Say, let’s admit consciousness is the result of a physical process.
Then say this process only goes “forward” when our time coordinate increases. Just like an egg gets cooked when it’s temperature coordinate increases, but it doesn’t get more or less cooked when it’s temperature coordinate decreases.
This would mean that going back in time doesn’t result in any perceptible change, since your consciousness hasn’t evolved from it’s “former” state.
Thus making it possible for us to be travelling through plenty of dimensions in varied directions, only ever experiencing the brief times when you happen to be moving in increasing time. Or whatever combination of movement along varied dimensions makes it possible for you to be conscious.
TLDR: i need to take shorter showers
That’s not the case. This is a very active area in academic philosophy and there are, objectively speaking, several reasons to think that consciousness is not solely a material process (whether or not you think these are good reasons is for you to decide). For an accessible introduction to this topic I recommend Facing up to the problem of consciousness by David Chalmers. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the Knowledge Argument is also a good intro if you are looking to dive right into something a bit more technical.
Yeah thanks, you can keep that naval gazing. Consciousness can never be the subject of science since it cannot be measured. It’s all conjecture and metaphysics. I don’t see the point of trying to classify it, since one can never test a theory.
The argument that consciousness isn’t based on the physicality of the brain is silly. When you attribute consciousness to magic, if magic is real, then magic is a part of physics - it’s just physics that isn’t understood. We cannot know if something is or isn’t conscious. So we cannot know if AI is or can be conscious. Any argument that it definitely isn’t or can’t be conscious is therefore wrong.
Notice that I said this is a very active topic in academic philosophy (not science). I literally sent you links to what professional metaphysicians have to say on this topic. Do you really think you can contribute more to this topic in one lemmy comment than experts who have studied this problem for their entire careers?
This is exactly one of the reasons why it poses a problem. Physical things can be measured but consciousness can’t.
So what’s the point of saying AI can’t be conscious? That’s where we started here. It’s a stupid argument that’s clearly wrong.
I’m not discussing whether AI could be conscious. I’m responding to your claim that consciousness must be a physical phenomenon, which is a separate issue.
Sorry, my bad - wrong thread.
But if it’s not physical - what else could it be? Are you implying some magic that follows no laws and isn’t based on anything that can be measured or modeled?
No. No one is suggesting that it’s magic. One popular idea is that consciousness is an irreducible and fundamental (and, crucially, nonphysical) constituent of the universe. It must still follow laws even if this was the case, because it works with such regularity in our day-to-day lives (certain wavelengths of light reliably produce the same colour experiences, etc) which wouldn’t be the case if there were no laws at play.
An analogy can be made here to electromagnetism. For a while it was thought that electricity and magnetism could be reduced to other physical forces. We now know that’s not true. Electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces of nature. Its irreducible. Similarly: it was thought for a time that consciousness could be reduced to the physical. A growing number of researchers are now seeing that this can’t be done, so it might just be the case that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of the universe. Its nonphysical, and irreducible to anything but itself.
If there’s a new force or field, then it’s still physical, it’s just unknown. But that’s not what you’re talking about, I think. It’s more like the notion of life, which is self organizing matter - which appears at first to go against the laws of entropy. But we can see how a chance configuration that self replicates is a natural phenomenon and actually accelerates entropy in the longer term. Life is still physical even though we can describe it as a concept that might seem to transcend physicality. Consciousness can just be the same. And yes, you can consider consciousness as some sort of other fundamental order, but it’s not scientific - it specifically cannot be since we can not measure it.
That depends how you define your terms, but under most definitions I don’t think that this is always going to be the case
I’m not taking about life, I’m talking about consciousness which is a separate topic
Why?
We can measure it indirectly (eg by people telling us about their conscious experiences) which is good enough for empirical study