A simple conundrum

gmilam said:
How should it feel to be an autonomous biological machine if not like "this"?
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Even an autonomous biological machine is all dark inside. All of its processes and states can happen just as efficiently if not moreso nonconsciously than they can consciously. IOW an ABM would just be a zombie. We are more than that. We are bodies with minds.
 
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Write4U said:
It certainly is! The proof lies in the "fake hand" experiment, where the brain assimilates a fake hand as the real thing. Optical illusions are hallucinations where the brain makes a best guess of reality.

But does it matter? The brain produces "action potentials" that act on the muscle fibers and trigger a physical response. Not all intentional physical action is precise, but relies on a "best guess", and "best muscle control".

And it appears that the simplest organisms like single cells can also have the ability to communicate and relay data, making the cell a tiny data processor (unconscious brain) as well.

This can demonstrated with the quasi-intelligent behavior of the multi-nucleic single-celled "slimemold" that already displays a high level of "problem solving" survival skills.

This cytoplasmic blob is capable of astounding feats of "best guesses and logical behaviors". A slime mold can "walk" (pseudopodia), solve mazes, draw maps, tell time, react to temperature. And, in nature, we can see them do it.

Human body-cells also communicate from cell to cell, human brain driven ability to walk is still performed at the cellular level by the same cellular communication system as a slime-mold, but is triggered by an evolved brain that controls the production of action potentials.
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The holographic movie playing inside our brains that is constantly being updated and edited thru strange loops of inputting sensory data and outputting motor commands? Or perhaps parallel and simultaneous processing of those two signal streams enabling comparative differentiation?

"A strange loop hierarchy is "tangled" (Hofstadter refers to this as a "heterarchy"), in that there is no well defined highest or lowest level; moving through the levels, one eventually returns to the starting point, i.e., the original level."--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop#:~:text=A strange loop hierarchy is,, i.e., the original level.
 
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Magical Realist said:
There cannot be another view to physical objects insofar as we are agreeing that to be physical they can have nothing other than an outside or objective view.
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I am not seeing that we did agree to your definition of physical.

The inside or subjective view is totally dark and silent and intangible, While events are indeed happening in it, like synapses firing and cells dividing and molecules interacting, all those events are also totally physical too and so are happening totally non-consciously or "in the dark". How is it then that there IS this view of what it is like to be brain? How, iow, does a mass of physical matter acquire an inside view of itself and the world in general in the form of mental properties like thought and intention and feelings and memories and sensations?
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Perhaps the inside view gives an organism some selective advantage and so it has evolved. You present no compelling reason that biology cannot give rise to novelty and unexpected adaptive innovations.
 
I am not seeing that we did agree to your definition of physical.
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Sorry about that. So how DO you define the physical, if you do at all? And if everything is physical, how would we know it without a contrast with something non-physical or what I take to be mental?
 
Magical Realist said:
Even an autonomous biological machine is all dark inside. All of its processes and states can happen just as efficiently if not moreso nonconsciously than they can consciously
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How have you determined this? Consciousness by all evidence confers an adaptive advantage and, if anything, seems to add efficiencies. Animals that have, as animal behaviorists call it, "a theory of other minds," seem to adaptively benefit from the awareness that other animals (especially within a social group) also have interior thoughts just as they do. Even non-mammals, like corvids, show signs of this remarkable ability.
 
TheVat said:
How have you determined this? Consciousness by all evidence confers an adaptive advantage and, if anything, seems to add efficiencies. Animals that have, as animal behaviorists call it, "a theory of other minds," seem to adaptively benefit from the awareness that other animals (especially within a social group) also have interior thoughts just as they do. Even non-mammals, like corvids, show signs of this remarkable ability.
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From all our studies of matter and the physical universe, there has so far been no need to posit a conscious agent over and above the processes and operations of the system itself. Indeed is not science all about understanding how phenomena occurs from the autonomous workings of physical processes and chains of causation? This applies to all material systems from quarks all the way up to living organisms. Positing a consciousness behind behavior attributes causation to a given non-physical agent. But it doesn't really explain anything. It invokes a mystery to explain a mystery, since a non-physical property like consciousness cannot be reduced to physical events or causes.
 
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Magical Realist said:
Even an autonomous biological machine is all dark inside. [...]
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What is conceived as the conventional nature of matter, anyway -- that it lacks internal qualitative states.

Which arguably falls out of the primary/secondary properties distinction of Galileo (that subjective properties do not exist "out there"), and the materialist(?) view that there are no experiences or "manifestations of thoughts and sensations" after death or the cessation of brain functioning. (-->Why We Can't Imagine Death)

Usually this "anti-panphenomenalism" or eternal oblivion attitude does not need to be pointed out as some kind of default prerequisite of science activity (or of naturalism, physicalism, etc).

But many people may be implicit panpsychists who haven't critically realized that their depictions of a mind-independent world or of non-represented matter still sport the qualitative "showings" of the brain rather then being devoid of image, sound, odor, etc.

IOW, if asked if they believe in some form of panpsychism, they would certainly respond no. But in practice we do not actually imagine or portray a mind-independent version of the world as "not-even-nothingness", since such a metaphysical choice is not useful or tool-like. In practice, we do not really adhere to the belief, so this can generate inconsistency or confusion in debates (sometimes).
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I found this common definition of physical in the dictionary:

"relating to real things that you can see and touch:"

But the limits of this can be easily seen by considering all the phenomena and ontic entities that are physical but cannot be seen and touched: quarks, photons, electrons, forces, time, space, gravity, mass, charge, etc and etc.
 
Magical Realist said:
I found this common definition of physical in the dictionary:

"relating to real things that you can see and touch:"

But the limits of this can be easily seen by considering all the phenomena and ontic entities that are physical but cannot be seen and touched: quarks, photons, electrons, forces, time, space, gravity, mass, charge, etc and etc.
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Yes, there's no definition of "real" that has been concocted that holds up universally or is without controversy (invulnerable to criticism). The majority of people on the planet may be still be direct, naive, or commonsense realists who can't even accept that their perceptual experiences of the outer world are in their head (or at least correlated to brain activity and processing of received environmental information). So a particular person's meaning for "real" may be working from wholly different conceptual grounds than another's.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/
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TheVat said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism

Just to clarify what is meant by physical, in a philosophy of science context.
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From a physicalist perspective, even abstract concepts such as mathematics, morality, consciousness, intentionality, and meaning are considered physical entities, although they may consist of a large ontological object and a causally complex structure.[3]
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Question, if a thought is a physical object, does it become manifest in reality or only in your physical brain's imaginary reality? Is your internal image the result of electrochemical states or of the coded informational patterns they represent?

What could produce such internal imagery? Answer: 100 trillion synapses ?

What is wrong with "emergent" metaphysical qualities, along with evolving physically sensory survival abilities, which eventually results in a mathematical self-referential state, i.e. "strange loops", that eventually results in a self-aware controlled consciousness?

Definitions[edit]
A strange loop is a hierarchy of levels, each of which is linked to at least one other by some type of relationship. A strange loop hierarchy is "tangled" (Hofstadter refers to this as a "heterarchy"), in that there is no well defined highest or lowest level; moving through the levels, one eventually returns to the starting point, i.e., the original level.
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Examples of strange loops that Hofstadter offers include: many of the works of M. C. Escher, the Canon 5. a 2 from J.S. Bach's Musical Offering, the information flow network between DNA and enzymes
through protein synthesis and DNA replication, and self-referential Gödelian statements in
formal systems.
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In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter defines strange loops as follows: more........
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop#
 
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Magical Realist said:
Even an autonomous biological machine is all dark inside. All of its processes and states can happen just as efficiently if not moreso nonconsciously than they can consciously. IOW an ABM would just be a zombie. We are more than that. We are bodies with minds.
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Incredulity is not a good look on you.
 
Magical Realist said:
Gee thanks. I wish I cared more about how I look.lol
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images
 
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