Science contains the reduction that two physically identical objects are equivalent: a kilogram of pure iron is the same as any other kilogram of iron (if such a thing existed). For the purposes of physics and biology, it's a valid reduction, and a necessary one, since it'd be impossible to reason about organic chemistry probvlems if individual carbon atoms had "personality" or "identity" that needed to be taken into account.
Subjective experience, or "consciousness", is a property for which this reduction doesn't hold, since an exact physical clone of oneself would hold a different consciousness, even at the zero moment when they were physically identical.
This isn't a discrepancy that can be reduced through better equipment and more complex models. It's a fundamental gap.
> Subjective experience, or "consciousness", is a property
> for which this reduction doesn't hold, since an exact
> physical clone of oneself would hold a different
> consciousness, even at the zero moment when they were
> physically identical.
This is a nice assertion to make but it is by no means proven. Perhaps an exact physical copy of myself shares a consciousness with me, or has no consciousness at all. And even if it told me that it had it's own consciousness, why should I believe it anyway? ;-)
Many things that seem intuitively clear turn out not to be true. I don't know if my "alien clone" would share a consciousness with me and you don't know either.
It's not even clear if split brain patients (people with brain hemispheres that do not communicate or very inefficiently communicate with each-other) can be said to have a single consciousness or two consciousnesses or something else entirely.
My anticipation of the counterargument (which is not a bad one): As soon as you whisper something to the clone, the physical state of the clone is different from his.
The counter-counter-argument is that if consciousness is a product of one physical state, rather than a range of states, then a person harbors an entirely different consciousness from one moment to the next, which is utterly contrary to our notion of consciousness.
The upshot of hardcore materialism is that if it's true, the notion of consciousness is an illusion. Then there's no reason to be upset over death, since the thing that will be annihilated doesn't exist. It really is some other person in the distant future who will die.
Even sleep is problematic-- if I go to sleep and wake up after a nice nap, does the post-nap me share the same consciousness as the pre-nap me? Now while you were asleep I create a clone of you. Which one do you wake up as? Why?
It's to bad the story went dead, this is just starting to get fun.
You are still conscious during sleep, but you usually aren't forming memories. The word "unconscious" (meaning nonresponsive) and "consciousness" (as a metaphor for "mind" in the Buddhist sense, subjective experience, or "soul") shouldn't be connected because they refer to entirely different phenomena.
With practice in mindfulness meditation, you can remain aware in the early stages of sleep, and form memories nonetheless. It can actually be jarring, because you experience with full awareness the paralysis, the strange pains/zaps (that are actually harmless). If you get good at it, you can pop into a lucid dream (sometimes) or follow the mind into fairly deep levels of sleep... though it's debated whether or not awareness in Stage IV sleep is possible.
Perhaps we should now define our terms very carefully, I am using the word consciousness to refer to the state of having a subjective experience. So states without a subjective experience-- sleep or anesthesia or death-- are unconscious. Do you disagree?
It's not at all clear to me that you can have subjective experiences while you are asleep. Usually dreams are considered a subjective experience and this is interpreted to mean that you experience a dream, and upon waking you remember that experience.
But consider this alternative hypothesis: There is random brain activity during sleep, but no subjective experience of it. Upon awakening, the brain has to make sense of this nonsense activity and shoves it all into memory. This is, in a way, a "false memory". Thus you wake up and "remember" a dream that you did not experience.
It would be extremely difficult to prove, since an exact physical copy of anything is impossible to make.
I think it's very likely, though. I don't exhibit a constant physical state; it's always changing. This establishes a range (albeit, a very narrow one) of possible physical states that can harbor my consciousness; there can't be just one. A clone of me would also have a fluctuating state. Although it's extremely unlikely that we would ever share the same state at the same time, it's plausible that his state would fluctuate into my range; there's no way of establishing how likely this is, because these concepts are imprecisely defined, but it's clearly not implausible. Philosophically, I find it unlikely that his fluctuations into my state-range would cause a merging of my consciousness with his. Any assertion of the opposite would suggest telepathy (of an involuntary sort).
"Never" is a very strong word. "Subjective" experiences ultimately manifest as a series of electrical / chemical state changes in the brain; both the brain and those state changes are well within the realm of scientific understanding, so it seems quite plausible that science could explain subjective experience.
The assumption of materialism is as superstitious and silly as most religious assertions. It's scientism, not science.
Science treats physical matter as first-class citizens; mind is not one. A large subset of Buddhism (especially Tibetan) takes the opposite approach-- mind is the first-class citizen, and physical matter is "an appearance to the mind"; it exists only because we (and trillions of other beings) experience it, and it's no more or less real than the world in a dream. These approaches seem diametrically opposite and yet, interesting enough, it seems that Buddhism is (of the major religions) the one most quick to embrace science, because of the mutual recognition that these two approaches (matter first vs. mind first) are just that: merely approaches, none of which have a monopoly on the generation of useful knowledge.
The article just seems strange to me. How is it different from an article called "The 50 Most Brilliant Christians of All Time" or any other label for a group of people with a specific belief?
Beside the font size being bizarrely large (I believe I shrunk it 3 times before it stopped hurting my head), I believe the people included are largely poor choices too. I don't perceive Ayn Rand, Katherine Hepburn, George Carlin, Mick Jagger and numerous others toward the end of the list as brilliant atheists.
I'm sorry, but to be brilliant you have to provide something profound to society. I hope one day to be a famous writer and when I pop a cog and get my corpse torched, I hope to whatever that I never end up on a crappy list like this. I'd want to be remembered as a brilliant writer, not an atheist, just like every writer who believes in god wants to be remembered as a brilliant writer, not a Christian.
Can we please not bring this type of stuff here? No offense to the OP, but Reddit has it in spades and a bunch of Hackers are not going to be able to logically deduce the answer here. Code, finance, web design/development, writing, major events are all great topics.
If you believe a story shouldn't be here, you flag it. Politics, crime and sports are considered potential off-topic unless they have good reason to be here (I remember reading about a start-up's device that was improving baseball performance IIRC by cooling the body faster; very good article, very on topic).
Religion is very risky and IMO doesn't really belong here, I believe a few rare instances will spring up. This isn't one of them.
My only issue with that is I fee the flag reflects on the person who posted it. Like I'm getting them in trouble or something. I think the people who post this type of thing are well intentioned so I just feel about about flagging them.
I've personally never had a problem with being criticized, I had professional editors criticizing some of my work at 17 so I guess I got used to it young. So I don't see flagging as reflecting on the person, I see it as a learning experience for them.
I do like that there's no Richard Dawkin's fanaticism here, unlike Reddit, so I guess I'm biased to nail all and every religion/atheism submission I see just because I disliked seeing every 5th submission being about atheism and I'll leave HN if it ever does.
There's some fanaticism about pg here, but then he made the place so that's acceptable. I guess if I was ever in one of the Queen's Palaces or in the White House, I'd probably complement them too... but at least they have roofs on their places.
I'd say if you don't feel flagging then that's your choice, but if you feel something breaches the guidelines beyond your tastes then hit the button.
25 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] threadIt never will, because subjective experience by definition lies outside the boundary of what scientific experiments can detect.
Subjective experience, or "consciousness", is a property for which this reduction doesn't hold, since an exact physical clone of oneself would hold a different consciousness, even at the zero moment when they were physically identical.
This isn't a discrepancy that can be reduced through better equipment and more complex models. It's a fundamental gap.
At this point, do you know what I said to the clone? If your consciousness is the same, shouldn't you?
Maybe not "experimentally proven" but seems clear to me nonetheless.
It's not even clear if split brain patients (people with brain hemispheres that do not communicate or very inefficiently communicate with each-other) can be said to have a single consciousness or two consciousnesses or something else entirely.
That isn't much of a counter-argument. Can you give me something better?
The counter-counter-argument is that if consciousness is a product of one physical state, rather than a range of states, then a person harbors an entirely different consciousness from one moment to the next, which is utterly contrary to our notion of consciousness.
The upshot of hardcore materialism is that if it's true, the notion of consciousness is an illusion. Then there's no reason to be upset over death, since the thing that will be annihilated doesn't exist. It really is some other person in the distant future who will die.
Even sleep is problematic-- if I go to sleep and wake up after a nice nap, does the post-nap me share the same consciousness as the pre-nap me? Now while you were asleep I create a clone of you. Which one do you wake up as? Why?
It's to bad the story went dead, this is just starting to get fun.
With practice in mindfulness meditation, you can remain aware in the early stages of sleep, and form memories nonetheless. It can actually be jarring, because you experience with full awareness the paralysis, the strange pains/zaps (that are actually harmless). If you get good at it, you can pop into a lucid dream (sometimes) or follow the mind into fairly deep levels of sleep... though it's debated whether or not awareness in Stage IV sleep is possible.
It's not at all clear to me that you can have subjective experiences while you are asleep. Usually dreams are considered a subjective experience and this is interpreted to mean that you experience a dream, and upon waking you remember that experience.
But consider this alternative hypothesis: There is random brain activity during sleep, but no subjective experience of it. Upon awakening, the brain has to make sense of this nonsense activity and shoves it all into memory. This is, in a way, a "false memory". Thus you wake up and "remember" a dream that you did not experience.
I think it's very likely, though. I don't exhibit a constant physical state; it's always changing. This establishes a range (albeit, a very narrow one) of possible physical states that can harbor my consciousness; there can't be just one. A clone of me would also have a fluctuating state. Although it's extremely unlikely that we would ever share the same state at the same time, it's plausible that his state would fluctuate into my range; there's no way of establishing how likely this is, because these concepts are imprecisely defined, but it's clearly not implausible. Philosophically, I find it unlikely that his fluctuations into my state-range would cause a merging of my consciousness with his. Any assertion of the opposite would suggest telepathy (of an involuntary sort).
Science treats physical matter as first-class citizens; mind is not one. A large subset of Buddhism (especially Tibetan) takes the opposite approach-- mind is the first-class citizen, and physical matter is "an appearance to the mind"; it exists only because we (and trillions of other beings) experience it, and it's no more or less real than the world in a dream. These approaches seem diametrically opposite and yet, interesting enough, it seems that Buddhism is (of the major religions) the one most quick to embrace science, because of the mutual recognition that these two approaches (matter first vs. mind first) are just that: merely approaches, none of which have a monopoly on the generation of useful knowledge.
I'm sorry, but to be brilliant you have to provide something profound to society. I hope one day to be a famous writer and when I pop a cog and get my corpse torched, I hope to whatever that I never end up on a crappy list like this. I'd want to be remembered as a brilliant writer, not an atheist, just like every writer who believes in god wants to be remembered as a brilliant writer, not a Christian.
I guess the YC folks just don't want to risk losing a really good story.
Religion is very risky and IMO doesn't really belong here, I believe a few rare instances will spring up. This isn't one of them.
I do like that there's no Richard Dawkin's fanaticism here, unlike Reddit, so I guess I'm biased to nail all and every religion/atheism submission I see just because I disliked seeing every 5th submission being about atheism and I'll leave HN if it ever does.
There's some fanaticism about pg here, but then he made the place so that's acceptable. I guess if I was ever in one of the Queen's Palaces or in the White House, I'd probably complement them too... but at least they have roofs on their places.
I'd say if you don't feel flagging then that's your choice, but if you feel something breaches the guidelines beyond your tastes then hit the button.
Hindi is a language, Hindu is a religion. More importantly, all Hindus do not speak Hindi
People who quote eminent people and get their facts wrong (spelling Gandhi as Ghandi) automatically lose credibility.