The intuitive notion of “mind” exists only in the physical manifestation of the mind.
Or to put it (perhaps) more clearly: the only reason we think dualism exists is because our (non-dual) brains tell us so. Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder.
Our judgment of whether something is intelligent or sentient is based on an opaque weighing of various sensory criteria, that tell us whether something is likely to have intentions of its own. We start out as children thinking that almost everything has this intentional quality, and gradually learn the things that don’t.
It’s as if brains have a built-in (at or near birth) “mind detector” circuit that triggers for some things, and not others, and which can be trained to cease seeing certain things as minds.
What it doesn’t do, is ever fire for something whose motions and innards are fully understood as mechanical—so it doesn’t matter how sophisticated AI ever gets, there will still be people who will insist it’s neither conscious nor intelligent, simply because their built-in “mind detector” doesn’t fire when they look at it.
And that’s what people are doing when they claim special status for consciousness and qualia: elevating their genetically-biased intuition into the realm of physical law, not unlike people who insist there must be a soul that lives after death… because their “mind detector” refuses to cease firing when someone dies.
In short, this intuitive notion of mind gets in the way of developing actual artificial intelligence, and it leads to enormous wastes of time in discussions of dualism. Without the mind detector—or if the operation of our mind detectors were fully transparent to the rest of our mental processes—nobody would waste much time on the idea that there’s anything non-physical. We’d only get as far as realizing that if there were non-physical things, we’d have no way to know about them.
However, since we do have an opaque mind-detector, that’s capable of firing for the wind and the rain and for memories of dead people as easily as it does for live animals and people in front of us, we can get the feeling that we are having physical experiences of the non-physical… when that’s a blatantly obvious contradiction in terms.
It’s only by elevating your feelings and intuitions to the level of fact (i.e. abandoning science), that you can continue to insist that non-physical things exist in the physical world. It’s pointing to reality and saying, I feel X when I look at it, therefore it is X.
(A bit like the religious fundamentalists who say that they feel icky when they see gays, therefore homosexuality is disgusting.)
(A bit like the religious fundamentalists who say that they feel icky when they see gays, therefore homosexuality is disgusting.)
I would have said, “A bit like philosophers of free will who say that they feel like they could have done something else, and therefore determinism must be false”. (:
The intuitive notion of “mind” exists only in the physical manifestation of the mind.
Or to put it (perhaps) more clearly: the only reason we think dualism exists is because our (non-dual) brains tell us so. Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder.
Our judgment of whether something is intelligent or sentient is based on an opaque weighing of various sensory criteria, that tell us whether something is likely to have intentions of its own. We start out as children thinking that almost everything has this intentional quality, and gradually learn the things that don’t.
It’s as if brains have a built-in (at or near birth) “mind detector” circuit that triggers for some things, and not others, and which can be trained to cease seeing certain things as minds.
What it doesn’t do, is ever fire for something whose motions and innards are fully understood as mechanical—so it doesn’t matter how sophisticated AI ever gets, there will still be people who will insist it’s neither conscious nor intelligent, simply because their built-in “mind detector” doesn’t fire when they look at it.
And that’s what people are doing when they claim special status for consciousness and qualia: elevating their genetically-biased intuition into the realm of physical law, not unlike people who insist there must be a soul that lives after death… because their “mind detector” refuses to cease firing when someone dies.
In short, this intuitive notion of mind gets in the way of developing actual artificial intelligence, and it leads to enormous wastes of time in discussions of dualism. Without the mind detector—or if the operation of our mind detectors were fully transparent to the rest of our mental processes—nobody would waste much time on the idea that there’s anything non-physical. We’d only get as far as realizing that if there were non-physical things, we’d have no way to know about them.
However, since we do have an opaque mind-detector, that’s capable of firing for the wind and the rain and for memories of dead people as easily as it does for live animals and people in front of us, we can get the feeling that we are having physical experiences of the non-physical… when that’s a blatantly obvious contradiction in terms.
It’s only by elevating your feelings and intuitions to the level of fact (i.e. abandoning science), that you can continue to insist that non-physical things exist in the physical world. It’s pointing to reality and saying, I feel X when I look at it, therefore it is X.
(A bit like the religious fundamentalists who say that they feel icky when they see gays, therefore homosexuality is disgusting.)
I would have said, “A bit like philosophers of free will who say that they feel like they could have done something else, and therefore determinism must be false”. (: