Suppose your consciousness was transferred into someone else's body, the rationalist asked me. I asked what does that even mean? I am an entirely physical being. What exactly is being swapped over? I'm not going to evaluate a "but what if you were haitian" hypothetical with such a bad ontological premise. We settled on a brain transplant swap with the girl sitting next to me as a physically meaningful operationalization. How would I handle this? How therefore should you handle the analogous operation of being yourself? Should you feel shame about what you did yesterday, or any sort of identity shear with the body you woke up with today?
My answer was the intuitive one for a physicalist. I guess "I" would be beset by many unfamiliar physical feelings and have quite an adaptation process as I learned to adapt my sense of self, life ambitions, body image, body composition, and so on to my new physis. I would probably be somewhat depressed and confused for a while as I worked through all this. Acts of will can change your physiology, like going to the gym, taking drugs, or eating different, but assuming the "brain transplant" was not reversible, what else can you do but adapt your sense of self to the set of physical possibilities you actually find yourself in? Thoughts and feelings must bend to physical reality. There is no "me" but this knowledge and these plans in this body with these friends in this world. Change any large part of that and it's a different "me".
What then is physical and rational about shame, guilt, moral and social obligation, etc? If we are parachuted into our body freshly every morning, the rationalist asked why should we feel any of it? Why not just defect from all of it and not care? This too seemed easy to me: my reputation, my relationships, even my relationship to the truth, to my internal code of conduct, these are all physical things too. I have not just the body, but the social accounts and even the finely balanced internal order of the mind. When you inherit a corporation, don't imagine that you don't also inherit its brand commitments. We should relate to these things as such: subtle but physical parts of our domain, often meaningful, fragile, and valuable. If "my consciousness" was somehow a fresh soul with no obligations or entanglements, my behavior shouldn't change at all, because none of the relevant content is in this abstract indentity, and all of it is in the physical reality.
I don't think the rationalist I was talking to disagreed with my physicalist ontology, but his intuitions were much more dualist. He was surprised that I attached almost no significance or even reality to the spark of consciousness itself, and everything to the physical reality of my body, relationships, world, etc. He identified as an abstract sort of brain in a vat, merely piloting his body, but sharing no particular identity with it. But to a physicalist, this sort of brain-in-a-vat thinking and all the weird rawlsian moral confusions and identity crises that come from it are just irrational superstitions. There is no such thing as the abstract moral agent or abstract metaphysical self that could be put in this or that body. There is only the body, with the mind and morality as a derivative phenomenon of that.
If this were the first time I'd encountered this, I wouldn't mention it. But I'm not just picking on one guy. I'm not even picking on the rationalists. I think incoherence in moral ontology is a major problem in almost all modern ideology, and the source of many of our problems. I think we would all do well to have a deep meditation on the implications of physicalism for how we conduct our inner lives and relationships to ourselves.
Bravo. I think this is what I find refreshing about pre-Socratic Greek thought, about Orthodoxy in contrast to other Christian denominations, about "sun and steel": a relentless physicalism.
The obvious retort is the Landian observation that the history of capitalism is an attempt to escape from the constraints of the body into the realms of pure reason. The societies that fracked their members' mindbodies got access to powerful magicks and conquered the world.
Much like the race to AGI now hinges on who can attract the most ultra-dissociated transwomen to optimize their GPU code.
I think I basically agree. The way I’d put it is that the ‘brain transplant’ wouldn’t really be a brain transplant, it would necessarily be a series of transplants of organs and limbs. A brain on its own is not viable, it needs some kind of life support system, so it’s never the case that you’re ’just your brain’. You’d have your body parts replaced with the girl’s body parts. This, again, would necessarily be a gradual process, life support would have to be gradually transferred from your organs to hers, nerves would have to be severed and reattached, etc. So even in the case with the brain, ‘being transferred to another body’ is a misleading way of talking about it. Obviously your new organs and limbs and face and so on would take some getting used to, but perhaps it’s not so far from people who have to ‘relearn the use of their body’ (a somewhat misleading phrase for relearning how to move) and people whose appearance is transformed radically.
I am a physicalist, interpreted in the ancient Greek sense of physis as nature, not in the modern reductionist sense of "materialism," which I find incoherent.
Aristotle said that the psyche is the form of a living thing (plant or animal), where every existing thing can be analyzed as principles of form and matter. A principle is not itself a thing. The psyche is not a thing that could be moved into some other thing. Does not even make sense. The psyche is the characteristic way a living thing is organized.
Even brain transfer doesn't make much sense. The nervous system extends throughout the body. The brain is a dense concentration of neural tissue, but far from all of it. Serotonin is a critical neurotransmitter. Nice fact: there are more serotonin receptors in the Enteric Nervous System (gut) than in the brain. When a person suffers from depression, or eats a psilocybe mushroom and experiences elation, do you imagine that's all happening in the brain? This is also why the microbiome is important.
>>2235 >>2230 The feasibility or completeness of brain transplants isn't really the point here. Yeah you might end up with psychological content from the gut and heart etc of the new body, but that's beside the point. It's just a way more physically plausible thought experiment for teasing out what is "you" and how or whether you should identify with your body and social situation.
The rawlsians are running around with the intuition that the moral agent is the nonphysical spark of consciousness and free will, and any physical determinant of behavior (eg poverty, genetics, upbringing) makes you morally and possibly legally not liable. This is total insanity. Relatedly, people seriously consider questions like "how would you feel about immigration if you were a haitian" that presuppose a nonphysical "you" that could be haitian while remaining "you". Relatedly, there's a whole culture war around trans people articulated in terms of a nonphysical gendered soul being trapped in an opposite-sex physical body. Relatedly, the way rationalists talk about subjective measure, existence, etc also betray belief in an unphysical soul. This stuff is obviously widespread, but totally bonkers.
The point is that if you take physicalism seriously all of these moral foundations of our present order go up in smoke, including the identity intuitions of relatively intelligent people who supposedly take physicalism seriously. I realize I'm not making a compelling case because I haven't actually developed the alternative. I will attempt to do that some day.
>>2238 Again, I agree with you on the physicalism.
There is a meta-question about whether Rawlsian nonsense is really driven by a bad metaphysics of the human person, or if it's just a matter of being cucked by a broader moral corruption that comes from social rather than philosophical sources.
One can ask the same thing about trans ideology. Advocates may try to justify their beliefs in terms of Cartesian dualism or whatever, but is that really where it comes from?
>>2239 >is it philosophy or sociobiological degeneracy? I agree it’s some of both. Healthy people don't just philosophy themselves into such extreme idiocy (though they may be bamboozled by someone else’s bad philosophy). But once the degeneracy gets going, it takes on structure through bad philosophy, and the bad philosophy makes it worse in particular ways. Furthermore, the philosophy serves as a shorthand for the sociobiological; healthy philosophy attracts and gives structure to healthy people. By striving for healthy philosophy, we improve ourselves on the margin and attract healthy people around ourselves.
While we’re dunking on the rationalists, my favorite example there is the crucial rationalist busted premise of distrust in God. Without God, or some functionally equivalent teleology of goodness driving the nature of things, there is no backstop beyond desperate rearguard self-preservation against an uncaring universe. No reason to suppose traditions are wise and good, no reason to trust the natural teleologies of life, no real hope for the future. The only hope is to somehow overthrow natural law and create a permanent entrenchment of our current “values” (another superstition). Of course god-distrusters dismiss this logic, but i see it in their despairing prognosis against AI, their attempts at overthrow of stuff like monogamy, general lack of insight into morality. Sociobiologically, they are probably not going to be corrected philosophically, but i bet if we did develop the alternative philosophically, we would end up with a healthier crowd.
No one here has actually tried to square the experience of consciousness with its supposed physical origin.
Leibniz talks about this. There is no bridge to connect the gaping gulf between the two ontological states of the physical and the subjective. It's the same conceptual task as drawing an ought from an is.
A boulder tumbling down a hill is the same (albeit more primitive) activity as experiencing watching a boulder tumble down a hill — per the physicalist worldview. (I'll grant that @0x3a0 offers somewhat of an exceptional physicalist perspective that may be more workable.)
*Where* is the experience of watching a boulder tumble down a hill? I can show you where in the brain the visual input is occurring. But where is the *experience*? A web of neurons is fired up and the organism reacts appropriately and in an adaptive way — okay, but a Tesla can do that. Why is there also a mysterious conscious experience occurring as a fundamentally distinct OS on top? Physicalists will often respond with "emergent complexity" or whatever but again that fails to comprehend the ontology here.
It's an open question, and I'm not saying that the answer is "therefore we're all actually Devas choosing to inhabit human bodies for fun and to stave off the boredom of eternal life."
>>2253 What observable fact is actually in need of explanation with this mysterious consciousness idea? Is it just that there is a “something” observing a boulder rolling down a hill? If we locate that “something” in the physical model and show what we mean by “observing”, is that sufficient? Maybe we also have to include it observing itself in the process of observation? That doesnt seem fundamentally harder. Maybe it goes like this:
The signals enter your brain, your brain produces some kind of reflective model of the boulder rolling that includes information about how it rolls and how one might respond to it. Suppose this is all just computational information of the usual type (though of course in a highly unfamiliar format and made of meat instead of semiconductor). Then suppose this primitive “observer” is also getting signals in a like way about its own internal state. Not with perfect fidelity of course but with the essential details and the ability to direct that “attention” around. Then it likewise builds a model of its internal state (smaller than the real thing of course) and its affordances for prediction and interaction? What does this thing “experience” which is to say what would it report about itself if it could speak (and of course computers can now speak or at least translate internal state into coherent narrative prose so surely this brain can too)?
It seems to me it could report something like “there is a boulder over there and we could do this or that with it and it might do this or that. Furthermore i can ‘see’ myself (colloquially. More exactly “something”) in a different but analogous way observing the boulder and observing itself. I am/it is speaking this report.” This seems all straightforward physically and to account for nearly every feature of consciousness i have heard of in this conversation and others (qualia and emotions being others not addressed here but much the same to untangle). What exactly is not being accounted for here? Why should i note look at this thing in the physicalist model thinking about its environment and itself and not just point at that and say “there’s me!”?
This deserves its own thread so ill leave it at that for now.
I agree that "explanations for consciousness" should go to their own thread, since that's not really needed for the OP topic.
I'll just say that the *fact* of consciousness is not what's mysterious. It's immediately observed. We know it every time we wake up in the morning and open our eyes, etc.
Explaining how that fact relates to some physical account is another matter. It's not hard to give an account concerning signals impinging on the senses and entering the brain, etc. What's hard is explaining why those processes, however richly described, should result in the experience of consciousness.
>>2258 If consciousness were not a tractable phenomenon within physicalism, that would definitely throw a wrench into the OP’s contention. It just deserves its own thread to be treated properly. I will make one soon.
Is "Suppose your consciousness was transferred into someone else's body" a question that's either realistic (so it would have practical implications) or novel (so it would change our thinking)?
My answer is - neither. It's neither practical nor novel. It's a science fiction trope.
We have better things to discuss. Not every question deserves an answer.
I would add, more generally, that many of the thought experiments invoked in recent analytic philosophy (e.g., p-zombies) have no argumentative force because it's far from clear that the thing imagined is actually possible. It's trivial to conjecture scenarios, but if they contradict laws of physics and so are not possible, they have no implications for our universe.
This is evidence for ivory tower thinking - in which academia is increasingly detached from the physical and economic reality in its own citation network and student loan economy instead of serving the citizenry feeding it, and the students paying an arm and a leg for access to it.
>>2253 The same question can be asked about software or physical laws. Where is the software ? or where is gravity ? I think neither question is answerable. We see functional behaviour that can be described by software or physical laws. Maybe consciousness is in the same category?
In the case of gravity, general relativity gives us a pretty credible account: matter determines how spacetime curves, and spacetime determines how matter moves. What we call "gravity" is strictly accounted for by the latter.
In the case of software, you need to accept that form is a real principle of things. Once you accept that, it is clear that things can and do embody systematic information processing. This is not only true of digital computers. It is true of biological cells. It is true of chemical reactions. It is true all the way down, and all the way up.
>>2374 Following Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a more careful thinker on these matters than I, yes a ribosome or other complex molecule has a simple interiority, a slightly composite particle of consciousness. A Tesla likewise has its own interiority, much more complex than than a ribosome, but probably falling short of the richness and integration of a moderately complex single celled organism. The thing about engineered machine-like "organisms" like a Tesla is that their actual core cybernetic network that maintains homeostasis and would be the seat of the actual "conscious" "lifeness" is quite primitive and fragmented. They have a lot of add-on unliving machines like their internal google maps clone and power electronics programs and whatnot and even most of their self driving internal representation, but those have a very distinct shape from actual agent-like life-like information systems. They are more tree-like and compartmentalized in their internal connections, whereas actual life has a much more loopy causality and dense network of interconnected feedback loops. Human engineering doesn't know how to do the latter, so our creations are not very alive or conscious in that way.
A lot of people conflate the complexity created by top-down engineering with the complexity created within living systems, as if pouring enough complexity into a bucket would make it wake up and become conscious, or as if that's what physicalists are claiming. There's a similar thing going on right now in AI research with scale.
If you're correct there are philosophical implications "we" are not ready for.
On the scale we're dealing with here, a Tesla is arbitrary. We could conceive of the road it travels on and the air within a 10 feet radius of it as parts of a whole that itself has an interiority. What is the Earth's interiority like?
>>2383 Earth's interior is hot, high pressure, and mostly hydrostatically balanced. I don't just mean that as some pithy rejoinder, but as a description of what it's like in any relevant sense. Everything has some intangible interiority that defines the logic of its form, but it all adds up to normal. Same deal with us. We see it from the inside so it looks a bit mysterious because we see everything else from the outside, but it's all the same principles underneath. My point above is precisely that it's not some magic consciousness juice that has "philosophical implications", but regular old matter arranged in regular old form, with all relevant properties following directly from those.
What philosophical implications do you think we are not ready for?
>>2384 > it's not some magic consciousness juice that has "philosophical implications", but regular old matter
Many things have philosophical implications. I don't read that as code for woo.
Consciousness is a fact. I don't consider it magic at all, much less juice (?). This is strawmanning that obscures rather than clarifies.
To assert that consciousness is just regular old matter is false and silly. And not at all because it's "magic juice" instead. That's not the alternative.
Even a single cell, say that of a bacterium, consists of far more than matter. This is obvious. If you were to mechanically break it down into a soup of its constituent molecules, its matter would be unchanged, but it would not longer be a bacterium, nor alive.
"But that's not some additional magic juice!" Yes, my point exactly.
“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Carl Sagan
>>2385 What has a cell got besides its matter? Form. It is arranged in a very particular way that makes it behave differently from a homogenized soup of its constituent chemicals. Similarly, a ground up microchip will not function either. You may notice that the rest of the sentence you quoted is about how the matter of life is arranged into form.
But let’s attend to actual disagreements of expectation here. I don't think there are any. We all know how life and unlife behaves, and very roughly how it works and what it’s made of. We seem to be arguing about words. But some do seem to actually disagree. The possibility of artificial intelligence is one strong prediction in question here. I know multiple people who think its not possible on the grounds that consciousness isnt physical. I know another guy who thinks the mind is not subject to physical limits (like speed or memory) on the grounds that it is not physical. They always start with the sort of arguments raised here against physicality of consciousness and i’ve never seen these arguments end up anywhere else when actually pursued in earnest. Does anyone around here wish to defend the idea that these arguments have these antiphysicalist implications?
>>2388 > What has a cell got besides its matter? Form.
Yes, and it is precisely form that makes all the difference. The difference between a cell and a materially identical non-cell. This is true up and down the hierarchy of complexity. Form is a real principle of things, as much as matter. Further, it's the principle that we should really care about if we want to build. Decreasing entropy locally is all about form.
You're very concerned that others believe in woo. On the one hand, we should maintain good intellectual hygiene. On the other hand, this can become a kind of minor obsession, a kind of psychological policing. That's counterproductive. Some people will always believe in woo. Often, those people are not our enemies, at any level. They're just people.
There is evident physical degeneration that also shows in identity. For example, India, which is objectively one of the worst countries on Earth, is built on a cultural tradition created by Aryans which is rich and powerful. However, after millennia of human degeneration, the country's culture is a culture of chandalas and public defecators. Possibly, Indian degeneracy is a consequence of an ancient radioactive war, too, but that doesn't matter for this debate.
>>2390 This should be taken to another thread if there is interest, but there is no evidence that the Aryan invaders of the subcontinent were ever more than a small minority of the overall population.
It's a close thing as to whether a conquering elite can even maintain its language over a few generations. The Franks failed to do so in Gaul, the Visigoths in Iberia, adopting the vulgar Latin of the inhabitants. Likewise, the Normans in England soon lost their French.
Conversely, sometimes a conquering elite maintains its language but leaves very little genetic trace in the population. The Hungarians speak the language of their Magyar conquerors, but genetically they are just Slavic and German. Only Hungarian nobility have even a trace of Magyar genes.
So it's remarkable that Sanskrit and the Vedas were preserved in India at all.
>>2389 Not enemies, just fools. You are right it’s pointless to police other people’s irrationalities. When i examine my interest in this topic, its that i want to root out my own irrationalities. I have always considered the physicalist (thanks to you guys for the terminology correction) account of consciousness etc to be elegant and to answer all real questions. But when very smart people tell me I’m being retarded, foolish, unsophisticated by believing this, i get curious. I push back increasingly aggressively in the hopes of eliciting some actual counterargument to my position. Is it just bluster and cope, or real philosophical sophistication that accuses me of error? Unfortunately it looks like bluster and cope, and i’m not going to stop saying so until someone proves me wrong. Of course we dont have to be invasive over overly fixated on this, because its not that important, but im confident enough while being curious that it seems worth occasionally picking this fight.
>>2392 You're not going to reach greater clarity by yelling at people (even figuratively by stating things in a polarizing manner).
The issue really is subtle.
It is in the nature (phusis) of a dog to be conscious. It is in the nature of man to not only be conscious, but to be capable of abstraction, reason, and understanding.
The difference a dog and a man lies not in the addition of a mind substance, as Descartes thought, but in the respective forms of a dog and a man. Materially, they are made of pretty much the same molecules. I have no trouble saying that he form of man that allows for his higher abilities is part of his nature and so physical. But also, we don't really understand that nature so well. If we did, it would be easy to create AGI.
Seems to me like gravity to you is not form but something else ? Or did you just want to give a credible answer to explain gravity ? For me, a credible explanation does not imply that something is not form. Otherwise, form could just be explained away.
I can explain any software also by the on and off switching of transistors and give a physical explanation of software. Transistors are well described by electrodynamics. Thus it is fully accounted for and not form anymore? Especially if chemical reactions are form for you, I do not see the natural distinction to gravity, since chemical reactions are "just" the physics of the outer electron shell, thus also fully accounted for.
Thus, I still stand by my point that gravity/physical laws and software are both form (functions) and should be thrown in the same bucket. Every true and accurate functional explanation is form.
>>2394 Gravity is a force, a response to the form of mass-energy. Things made with that force, like an orbit, have form as a key property. Credible explanation does not imply form isnt operative. Form isnt a stand-in for mystery, its just what it says: the particular way the underlying materials are arranged that gives rise to the particular behaviors of that thing (the behavior being predictable from the laws of the underlying matter and the form you arrange it into in the usual way).
You can explain software in terms of physical transistors, but you’ll find that the easiest way to do so is to establish the abstractions and then talk about the abstract forms, like operating systems, io, programming languages, etc. this is what the other anon means by form being a real and necessary part of the explanation. The thing built out of the matter is often more important to understand than the particular matter.
It makes little sense to think of software in terms of transistors. The best you could do from the transistors is to re-abstract the software (like a decompiler, only more so) and be back where you started. Conversely, a Python or Haskell program cares nothing at all about transistors and could be implemented otherwise. Transistors are simply the technology we happen to use to today. In a real sense, they are irrelevant. The Python or Haskell program truly is the software.
>>2394 I have nothing more to respond to this beyond what 2395 said.
>>2395 Thanks for clarifying that form is meant literally. If you meant to clarify that form is a real principle in reality, I do not disagree with that statement. However, this still leaves me confused when I read >>2395 and >>2397.
Assume that all things are functional. Then we have the following relation: input -> function -> output If I understand and take your definition of form, functions are implemented through matter and there particular configuration (form). This leads to the behaviour of the function (how the input gets transformed/translated into the output). This all sounds good to me.
What confuses me is that, as stated in >>2397, the underlying material and form is independent of Python/software. Thus the functional behaviour is independent of form and matter (in the sense that it needs to be implemented but with which matter, form and underlying physics is open) but the importance is that the input gets translated into the specific output in the same way. Thus the functional behaviour is important and is what we care about, not the matter and form!
If the functional behaviour is the thing we care about, I come back to throwing software and gravity into the same bucket. (I can write a simulation in which two objects are attracted to each other through the law of gravity, implying I do not need to take gravity from base reality to simulate the same functional behaviour.)
>>2395 did say abstract forms, so I am wondering whether form and abstract form are different for you and whether gravity is an abstract form as well ?
>>2398 I dont see the importance of the distinction you are implying between form and function. The form implements the function and you cant change function without changing form. Everything here meant in the usual sense and not some exotic technical sense. In practice we dont only care about function except in pure information processing, because we care about physical results. A simulated spaceship cant fly you to the actual moon, etc.
What >>2397 is saying about software isnt that the function is all that matters, but that the programming languages have a degree of independence from the substrate (church turing thesis etc). I dont see what the problem is with this.
I meant abstract form in the everyday sense, with no distinction from any other kind of form except to emphasize that software logic has a certain conceptual distance from its substrate.
Im not sure quite what is confusing you but does it help if i clarify that I and afaict the other anon as well are not postulating any magic or exotic physics or metaphysics at all? In particular, “form” is not meant in the neoplatonist sense of implying existence separate from physical instantiation. Everything including you and your mind is physical in the everyday sense; made out of matter arranged in particular forms, where the nature of the composite follows from the nature of the materials and the way they interact in the particular configuration.
>>2399 Take the programming language that has a degree of independence from the substrate. We can take two different substrates made of two different materials. We can have two different substrates running the exact same software. These substrates will have a different form since they run on different materials. However since they run the same software, I believe we should throw them into the same bucket since they are doing the same thing. But my reason for throwing them into the same bucket is due to them functionally doing the same. Not because they are instantiated in reality the same way. This is basically why I believe the distinction is important.
>Form isnt a stand-in for mystery, its just what it says: the particular way the underlying materials are arranged that gives rise to the particular behaviors of that thing
strictly connects material and their configuration to its behavior (form). This is in my view quite limiting as a concept since the above example would then be two different forms with the same behavior.
From the earlier discussions it is quite clear that you and the other anon are not mystics. I do not see myself disagreeing with either of you on how reality works. Rather I seem to slice it up differently. I shall reflect more on whether it makes sense if this does not make the distinction clear to you.
>>2408 The crux seems to be this “bucket” you want to put different things in together or not. If the cpu architecture is different but the emulated program and behavior are the same (modulo timing, power use, etc), why does there need to be any canonical sense in which they are same or different? They are different machines doing the same thing, or the same machine running on different substrates, or the same behavior implemented in different ways, depending how you slice it. Any canonical slicing here feels presumptuous and at risk of confusing map with territory.
