Consciousness affecting the world

DavidPlumpton

In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words.

Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet are there any tentative explanations for this "can change world" property? Googling around I was unable to find anything (although Zombies are certainly popular).

I had an idea of how this might work, but just wanted to see if it was worth the effort of writing.

The correct response would have been, "Why is my primitive any more mysterious or magical than yours?"

Because yours doesn't do any work; as Eliezer said, if you postulate different laws for consciousnesses then you don't actually end up less confused about how consciousness works. Besides, I've never seen anybody even attempt to write down such a law, they're just referred to as this amorphous anyblob.

I'd be more charitable if dualists got their alternative laws to do actual predictive work, even if they just predicted properties of personal experience. But no, it happens that the people who do all the useful work are neurologists. This is the universe saying "hint" pretty loudly.

Without these "psycho-physical" laws, we don't have any good explanations of the phenomenal quality of conscious experience

But that's my point, psychophysical laws don't explain anything either, especially if you never get called on actually providing them! The only definition those laws have is that they ought to allow you to explain consciousness, but they never actually get around to actually doing so! This isn't reason, it's an escape hatch.

All that said, I AM NOT A DUALIST. I just don't think the rejection of dualism is virtually a priori true

Neither do I, I think it's evidentially true. (If they haven't argued themselves into epiphenomenality again, then it's a priori true, or at least obvious.)

A question, just to make sure we're not totally talking past each other: What is the kind of evidence that would lead you to update in the direction of dualism being true?

0pragmatist12y

I don't see why this has to be the case. We posited different laws for fields (they don't behave like particles), but that doesn't mean they don't do any work. The dualists I'm describing (and an actual example may or may not exist) aren't describing some completely parallel psychological realm unconnected to the physical realm. They believe one can build good theories where fundamental psychological variables are causally entangled with physical variables, kind of like field variables are causally entangled with particle variables. I agree that if these psychological properties are completely epiphenomenal then they do no work, but I don't see why they'd have to be. That's a substantive question. Maybe it will turn out that laws like the Weber-Fechner law are the best we can do in the relevant domain, that we can't come up with equally useful generalizations that don't appeal to sensations (a hypothetical example; for all I know, we have already done better in this particular case). In that case, our best theory has sensations as an irreducible component, but I don't see why that makes it mysterious or magical. If successful reductions are evidence for the general thesis of reductionism, then the absence of a successful reduction is evidence against the thesis. Weak evidence, perhaps, but evidence nonetheless. And the longer the absence persists, the stronger evidence it is. [...] Well, psychophysics is a field, even though it doesn't presume dualism. Dualists are claiming that we can't do better. Their position is largely a negative one, and so difficult to construct a research program around. I generally dislike positions of that kind in science, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be right. Also, I suspect the intersection of "dualists" and "neurologists" is not the empty set. Some of the neurologists doing useful work might be dualists of some stripe. In any case, I didn't intend to debate the efficacy (or lack thereof) of dualists. Like I said, I'm no dua

-5

Consciousness affecting the world

-5

-5

-5

Consciousness affecting the world

-5

-5