Comment by cwmma
7 hours ago
Probably not, we're nowhere near the complexity of the human brain yet, there are also quantization limits to the human brain (i.e. molecules, quantum physics, etc) so to characterize them as having infinite detail is probably a bad modal.
If I'm going to be honest most of the people who advocate this type of thing tend to be, shall we say, crypto-duelists who really believe in a soul but not like intellectually but intuitively and keep trying to come up with excuse with it's not just meat. So like you can find philosophers advocating stuff like this but they tend to have a bit of an agenda.
How are you measuring the complexity of the human brain?
You nailed it which is that almost everyone I’ve met seems to believe in some version of dualism
If that’s even subtly your position then there’s no way to have a productive conversation about perception, reality/truth, epistemology and especially consciousness
It’s honestly maddening cause I’ve had great conversations about this with educated people, and all but only a handful, collapse into the other person relying on some nonfalsifiable dualist argument
> collapse into the other person relying on some non-falsifiable dualist argument
Are there any non-duelist, scientific theories out there that could plausibly be tested? I can't say I've seen any but if you know of any then I'm curious to hear about them. From what I've seen, anyone trying to explain phenomenal consciousness in scientific objective terms falls into at least one of these three strategies:
1.) Saying that consciousness "arises" inevitably or is an emergent phenomenon of a complex information processing system. There are a number of theories along these lines but they aren't falsifiable from what I've seen and usually at some point rely on some magic unexplainable step or are actually dualist.
2.) Defining consciousness just as the easily explainable stuff via biology, such as being awake vs. asleep.
3.) Dismissing the idea that subjective experience exists at all. I sometimes wonder if people arguing strongly for this are something like a philosophical zombie and there's nothing inside them experiencing.
My intuition is that a single unit of consciousness is a wave/particle interaction, and that the kind of consciousness we experience has a particular volume and shape, some parts of which are fairly consistent between people and some parts which vary considerably. The more volume of consciousness the more diversity can fit into it.
My mental model includes integrated information theory and Karl friston free energy principle, and something about temporal computation on a physical graph structure.
Which camp would this fall into? 2 seems closest but kind of undersells it...
I’m both confused and intrigued at this question
Every scientific theory that is predictably/measurably correct is not dualist by nature.
Dualism assumes that there’s a non-measurable variable (usually undefined) but nevertheless has a causal input in action determination
Dualism is precisely non-scientific if you are using the classic Baconian-Khaneman you epistemological process because it introduces variables that cannot be measured
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I'm basically restating what you said, but it's amazing to me that the vast majority of people you will meet, even educated people, are casual dualists and free-will libertarians. If they happen to acknowledge materialism in some way (i.e. the acceptance of the idea that the brain's processes are just the interaction of physical matter), there is still zero chance they draw determinist conclusions from that acknowledgement. But I guess that tracks, given that most professional philosophers are apparently compatibilists for some reason I have never understood (the arguments get really confusing).
I’ve studied this in extreme depth and my conclusion is that at a certain point most people just give up and take a position that gives them some kind of mental relief
For people who can’t self-delude, like Godel and Schopenhauer and Tesla, they kind of just go “mad” because it’s a giant epistemological hole they can’t solve.
Even the smartest the scientist are always going to choose self preservation in their cognitive capacity so they don’t feel bad over feeling bad and living in the contradiction
This is why it’s important for scientists to study Camus IMO