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That's my boy!!! You have defined a cow by what it does, which is a whole lot different from "not being an uncow" because I can apply the moo test to any external object and thus identify a cow with no previous knowledge of what it is, or what it is like to be one.So, what does a conscious being do, objectively, that distinguishes it from all non-conscious entities?
A hall mark of consciousness is not just being self aware, but knowing that others are also aware, and being able to imagine or see something from the perspective of another conscious being.
At the very end of that book of his ,and after proving the "fact " that the apparent altruistic behavior is just selfishness in disguise ,even at the level of humans , Dawkins went on concluding that :true altruism has never existed neither in nature nor in the history of the world .But , we , as humans , are the only species that can revolt against the selfish tyranny of our genes, and against the "fact " that we were born as selfish creatures , by being able to deliberately and consciously modify our selfish behavior by becoming truely altruistic , by teaching altruism, generosity ...blablabla ...How , on earth, are we supposed to do just the latter , if we are just machines then ?How, on earth, did we get to possess such unique property or quality to behave independently from our mechanical systems then ?How, on earth, did those properties or qualities rise from our mechanical systems then , in the first place to begin with ?
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 08/09/2013 20:00:07Look, i do agree with most of what you were saying , form the materialistic point of view at least ,so :Help me out here ,in order to make dlorde and alcanverd see the light haha :Do you need anyone else to see the light? None of us can see how consciousness works, but maintaining a diversity of approach is a good thing as it makes it more likely that someone will trip over something useful.
Look, i do agree with most of what you were saying , form the materialistic point of view at least ,so :Help me out here ,in order to make dlorde and alcanverd see the light haha :
What matters from my point of view is that more people understand the problem with translating experience of qualia into data about qualia because if they are aware of this issue they may find some kind of solution which looks completely imposible
right up to the point where it jumps out and hits you across the face with a wet fish. If you understand the key problem and know what you're actually looking for, you're more likely to recognise the solution if you stumble upon it. Beyond that, there is no need to evangelise any specific position.
Also, attempts to make people change position are almost always doomed to have the opposite effect, so it's counterproductive to go down that road. People need to make their own journey and not be pushed. It is sufficient to set out an argument and then leave it there. If people take it on board to any degree, they may gain. If they find a fault in it and destroy it, you gain instead by having a faulty argument destroyed, thereby liberating you to find a better approach.
QuoteWhat you cannot understand is how consciousness or the mind ( I see the human mind or consciousness as a whole process which contains intelligence , emotions, feelings , imagination ...) can rise from those biological mechanical processes ? or as Dawkins put it , we can "revolt against the selfish mechanical tyranny of our genes " by deliberately modifying our selfish behavior via our free will : how, on earth, are we supposed to do just that , if we are just machines = we cannot have a free will = free will is an illusion ,according to this mechanical deterministic materialistic view of the universe , man, life , nature ... People often put ideas across rather badly, framing them in ways that imply that they believe things they don't altogether believe in, so it's always hard to work out what their true position is. Dawkins in the context above is really talking about the ability of our intelligence to override the less intelligent evolved rules of behaviour programmed into our DNA. Our genes set up certain behaviours in us which are not always ideal, but they also generate a general purpose computer in our heads that can do a better job, and when it recognises that there are better ways to do some things (such as suppressing violent instincts in order to create a safer society in which random death by violence is massively less likely), instinctive behaviours can be overridden. He may attribute this to free will as a shorthand, but if you were to pick the point apart with him, he would probably agree that there is no such thing as free will and give a longer, more accurate account.
What you cannot understand is how consciousness or the mind ( I see the human mind or consciousness as a whole process which contains intelligence , emotions, feelings , imagination ...) can rise from those biological mechanical processes ? or as Dawkins put it , we can "revolt against the selfish mechanical tyranny of our genes " by deliberately modifying our selfish behavior via our free will : how, on earth, are we supposed to do just that , if we are just machines = we cannot have a free will = free will is an illusion ,according to this mechanical deterministic materialistic view of the universe , man, life , nature ...
Quote"...consciousness, feelings , free will, good and evil, emotions, ethics , cultures, societies, politics, economics , religions or spirituality..."There are a lot of diversions there which don't really have anything to do with consciousness. Free will is not free at all, even if qualia are real: extreme pain, if pain is real, may force you to try to act to try to reduce it in any way you can find, but there is no free will involved in that. Ethics is really just about weighing up the harm people do and minimising it within a system where some harm is necessarily allowed in order to make life fun: if you want the freedom to enjoy walking through a park, it has to be allowable for people to disturb others by walking about through a park. Some people are unable to weigh up the balance properly and will think they are allowed to push other people out of their way rather than walking round them, and some may think it's okay to stick a knife in them at the same time, but there's nothing supernaturally evil going on - all that's happening is that there are faults in the algorithms they run, and these may be caused by genetic errors, errors in the construction of the brain, or a violent upbringing which has taught the individual in question that no one else seems to care about the rules, so why should they.
"...consciousness, feelings , free will, good and evil, emotions, ethics , cultures, societies, politics, economics , religions or spirituality..."
Politics is an attempt to run things well and to apply morality through law, but it's all mechanistic, some of it being driven by instincts (homosexuality is not acceptable because we're programmed to find it disgusting), some is driven by cultural beliefs (homosexuality is not acceptable because this Holy book says so), and some of it is driven by direct thinking which may be right or wrong (homosexuality is not acceptable because it spreads disease; or homosexuality is acceptable because it does immense harm to people to prevent them from being the people they cannot help but be).
Religion is a kind of science in which magic is allowed as an explanation, but most of it is based on sense on some level. It began with things like hearing an echo coming out of an empty cave: you shout into it and a spirit shouts back at you. That isn't stupidity, but an attempt to understand something which happens to be wrong. Explorers used to write "here be dragons" on maps whenever they ran into a thunderstorm, and they weren't stupid either - they heard the dragons roaring and saw the fire that they breathed. That isn't part of a religion, but it works in the same way - it's an attempt at a scientific explanation that has gone wrong due to a bad assumption. A lot of religious beliefs are based on feelings, such as love and awe. These feelings may or may not be real, so exploring beliefs based on feelings really doesn't address the issue of consciousness itself - it is merely a diversion. What matters to us in this discussion is whether the feelings are real or not, and we can explore that best by looking at the most stark of qualia, pain. Pain drives behaviour more strongly than any other quale, although it only does so if pain isn't a fiction. We need to see a full cause-and-effect model of the process by which pain can drive something in order to see it as more than a fiction, and if someone can do that we will then be able to build similar models for all other qualia and explain the whole lot, but there's no point in trying to understand the whole mess in one go until we can explain the clearest case
How can even science itself ,or any other form of human knowledge for that matter , to mention just that , how can they ever rise from those evolutionary exclusively mechanical processes of ours ?
Evolution appears to have built the first information systems in the form of DNA. A second kind of information has then evolved in the form of brains, and one species has ended up with a universal computer which can turn itself to any task. Some of the programming of that computer has evolved to do what it does, but it has reached the point where the rest of the programming can be done through learning. Science comes out of the programming of this computer to try to model the world around it. None of that requires consciousness, but if consciousness is useful as part of the mechanism for some reason, there is no reason why evolution shouldn't have taken a pathway that includes it. We just don't know what its role is because it appears to be superfluous
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 09/09/2013 17:36:07At the very end of that book of his ,and after proving the "fact " that the apparent altruistic behavior is just selfishness in disguise ,even at the level of humans , Dawkins went on concluding that :true altruism has never existed neither in nature nor in the history of the world .But , we , as humans , are the only species that can revolt against the selfish tyranny of our genes, and against the "fact " that we were born as selfish creatures , by being able to deliberately and consciously modify our selfish behavior by becoming truely altruistic , by teaching altruism, generosity ...blablabla ...How , on earth, are we supposed to do just the latter , if we are just machines then ?How, on earth, did we get to possess such unique property or quality to behave independently from our mechanical systems then ?How, on earth, did those properties or qualities rise from our mechanical systems then , in the first place to begin with ?You've just posted three long extracts from Dawkins followed by the above in order to repeat a question you've already asked. I attempted to answer it in a post that appeared 3 minutes before you posted the above. They are mechanical processes running at a different level. The genes run at one level and determine a lot of our behaviour, but the rest happen in the general purpose computer through mechanical thought, and the ideas generated there are able to override the rough-and-ready directly-evolved behaviour control mechanisms programmed into the DNA.
[By the way, my internet connection is too slow for watching video. Even if that was not a barrier to me, it is sad in this day and age that so much content of the Internet is now being put out there in a form that can only be accessed at the speed of a snail. Video is a major step backwards for the communication of ideas, except where the visuals are important to the points being put across. Sometimes they are, but a diagram will often do just as well. Sometimes there is no substitute for video, but this is rare.
@ David Cooper ,dlorde :Please , let's stop deceiving each other , let's be honest :
Quote from: cheryl j on 09/09/2013 03:45:39A hall mark of consciousness is not just being self aware, but knowing that others are also aware, and being able to imagine or see something from the perspective of another conscious being.That isn't a hallmark of consciousness (regardless of this label that is usually attached to it), but an indication that a certain level of intelligence has been reached. A machine can be programmed to recognise other machines and to judge that they have a different perspective on things, but with no consciousness being involved. It's important not to be misled by the labels where someone has incorrectly attached the word "consciousness" to something. "Self aware" does not require consciousness, but a lot of people assume that consciousness is tied up in the idea of awareness. A security lamp that switches on when a cat walks past at night is "aware" of the cat, but there is no concsiousness involved. Consciousness is not awareness, but a feeling of awareness; a feeling of understanding something; a feeling of some kind or other. It is always a feeling.
Self-awarness or awarness can also contain cognitive elements , maybe vague cognitive elements , but nevertheless cognitive ones ...
Conciousness, self-consciousness, awareness, self-awareness ...might be just evolutionary mechanical sophisticated illusions we take for real as well , but they cannot rise from mechanical systems
I just do not buy that exclusive magical dogmatic ossified materialistic mechanical reductionistic approach of consciousness, feelings , the thought process, free will, good and evil ...
Materialism as a world view, philosophy, paradigm...should be confined only within the field of inorganic and organic matter processes though , and even there , materialism holds no water ,as quantum physics had shown : "matter is not made of matter " ,so to speak .
The problem is ,neither Dawkins or others could , would , or did answer is :How did that intelligence of ours or that ability of ours to override ....rise from our alleged mechanical systems, in the first place to begin with , and how does it do just that you were saying , in fact ?
Materialism excludes indeed any potential existence of the free will , but many self-declared materialists scientists whose works i read , do think free will does exist = a paradox .
Nature vs nurture : what about our own input ? we cannot be just machines ,no way , otherwise , just try to explain consciousness to me via that mechanical approach of yours = you cannot , unless you do try to kiss your materialism goodbye ...
You do make it sound as if we are just some unconscious puppets in the hands of unconscious DNA machinery in its interactions with the environment ,nurture .
That's just the mainstream materialistic point of view on the subject i do not share :we cannot explain human behavior just via biology genetics , environment and nurture ,without the notion of free will at least .
This exclusively biological genetic approach explains some parts of the human condition , human behavior, human suffering ....not all of it .It cannot explain consciousness, feelings , emotions , love ....not in a million years ,despite what promissory messianic materialism says on the subject .
QuotePolitics is an attempt to run things well and to apply morality through law, but it's all mechanistic, some of it being driven by instincts (homosexuality is not acceptable because we're programmed to find it disgusting), some is driven by cultural beliefs (homosexuality is not acceptable because this Holy book says so), and some of it is driven by direct thinking which may be right or wrong (homosexuality is not acceptable because it spreads disease; or homosexuality is acceptable because it does immense harm to people to prevent them from being the people they cannot help but be). You're not explaining anything via this mechanical approach , dude .How can all that rise from our mechanical systems then ? makes no sense .
Funny way of looking at things : ( Religions did evolve and still do,as the universe is still expanding , as the creation of the universe is still an ongoing dynamic process , no wonder that early muslims did discover evolution itself , centuries before Darwin was even born, thanks to that evolutionary spirit of Islam mainly .Religions were the first to call for experience , personal experience , observation ...before science learned to ever do so : even science itself did originate from the epistemology of the Qur'an ...)
We always come back to square zero again : how can pain, suffering , consciousness, feelings , the thought process, thoughts ...rise from our alleged mechanical systems ?Either they are illusions we take for real ,or both mind and body are 2 entirely different "systems " which do interact with each other :But , we cannot yet explain how they interact with each other : an almost impossible issue .
QuoteEvolution appears to have built the first information systems in the form of DNA. A second kind of information has then evolved in the form of brains, and one species has ended up with a universal computer which can turn itself to any task. Some of the programming of that computer has evolved to do what it does, but it has reached the point where the rest of the programming can be done through learning. Science comes out of the programming of this computer to try to model the world around it. None of that requires consciousness, but if consciousness is useful as part of the mechanism for some reason, there is no reason why evolution shouldn't have taken a pathway that includes it. We just don't know what its role is because it appears to be superfluous.Wrong : makes no sense to me whatsoever ; evolution cannot explain human consciousness ...pain, suffering ...feelings , love ...no way .
You, guys , just "replaced " the God of religion with other "gods " such as nature , evolution , computation, magical emergence ...
materialism just replaced religious metaphysics or theology with its own materialism is another kind of ossified irrational exclusive orthodox religion ,which pretends to be scientific , which is absolutely not the case .
Science cannot exist without consciousness either .
Consciousness cannot rise from mechanical systems as you know .
Evolution might "program" our alleged mechanical systems to be flexible, to be able to adapt to new situations , to be able to to learn new things ,skills ...but it cannot explain our consciousness , feelings , thought process ....not just via that materialistic mechanical approach , no way .
You were just using some magical thinking here as well, unfortunately enough, just speculating ...
I do not see any fruitful or constructive insights ever being 'able " to "emerge " from that magical materialism thus ,sorry .
@ David Cooper ,dlorde :Please , let's stop deceiving each other , let's be honest :Why did you , ignore what that physicist said about the dogmatic "religious " orthodox magical ossified exclusive ...materialism in science ?
Can you try to address what he said on that subject at least ?Especially when it comes to the fact that materialists such as yourselves do confuse their materialism as a world view , with ...science proper as such , ironically enough .
Worse : How can't you , as materialists , realise the fact that you have been deceiving people , in the name of science , by presenting materialistic views as ...scientific facts,or at least as scientific approaches : materialistic views such as the "fact " that life is just a matter of mechanical biological processes , that the universe is exclusively material, that consciousness can be , some day , (Promissory messianic materialism ) , explained within that materialistic dominating paradigm in science ...?
There are a lots of legetimate issues like that regarding materialism in science and elsewhere , you just prefer to push under the table and ignore ,as if they do not exist ....Why is that ? Why , if you are really what you pretend to be , guys : presumabely rational logical scientific people....Why ? Why this deceit , self-deceit , dishonesty or lack of integrity ?
I thought that you, David Cooper , would be courageous enough to be honest and have integrity regarding these issues of pure materialistic beliefs imposed on and in the name of science , but i see i made a mistake in that regard at least . [/b]
You can believe whatever you want to believe in ,i have no problems with just that , but ,please , just have the decency integrity and honesty not to present them to people as scientific facts , or as scientific approaches at least ...while those materialistic beliefs of yours , in fact , have nothing to do with science proper ...whatsoever ...
If there is no integrity to be detected in you , guys , regarding these issues , then , any discussions concerning science , materialism and -in science , evolution, consciousness , free will ethics ,...and the rest , would be an utter waste of time , or just deceptive make -believe , ....= the "truth" we seem all to be looking for would be the main victim, together with science itself, as a result ,unfortunately enough ...
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 09/09/2013 19:31:51@ David Cooper ,dlorde :Please , let's stop deceiving each other , let's be honest :So you've been deceiving us, not being honest? ohhh... and to think I trusted you... You're probably confused about our responses because you have this weird idea that you can label us materialists based on our general opinions, then castigate us for not being True Materialiststm according to some straw man absolutist definition you've decided on. It doesn't work like that. Materialism isn't some kind of fundamentalist religious sect, nor does it (or we) have to conform to your exacting expectations. Learn to live with it.
Quote from: David Cooper on 09/09/2013 18:13:00You've just posted three long extracts from Dawkins followed by the above in order to repeat a question you've already asked. I attempted to answer it in a post that appeared 3 minutes before you posted the above. They are mechanical processes running at a different level. The genes run at one level and determine a lot of our behaviour, but the rest happen in the general purpose computer through mechanical thought, and the ideas generated there are able to override the rough-and-ready directly-evolved behaviour control mechanisms programmed into the DNA.You just have been performing an amazing U boot turn , in total contrast with what you were saying earlier regarding the fact at least that consciousness cannot rise from mechanical systems ....cannot be explained by mechanical systems ...unless ....
You've just posted three long extracts from Dawkins followed by the above in order to repeat a question you've already asked. I attempted to answer it in a post that appeared 3 minutes before you posted the above. They are mechanical processes running at a different level. The genes run at one level and determine a lot of our behaviour, but the rest happen in the general purpose computer through mechanical thought, and the ideas generated there are able to override the rough-and-ready directly-evolved behaviour control mechanisms programmed into the DNA.
What happened ? Why do you, guys , just resort to deliberately contradicting and therefore self-deceiving yourselves and others in the process , whenever you are cornered via some detected anomalies and holes in your capacity of judgement ,or in your world view on the subject ?
What you said here above makes no sense whatsoever , unless we assume that our consciousness, feelings , free will, thought process ...are just sophisticated illusions we take for real in order to survive : but , if we do just that , then all our knowledge , including the scientific one, including that regarding evolution itself are therefore also just ...illusions , in order to survive , or in order to improve our survival ....Maybe lying to ourselves and to others may lead to the truth , as literature assumes it to be the case , maybe ...
What's wrong about objectivity , honesty , integrity, decency ?
"Searching for the truth and science as a means to approach the truth or reality " require some degrees of objectivity , integrity at least , honesty , ....Don't you agree ?
please do not present your own beliefs as scientific facts or as scientific approaches : just present them as your beliefs ,as they actually are = that i can respect : That's what i meant by objectivity , honesty, decency, integrity ...
What's wrong about what i said here above and in my other post you responded to , that it made you say these irrational things of yours then ?
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 09/09/2013 21:20:11What's wrong about objectivity , honesty , integrity, decency ? Nothing at all, they are laudable aims.Quote"Searching for the truth and science as a means to approach the truth or reality " require some degrees of objectivity , integrity at least , honesty , ....Don't you agree ?Science doesn't claim to search for truth, or even reality; nevertheless, it does help to have objectivity, integrity, and honesty in scientific work and in general.
Quoteplease do not present your own beliefs as scientific facts or as scientific approaches : just present them as your beliefs ,as they actually are = that i can respect : That's what i meant by objectivity , honesty, decency, integrity ...That's my intent. By all means point out any examples where you think I go astray.
QuoteWhat's wrong about what i said here above and in my other post you responded to , that it made you say these irrational things of yours then ?What irrational things do you mean? if you have a problem with something I said, quote it and explain the problem.
...if you were able to do that and hooked a person up to a chimp, DonQuixote would claim they were only experiencing the "illusion" of the chimp's consciousness.