This video explores the meta problem of consciousness proposed by David Chalmers and argues that naturalistic processes couldn’t have given us knowledge of consciousness
This is my video.
Naturalistic processes could not have given us knowledge that subjective experience exists.
Can naturalistic processes explain how humans came to know that subjective experience exists?
Suppose a boulder rolls down a hill and smashes into a house. That boulder and the house are made up of molecules, and we could in principle fully describe the boulder smashing into the house in terms of the molecules the boulder and the house are made of, fully describe the interaction and how the molecules move and change, and never mention the boulder or the house.
So do the boulder and the house have no causal effects? That seems strange to say. Sure, we could describe the boulder as molecules, but changing the description isn’t eliminating ‘the boulder’. The boulder caused a hole in the wall of the house; the house caused the boulder to stop rolling.
Similarly, we can describe human behavior in terms of the chemicals and electricity that make up our brains. But if I want to understand why a kid is crying, it’s useful to use the cognitive shorthand of “she fell and scraped her knee and it hurts” than to describe the functioning of every one of the billions of neurons that result in that behavior.
Where it gets confusing is when we observe ourselves, and apply the same cognitive shorthand to our own thinking. Parts of the brain ‘observe’ each other, in the sense that they are wired up to receive information from each other.
When we think of a square, we have an experience similar to seeing a square because a part of our brain involved in seeing a square with our eyes is sending signals similar to what it sends when we see a square with our eyes. That part of our brain can be triggered by a pathway that begins with light hitting our retinas that was reflected from a square, but it can also be triggered by a pathway that begins with pressure waves that encode the words “picture a square” hitting our eardrums. The same part of our brain is triggered by both, and another part of our brains observes that with the cognitive shorthand of “visual experience of a square”.
And importantly, the cognitive shorthand has clear causal effects on our cognition. To use a ridiculous example, we understand what’s happening when Wile E. Coyote runs into a wall painted to look like a tunnel: the light hitting his retina triggered ‘tunnel’ rather than the ‘wall’, and so he acted as though he saw a tunnel. Less silly is the schizophrenic who hears his inner monologue and believes someone is beaming voices into his head.
That kind of mistake happens because parts of our brains rely on the signals sent by other parts of our brains, and that reliance affects the behavior of the part of the brain receiving the signals.
At the highest level, our cognitive shorthands about ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, our identity, our motives, all feed back into our brain to shape its connections and ultimately tune our behavior. That’s the observable causal effect of those descriptions.
And I think something similar applies to the computer without a monitor as well. A computer can process a JPEG and pattern match an elephant, and trigger a sorting function that puts it in the ‘pictures of elephants’ folder. It can do that by converting the numbers and letters into pixel intensities on a monitor, using a camera pointed at the monitor to convert light intensities back into numbers and letters and pattern matching on those numbers and letters to recognize an elephant. Or it can just pattern match on the original JPEG. Either way, when it passes ‘elephant’ to the sorting function, the file gets sorted into the ‘pictures of elephants’ folder.
the core idea is that computations alone are not enough to create an image, you need a monitor
Well since we are doing philosophy: no, everything we do computations with, say jpeg files, have some temperature above absolute zero, so they give off some radiation which can be considered a faint image (if we consider the monitor’s radiation an image).
when you look inside a brain, it’s just computations
Says who?
how is there imagery?
That’s probably not even the right question. A better question could be: given that phenomena (like the green square) are probably fundamental, what do we even mean by “computation”.
(Though emergence/complexity is of course just handwaving too that doesn’t solve anything, it’s just more epicycling.)
First of all: Welcome!
Hope you gonna have fun and can peel out some functioning ideas from the sloshing about that goes on.
Now In regards of the video
There is a plethora i dont understand here.
Why would you assume that the two products created by the neurons are not interconnected?
Its like you are trying to separate information from data.
That is not logically possible. Data carries the information and information creates the data.
Information and data born of the natural universe is a MUCH deeper rabbithole than how information should be not observable, predictable, readable, etc, just because in and of itself has no physical attributes.
Correct.
Information has no physical attributes when you view it on it’s own, in and of itself.
Its a ghost dragon.
But you conveniently forget that this ghostdragon is born of physical properties.
Of data. Of the neurons firing in a pattern.
Information and data are not separate the way you suggest it, and subjective experience as you put it, is simply the brain’s capacity to self-verify, not dissimilar to self-awareness caused by abstract information processing.
Ironically abstraction is what allows us to third person ourselves, what creates “us”, but in terms of efficiency, its abysmal, its a glitch.
Most animals simply process information in the first person.
They have no “self” because their information processing takes their self as self-evident.
There is no “I am hungry”, there is just “hunger” because the i is already self-evident and blatantly obvious that you are the one feeling it and not someone else, and there is literally no benefit in you sitting in your cave wondering why you are feeling hungry.
So dont know. I see subjective experience a much lesser issue than having the capacity of experience in the first place. How data, code, decode, information were born out of a naturalistic universe.
How the suggestion works that, there was nothing going on and suddenly a computer farted itself into existence with both hardware, software and all periphery attached to it as well.
Really, subjective experience, the computer’s capacity to read it’s own sensors is the least of the effing issues here.
I’m not sure why you separate out subjective experience and the capacity for subjective experience as two different problems?
How are you viewing it if it has no physical attributes?
This will be relevant:
This was my point. You cant just simply separate information from the physical data that holds it.
They are interconnected.
However, if you talk about just the principle of it, then information itself is not physical, much like your thoughts arent. It is a separate, emergent class of phenomena.
What if the ideas/mental substance, and what they inform/physical substance, are mutually entailing and have to happen together, or neither one of them happens—the whole “thing(s)”/Substance being …
commies △ communicating △ commo
…?
#embracetheweird
I’m in the middle of watching your video. I see what you did there by saying the subjective experience is explained supernaturally (since causal effects can’t… even though you keep saying all subjective experience is emergent, rather than at least some causal effects emerging from them). However, I don’t like what you did by taking causal effects away from subjective experience. We know our own causal effects for the same reason we know our subjective experience, and that is nothing short of the Cogito.
Wouldn’t it be funny if an electron was a deanthropomorphism?
hehe snort … Leibniz.
Never mind that you’re obviously of the reformed persuasion… but it does explain why you took away the causal influence of subjective experience. 
Anyway, welcome back.
The fact that we can condition responses by pairing unconditioned stimulus with conditioned stimulus, manipulating second causal influence with first causal influence (that is subjectively experienced… for some animals) … should tell you something.
Why does practice improve response times? Why does alcohol dull them? Subjective experience has causal influence.
Just because you can trigger the taste of apple pie by poking the brain doesn’t mean apple pie ain’t real. You don’t have to throw out causal influence to save subjective experience being supernaturally explained. In fact, you just kicked the can, because the supernatural explanation … how does it have causal influence? You ironically removed the sovereignty from God (as if).
We are co-creators in the image of original Creator(s).
PonderPoints wrote:
This is my video…
This video explores the meta problem of consciousness proposed by David Chalmers and argues that naturalistic processes couldn’t have given us knowledge of consciousness
Naturalistic processes could not have given us knowledge that subjective experience exists.
Can naturalistic processes explain how humans came to know that subjective experience exists?
I hope I am wrong, but I suspect that PonderPoints might be one of those “drive-by” posters who is only interested in dropping off a quick link to his video while having no interest in discussing it with us.
Whatever the case may be, good on you, PonderPoints, for taking the time and effort to present your theory in video form (I’ve done a few myself back in the 90s).
Anyway, with that being said, my response to your hypothesis is pretty much summed-up in what I wrote in the comment section of yet another one of Alex O’Connor’s videos → a video with a title similar to your video…
“Is This the New Theory for God?”…
Here’s what I wrote…
“…The video consists of two human minds trying to fathom something that is as far above humans in scope and consciousness as humans are above amoebas. They are like two human embryos (twins) trying to comprehend the outward appearance and ontological status of their mother while still suspended within the darkness of her womb…”
My humbly suggested bottom line is…
(and God forbid that I’m coming off sounding like “a new one” 
)
…is that the ultimate truth of reality (implied in my above quoted comment) is far more “natural” and “organic” than what is being proposed in either of your videos.
