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What Hacker News says
- > Can you explain the pattern?
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.
- Fair point, but historically, there have been metaphysical accounts of matter that continue to exercise their influence on the sciences and scientists (sometimes to their detriment). For example, Descartes defined material objects as extended things that are devoid of properties like color (which, for example, in physics are redefined in terms of things that are considered properties of matter, with what can't be accounted for in those terms relegated to the mind). Few physicists or biologists can explain to you what Cartesian metaphysics proposes, and few if any appeal to it in any explicit sense, but the legacy is insinuated in the modern scientific tradition, though it is not essential to science per se. This is the reason why scientists, perhaps biologists in particular, are uncomfortable or plainly hostile to the idea of teleology (though many of them misunderstand what it is by conflating it with intent). Teleology was in no way disproved historically by philosophers like Descartes, it was merely dismissed or relegated to immaterial minds.
Materialism, as I have encountered it as a philosophical position, has been a position that takes Cartesian dualism and drops the immaterial mind from it, leaving us with only the Cartesian account of matter. This position has been shown to be unworkable because now it is impossible to account for all of those things that have been swept under the rug of the immaterial mind. That's why Dennett takes an eliminativist position that simply denies that those things we've been sweeping under the rug exist at all. It's a cop out move because it denies the existence of those things it cannot explain. The sounder move is to revise one's presuppositions.
For this reason, I don't think these are really the best books on the subject, esp. for someone interested in getting a lay of the land and a rudimentary understanding of the subject matter. The best introductory book I've come across in this regard is E. Feser's "The Philosophy of Mind"[0].
[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_of_Mind.html...
- You might find "Philosophy of Mind" by Edward Feser interesting.
- While the particularities may be interesting, much of what's said isn't surprising (though for Cartesians, it may be, and the author does throw Descartes' name around a few times). There is a great deal of confusion about this subject and a number of philosophical errors in the comments (w.r.t. language, religion, qualia, zombies, etc). For those who do want some perspective, I recommend starting with Feser's introductory book "Philosophy of Mind" [0] as well as a series of blog posts he's written on the subject (such as [1] and [2], as well as a blog post with a long list of links on the subject and related subjects [3]).
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Fes...
[1] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/04/animal-souls-part-i....
[2] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/animals-are-consciou...
[3] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/05/mind-body-problem-ro...
- Non-human intelligences has been considered over the centuries / millennia:
* https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/aliens-and-...
I'm not sure there's a 'definitive' statement as of yet as to AI, but things tend to be leaning towards needing to be biological:
* https://www.catholic.com/audio/caf/can-artificial-intelligen...
* https://www.ncregister.com/interview/the-mind-and-the-machin...
Not sure if this means carbon-based or not:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...
Some thoughts from a philosophy professor (who is Catholic):
> 2. “But neurons do what logic gates do. So we know that computers can be intelligent, because they are essentially doing what our brains are doing.”
> No, they aren’t. True, there are causal relations between neurons that are vaguely analogous to the causal relations holding between logic gates and other elements of an electronic computer. But that is where the similarity ends, and it is a similarity that is far less significant than the differences between the cases. Logic gates are designed by electrical engineers in a way that will make them suitable for interpretation as implementing logical functions. No one is doing anything like that with neurons. In particular, no one is assigning an interpretation as implementing a logical function, or any other interpretation for that matter, to neurons. (The point is simple and obvious, but commonly overlooked precisely because it is so obvious, like the tip of your nose that you never notice precisely because it is right in front of you.)
> That brings us to a second difference […]
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Feser
He has a few books, including one entitled Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide), so has thought about this.
