (not many broken dishes) rate AND can do other things AND is priced like a nice used car (up to $35k) then yeah, maybe? But there's so much of "it depends" in there that it's hard to say for sure. In curious what price/generality/reliability you have in mind when you say "many people would prefer..."
On reflection, inefficient and high level vs efficient low level is far from the only dimension to evaluate these tools on :P
Clearly humans are of the first sort, just like this robot.
To the current example you gave - I would argue that humans require a huge amount of configuration/maintenance - far more than any machine. Of course they are definitely effective at tasks once they get going.
As to what price/generality/reliability level I think people would really prefer - I guess we'll have to wait and see when these come on the market, if they ever do. It's nearly midnight where I am and my morning confidence in humanoid robots has waned a little
Also applies to hiring real people - humanoid robots may be more expensive ph and perform worse but you avoid all the messy things that come along with hiring people (not that I think this is a good idea, just thinking from a bean counting perspective)
On 12: I see a more general product that allows you to amass as much personal data from any of your devices for use as future chat context as inevitable. We see early notions of this in Microsoft’s Recall and the new Pulse. Hopefully someone will build a great local first/open source version and it’ll probably be the first time I actively choose to use such software over the equivalent cloud offering! Don’t want Sam Altman seeing my browser history
Bit of a cliche but a few years ago I came back from a larger than planned acid trip and couldn’t unsee roads as arteries. Nice to see I’m not crazy and smarter people than I have formalised this to some degree :)
I’ve been thinking about how ai could make it easier to connect with people whose views we disagree with - idea being, make the expression of the idea more polite and perhaps easier to meet “on the merit” of the idea. So this is an experiment in the vein of those thoughts. To be clear, I’m personally in total agreement with you as to how much merit I think the posts on this site have (very very little). I’ve only ever visited 4chan a handful of times in my life :) but I thought it would be a cool experiment to see- these horrible views, how different would it be to read them if you removed all the profanity, slurs etc.
Thanks again for taking the time to write, I think it’s my first interaction on HN after a lot of lurking
As others have pointed out, we need more space, and time, to socialise with each other in unstructured ways. This will inevitably lead to more sex (pure human nature). There are many very obvious reasons why this isn’t happening, like working longer hours to cope with cost of living, or high real estate prices that make it financially unsustainable to operate third places.
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