[HN Gopher] The Mind's Body Problem
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The Mind's Body Problem
Author : drdee
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-11-14 06:34 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nybooks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nybooks.com)
| [deleted]
| DangitBobby wrote:
| https://archive.md/20211111232954/https://www.nybooks.com/ar...
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'm finding myself reading more paywalled stuff than not on HN
| these days.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| Off-topic, I emailed the NewYorker once telling them that there
| are some easy methods to bypass their paywall, their response
| was:
|
| Dear Subscriber,
|
| Thank you for contacting The New Yorker.
|
| It does require an active subscription for The New Yorker for
| unlimited access to articles to view on The New Yorker website.
| If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. To ensure
| your future concerns are handled in a timely fashion, please
| include all previous e-mail correspondence.
|
| Sincerely, The New Yorker Customer Service Bradley
|
| -----------
|
| I guess they know and they don't care.
| validvaxtravel wrote:
| Please.
|
| Quantum physics disproved materialism over a 100 years ago
| already.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| It is worth mentioning that Prof. Chomsky dismisses the mind-body
| problem.
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0 (he takes about it
| more in the Q&A)
|
| - https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_the_Mind-Body_Problem_M...
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274199
| foxhop wrote:
| I don't like this terrible article based on the free part.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Your comment would be better if it had a reason for why.
| cl42 wrote:
| I've always wondered if self-awareness, free will, etc. is an
| illusion driven by evolution.
|
| You are more likely to defend yourself and attempt to prolong
| your life if you _believe_ you are worthy of life -- that you
| have free will, that life is meaningful, etc.
|
| It would be evolutionarily advantageous for us to evolve a _hard-
| coded_ belief that any time we question our self-awareness,
| consciousness, free will, etc. the _hard-coded_ belief kicks in
| to say "yes, of course you have these things" and thus you will
| prolong your life, breed, and reinforce this.
|
| Curious if anyone has come across this in philosophical or
| biological readings.
| d0mine wrote:
| It depends on what definition of "illusion" would be useful
| e.g., you don't see what your eyes receive, you see what your
| brain predicts (hallucinates). All models are false, some are
| useful.
| guerrilla wrote:
| First, I definitely don't think self-awareness is an illusion
| (any more than anything else is.) You (i.e. your body) are
| clearly aware of yourself (i.e. your body.) QED.
|
| Second, your idea only works if there is also a mechanism that
| would cause us to _value_ consciousness, free will, etc. You
| have to explain the reason that those things would make life
| "meaningful" (i.e. be motivational) for an animal. I'd argue,
| as the Devil's advocate, that they actually don't and we can
| probably live without them perfectly fine. I think some people
| do.
|
| I don't know if this solves anything, but the way that I think
| about it is that the the mind is just the body's UI to the
| body. The body is the machine and the operator of the machine
| and the mind is just like the Windows desktop. I think I got
| this from something Donald Hoffman said. He talks about ideas
| similar but different from yours by the way. Might be worth a
| search on YouTube for you. He definitely doesn't think we see
| reality the way it is and has accumulated good evidence and
| theory for that and has spent a lot of time connecting it to
| evolutionary biology.
| jwdunne wrote:
| > You (i.e. your body) are clearly aware of yourself (i.e.
| your body.) QED.
|
| Reminds of "I think therefore I am" except a body doubting
| self-awareness shows the body is aware of the thing it doubts
| the existence of. Nice.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Well, "I think therefore I am" is really question begging
| if taken as a deduction and can be ambiguous, depending on
| the speaker and context, since the referent of "I" is not
| always clear. (i.e. does it mean mind, body, soul, etc.)
| Something thinks though, and something is obviously aware;
| since you have direct empirical evidence of both. You don't
| need an argument for either.
| podgaj wrote:
| You should read "I am a Strange Loop".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
|
| But it is an assumption that the body is aware of itself.
| That is part of the same illusion.
|
| When you dream, does that dream feel real?
| chanakya wrote:
| An illusion can only happen to conscious beings, so saying that
| it's an illusion doesn't add anything explanatory to the
| mystery of consciousness.
| simonh wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true, it depends how you define an
| illusion.
|
| One would be to say that Illusions are merely incorrect
| interpretations of sensory data. They can be experienced by
| beetles, and even amoeba.
|
| A more sophisticated definition might say that an illusion is
| when a subject, which has a mental model of a situation,
| incorrectly interprets sensory data to create a major
| mismatch between their mental model of a situation and
| reality. If we take this definition, then since many mammals
| or even vertebrates construct mental models of situations,
| they can all experience illusions. For example an animal
| seeing a reflection of itself, or it's prey.
| jeffschofield wrote:
| As usual it really depends on what you individually are
| referring to when you use the words "self-awareness" or "free
| will". Even "illusion" in this context could refer to something
| other than what you might expect. It really muddies the waters
| when seeking clarity on these questions, as it often seems like
| people don't even agree on the referent in the first place.
|
| Based on your description this view sounds like it would be in
| the wheelhouse of the likes of Dan Dennett and Keith Frankish,
| the latter of which argues for a view called Illusionism [0].
| Just note in this case "illusion" doesn't mean "not real", but
| more like "isn't what you think it is".
|
| [0]
| https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionis...
| someonewhocar3s wrote:
| You are more likely to defend yourself if you're moving forward
| in time. You are more likely to defend yourself if you're
| living by the week. You are more likely to defend yourself as
| yourself as yourself as yourself as yourself.
|
| What is your response if not your innate response? Was the
| relevant measurement dot projection of what's true something
| that wasn't you? Did you step out of line? Clock still ticks.
| Aren't you more likely to give if the illusion draws you?
|
| Doesn't the illusion poke the thought that it came from one?
| Why else would you wonder that?
|
| A stimulus (series) result, isn't that what you are? You'd say
| hi but apriori, did I? The idea is that your responses are your
| own, and the rest is just what it is. Your inception was
| automatic, gradually more of it was you, but it follows from
| what happened to you what you became, unless it's just an
| evolutionary outgrowth that could be the next one most just as
| well.
|
| Certainly, you're just hiding the truth under the next sheath,
| the next convolution, the next skin wrapping the further and
| further selves. Why else would it become a riddle, of all
| things, of something you could answer?
|
| Of course, you'd come with the unlikely answer; there is a
| variable to a function, such that the variable is my inception
| point or reference frame, and the function is the universe.
| Whoever would come up with such a rarified number? And what
| would be the point?
|
| Oh, blink the words from neuron to neuron, of course. Worries
| are alleviated by ease. Another moment, and it's gone. Inside
| it already understands. What do we tell it?
|
| Tell it it's just another post, by just another poster. The
| next post, maybe that's Food. "We have produced a seperate
| thinker, and a seperate fighter" said the Queen after she had
| trained one just for it. Nothing could penetrate the scalar
| economies of the irreduceable, inaliable, temporary existance
| one finds one's self as. Live or dead? Check and tell.
|
| The clock ticks audiably another line, as it's event horizon
| C-squares out in all directions. Sum of least squares,
| regression learned, breakout as precision is amplitude, free
| choice? It already happened. The clocks' event horizon would
| sigh for size but it was too short, and it gulped as it's final
| size turned out just another infinitisimality, not worth
| achieving until after. As far is the event horizon is
| concerned, it might as well have been the last tick.
|
| Eventually, though, something will pull it off it's stability,
| as the long hand shakes it's auditive moment over its midpoint,
| atomic vibration to atomic vibration, there's a few direction
| to go. How does the ryhme go? "in's over, out's inevitable,
| here's happened before you thought to check"? No that's not it.
| Infinitesimal is thin enough, but it's perfectly floral in all
| directions, not sharp to the cut. But there must come such that
| that tick'd never gone, or it'd be stable to the test beyond
| time.
|
| Inside, we already knew and it was debated to be best posed no
| question. Everytime we bring it up, it goes back down. One day
| we'll go around that corner, you as I, and you'll truly stand
| upon your own. Or, keep your model steady- this is text on the
| Internet, now where is 'the text on the Internet' and what has
| alltogether become of it? Because a temporial moment is only
| it's ti-
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Buddhism has rather a lot to say about this. I'd recommend some
| Dogen but it's quite dense stuff.
| podgaj wrote:
| Here is a series of writings on this from a series of
| Buddhist writers that might fit the audience a bit better:
|
| https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/various/wheel202.
| ..
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Unfortunately with almost all this stuff you realise
| quickly it's been written by someone with an understanding
| of nonduality, which makes it not so useful to anyone who
| doesn't. Which is almost everyone.. I mean, we can actually
| explain fairly simply _once you understand it_ but for
| anyone who hasn't spent two years on the cushion it's
| indecipherable. Saying "I am every cup of tea and lion"
| maybe makes sense to me, but probably not to others?
|
| I wish we had a way to communicate this stuff better, we've
| been trying for a long time..
| moobsen wrote:
| I share your wish, but I think that a big part of this is
| actually only understandable through experience.
|
| Just like you cannot really describe an unknown taste to
| someone, or describe colors to a blind person, etc.
| podgaj wrote:
| Any Buddhist or Daoist will tell you the self is an illusion.
| Not that it does not exist, but that it is not self.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta#No_denial_of_self
|
| All we are is a bundle of our six senses (the 6th sense being
| thought). If you take away these senses, where are you?
|
| We need a sense of self to navigate our way through the world,
| and the senses help the brain create time and space and
| movement.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| I don't see how is this different
|
| What do you mean by thought exactly? I guess you don't mean
| thinking, because you still aware of yourself if you are not
| thinking about something. But if by "thought" you mean
| "awareness" or "consciousness", then that doesn't add
| anything. And of course, if you take it away there is nothing
| left.
| simonh wrote:
| It very much depends what people mean when they say
| consciousness or self awareness is an illusion.
|
| For example, we only spend spend small portions of our lives in
| a fully conciliatory state aware of the present. Much of the
| time we are in undressing sleep, or in a state of fugue or flow
| in which we are acting unconsciously. When we become
| consciously aware of the present sometimes it can be
| disorienting as we transition into full consciousness. So
| consciousness comes and goes frequently every day. I imagine
| these semi-conscious or flow states are the standard mental
| mode for many animals. Thus consciousness if not illusory is
| certainly ephemeral and transitory.
|
| Then there's the fact that our conscious experience of the
| rodent is largely synthetic. That is, in many ways it is a
| post-hoc construction. We take many actions unconsciously and
| then construct post-hoc logical justifications for why we did
| them. We experience deja vu, or e.g. when a phone rings
| sometimes we think we experienced knowing the phones was going
| to ring before we are aware of the sound. We construct a
| conscious experience after the fact and sometimes we get it
| wrong. Conscious thoughts are only a small part of our ongoing
| mental activity, including decision making, and not always in
| the driving seat.
|
| We are so much more than our conscious experience, which is
| only a fairly small subset of our actual ongoing mental
| activity, which itself is continuously influenced by the needs
| and responses of the body beyond the brain.
| dvt wrote:
| > Curious if anyone has come across this in philosophical or
| biological readings.
|
| Yeah, this is touched on in Philosophy of Mind classes. It's
| just a very uninteresting and reductionist view that's probably
| wrong, so no one really takes it seriously, much like solipsism
| or the idea that we live in a simulation.
|
| Our entire experience informs us that the world is real, that
| other minds are real, that our own self-awareness and sense of
| _me-ness_ is real. There 's no real reason to doubt any of it,
| other than playing clever little logical gotcha' games. A
| caveat here is that philosophers do write about the reality of
| things in very deep and meaningful ways and Cartesian
| skepticism is certainly worth studying.
| podgaj wrote:
| It is usually only when you wake up from a dream when you
| find out it was only a dream.
|
| You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the
| illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego,
| which is created by the illusion, is not real.
|
| One would say seeing a person floating during a magician act
| was real because we experienced it, but the only thing real
| was the illusion performed by the magician.
| dvt wrote:
| > You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that
| the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the
| ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real.
|
| Gobbledygook nonsense. People much smarter than both of us
| have been asking these questions since the dawn of time,
| best get to some reading.
| aeternum wrote:
| Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be
| from a scientific POV. A decent part of our body is made up
| of bacteria that doesn't even share our DNA (gut bacteria,
| etc). Our minds have very little control over most of our
| cells. We generally have a ship of Theseus going on and
| replace most of our cells every few years.
|
| The borders of me-ness are also interesting to consider.
| There's already a slight feeling that tech like cellphones
| could become an extension of our body. Will that feeling
| change if we start implanting tech?
|
| With social insects like ants, is an ant more like an
| individual organism or are ants just limbs with the hive as
| the "me"?
| dvt wrote:
| > Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't
| be from a scientific POV.
|
| Everything we observe goes through our first-person-
| perspective, therefore there's no such thing as a
| "scientific" POV. We come to consensus, true, but it's
| still through first-person-experiential phenomena, and not
| some kind of external "science" validator.
|
| > The borders of me-ness are also interesting to consider.
| There's already a slight feeling that tech like cellphones
| could become an extension of our body.
|
| I'm not sure what cellphones have to do with anything,
| there are much better examples of the "fuzziness" of
| identity: conjoined twins, multiple personality,
| schizophrenia, dementia, corpus callosotomy, etc. These are
| all edge cases, though. We still barely understand the
| degenerate case.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| > Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't
| be from a scientific POV. A decent part of our body is made
| up of bacteria that doesn't even share our DNA (gut
| bacteria, etc).
|
| For sure. One of the early stages of many Buddhist
| meditation practices involves reflection on this question,
| looking for the "me" using various methods. Eventually the
| realization is of the emptiness (sunyata) of self and all
| phenomena. There's nothing that can be solidly considered
| self (atman). The Heart Sutra is one of the texts that
| elaborates on it:
|
| [1] https://plumvillage.org/sutra/the-heart-sutra/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra
| t-3 wrote:
| Well, article won't load without js, but I've always boggled at
| the "problems" people come up with trying to separate the think
| from the meat. These are obviously the same thing, but mystical
| concepts of "minds" and "souls" have warped and corrupted the
| terminology and thinking around themselves.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Considering you've essentially just dismissed over a thousand
| years of argument and counter-argument from some of the
| greatest minds in history, elaboration of your discovery would
| be very much appreciated so we can finally put this matter to
| bed.
| t-3 wrote:
| I thought I was clear, but I guess not: The mind does not
| exist (as a separate entity from the body - if that helps
| you).
| simonh wrote:
| Everybody dismisses thousands of years of religious and
| philosophical traditions all the time. How many Christians
| give even a second thought to Buddhist philosophy of the
| mind? How many Hindus give a fig what Christians think about
| the nature of the soul? Some sure, but a teeny, tiny
| minority.
|
| I actually find Buddhism and various mystical practices
| fascinating because they involve practical disciplines. They
| actually invoke mental states and get repeatable results.
|
| Meanwhile neuroscience is busily sorting it all out once and
| for all, as science has done so many times before on so many
| previously intractable questions of natural philosophy. I'm
| confident we'll figure it all out, but maybe not in my
| lifetime. Probably in those of my children though.
| nathias wrote:
| Its always refreshing to come on hn and see that all the
| history of philosophy is garbage, because everything is really
| obvious to some guy.
| t-3 wrote:
| Hmm? Do you not notice changes in your perception and thought
| patterns relating to changes in physical condition or
| environment?
|
| When I am hungry, when I am fed, I think differently. When I
| am tired, when I am rested, I think differently. When I am
| sober, when I am drunk, I think differently. All showing a
| very clear relationship of thought:body.
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