Thermostats were invented by the Dutch genius Cornelis Drebbel (aka de rebel) around 1600, based on alchemical principles.
This cybernetic alchemist also invented functional air conditioning, a perpetual motion machine (wound a clock powered by daily changes in barometric pressure), solar powered fountains and the first functional submarine (along with torpedos).
I have a full sized replica of his wooden submarine in Amsterdam. He also invented a mechanism for generating oxygen — necessary for the rowers, of course.
His thermostat was used to incubate eggs. It appeared in Chinese literature, with illustrations, within 50 years.
Both Shakespeare and Ben Johnson wrote plays with characters based on Drebbel.
He also invented magic lanterns (projection devices) and camera obscures for painters.
He was widely discussed by members of the Royal Society, but had been generally forgotten. Largely because a few early Dutch scientists thought he was a charlatan.
agumonkey 19 hours ago [-]
the submarine was surprising at least.. very interesting
dr_dshiv 19 hours ago [-]
Come visit Ruigoord and see it on display.
kubb 21 hours ago [-]
I really don’t like the part of philosophy which takes some word from the natural language and tries to deduce a formal definition for it with necessary and sufficient conditions.
I don’t like it because it’s so fundamentally unproductive, trying to fit formal logic onto the fuzziness of the language.
xtiansimon 10 hours ago [-]
> “…I don’t like it because it’s so fundamentally unproductive…”
For who? It’s wonderful for creative thinking [1].
I don't think this is it. There is definitely a lot of philosophy that tries (and consistently fails) to construct formal definitions of some "true ontologies". But this is more about trying to figure out reasonable definitions that people could agree about.
The problem in many branches of philosophy is becoming the opposite: people debating without shared definitions and thus not even talking about the same thing.
Chalmers has been central in trying to find reasonable shared definitions for (some of) the many different phenomena that are all too often referred to as "consciousness".
kubb 18 hours ago [-]
> this is more about trying to figure out reasonable definitions that people could agree about
That’s part of what I dislike. It’s not enough (for the philosopher) for the definition to be useful inside a field of study. It has to be binding for everyone, presumably because it then can be used to persuade people in other matters.
jampekka 17 hours ago [-]
A lot of philosophy is about finding, refining and arguing about definitions and that process can't be really separated from the "content". This stems largely from the very problem that it's hard/impossible to find rigorous formal ones.
kragen 21 hours ago [-]
Isn't that all of math and science?
JohnKemeny 21 hours ago [-]
No, on the contrary. Mathematics is about structures within, using its own language. Natural language is completely separated from mathematics (although most mathematicians use natural language to communicate mathematics).
kragen 21 hours ago [-]
Only pure mathematics fits your description, and while perhaps it is ontologically prior to applied mathematics and science, the human activity of studying pure mathematics seems to have historically arisen from applied mathematics and never entirely escaped it, while applied mathematics seems to have historically arisen from science.
And the first step in reducing some phenomenon of the contingent world, such as "heat" or "work" or "light" or "circle" or "strategy", to an abstraction you can apply math to, is precisely to "take[] some word from the natural language and tries to [invent] a formal definition for it with necessary and sufficient conditions." That's how you start applying the hypothetico-deductive method to anything.
You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy", but Plato, Newton, Kant, and Gauss would say you were full of shit.
Retric 20 hours ago [-]
That’s more a modern interpretation coloring history. “Applied mathematics” has always disagreed with reality. It’s only recently that we’ve gotten so good at understanding the world that the differences seem less pronounced.
Ancient Egyptians didn’t know why the height of a pile of grain doesn’t grow linearly with the amount of grain in a column etc, instead mathematics was seen as a useful shortcut. Which has always been what applied mathematics ends up as.
> You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy"
There’s a far longer list of famous people including philosophers, scientists, etc who disagree with that idea than agree with it. Fundamentally they operate in different directions with philosophy attacking from the top down and science and mathematics from the bottom up.
Plato specifically disagreed with the notion that observation alone can lead to truth.
kragen 20 hours ago [-]
Nonsense. You seem to want to redefine "philosophy" to mean "philosophy that doesn't work", which admittedly is a widespread definition today among the common people. But if we stipulate that definition, it has the practical problem that we cannot tell whether what Chalmers is up to here is "philosophy" or not until we find out whether it was a productive line of inquiry or not, perhaps in two or three hundred years.
Whether Plato believed that you could figure out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter from pure logic, or whether that required empirical observation, is irrelevant to the fact that he considered figuring out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter to be properly part of philosophy. This is an assertion that it would never have occurred to anyone to challenge until very recently, with the advent of the useless popular definition of "philosophy" you seem to be championing for some random reason.
Retric 20 hours ago [-]
Sure, nonsense meanwhile you seem to misunderstand one of the earliest philosophical debates.
Plato specifically argued for truth independent of physical reality where Aristotle believed in empiricism.
As to your edit> You seem to want to redefine "philosophy" to mean "philosophy that doesn't work", which admittedly is a widespread definition today among the common people. But if we stipulate that definition, it has the practical problem that we cannot tell whether what Chalmers is up to here is "philosophy" or not until we find out whether it was a productive line of inquiry or not, perhaps in two or three hundred years.
Hardly, I specifically mentioned that some philosophers are open to observation but they get there as a philosophical stance first. Meanwhile Thomas Aquinas and many others argued that truth flowed from religious text. It’s easy to dismiss such reasoning especially when it disagrees with observed reality but that doesn’t erase such people from history.
Edit2: I’m done responding to your edits.
dr_dshiv 19 hours ago [-]
They are united together in Pythagoreanism. Which Newton, Copernicus and Galileo claimed to be…
For a Pythagorean, the world is made of math: “All is Number.” The math exists in immaterial reality — and harmonies in math manifested as harmonies in the material world (ie “harmony of the spheres”).
Plato merely critiqued that a focus on empirical mathematical modeling distracted from how geometry and other pure mathematics revealed basic truths about reality. I can provide source texts as well.
Retric 19 hours ago [-]
I’m not disagreeing based on how Plato viewed math but rather physics.
Edit: He didn’t take the real world as a 1:1 mapping with Forms. So, deeper truths flowed from his abstract ideals, but they didn’t directly describe the physical world. We think of physics as descriptive an electron with respond this way to an electrical field, but that wasn’t how he thought of physics. Which is why he would argue studying the world isn’t a path to truth.
dr_dshiv 17 hours ago [-]
What’s your reference on this? I’ll admit it is very difficult to say what Plato thought, rather what ideas he discussed. I know very little about how he viewed physics, apart from the Timeaus.
There, I’m familiar with how Plato associated the four classical elements—earth, air, fire, and water—with specific geometric solids:
Fire: Tetrahedron
Air: Octahedron
Water: Icosahedron
Earth: Cube
The geometrical properties corresponded to the physical properties; for instance, the sharp points of the tetrahedron caused the penetrating nature of fire; whereas the cube produced solidity, etc.
Retric 16 hours ago [-]
> your reference on this?
It’s not a single line but rather a mental model I found that makes reading what he wrote seem more consistent. I can support the argument, but there’s a reason people write long books about several thousand year old works.
Trying to wade through ancient philosophy even when reading translations is a difficult process as they fundamentally think in different terms. For us the moon and the stars are just different physical places we could in theory visit, I’ve touched moon rock and seen photos taken on other planets. However, for much of human history it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to treat the stars as other. I can’t really prove how someone thought that, but it definitely fits a great deal of writing.
PunchTornado 21 hours ago [-]
isn't this the whole branch of analytical philosophy?
throw0101d 18 hours ago [-]
The title is a play a famous philosophy paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?":
> Nagel challenges the possibility of explaining "the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena" by reductive materialism (the philosophical position that all statements about the mind and mental states can be translated, without any loss or change in meaning, into statements about the physical). For example, a reductive physicalist's solution to the mind–body problem holds that whatever "consciousness" is, it can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body.[5]
[…]
> The paper argues that the subjective nature of consciousness undermines any attempt to explain consciousness via objective, reductionist means. The subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a system of functional or intentional states. Consciousness cannot be fully explained if the subjective character of experience is ignored, and the subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a reductionist; it is a mental phenomenon that cannot be reduced to materialism.[6] Thus, for consciousness to be explained from a reductionist stance, the idea of the subjective character of experience would have to be discarded, which is absurd. Neither can a physicalist view, because in such a world, each phenomenal experience had by a conscious being would have to have a physical property attributed to it, which is impossible to prove due to the subjectivity of conscious experience. Nagel argues that each and every subjective experience is connected with a "single point of view", making it infeasible to consider any conscious experience as "objective".
I don't understand why consciousness is considered mysterious anymore. We know intelligent systems broadly work by learning, updating and querying a predictive world model. For accuracy, a sufficiently powerful system must necessarily start to include its own state and potential actions in this world model. This creates a recursive self-knowledge that produces self-awareness. The ongoing process of analyzing and acting upon this self-model is consciousness.
kalavan 18 hours ago [-]
It's considered mysterious because of the hard problem of consciousness. Describing a mechanism that could be considered analogous to consciousness "from the outside" is pretty easy (just do self reference).
But the subjective quality of "what is it like to be X" is not easily captured by such descriptions - not unless you make some kind of panpsychist assumption that everything that has self-reference is subjectively conscious.
That said, a number of materialists say that there's no there there, and thus no problem. We're just all deluding ourselves into thinking that we have subjective experience. I don't think that argument is very strong, but it is made, and could explain why some find the whole business of consciousness seemingly trivial while others consider the hard problem to be very hard.
We who are prey argue consciousness because we are able to ask, "What is it like to be the hunter?"
But the hunters still eat us.
The hunters have a faction who agitate for equal rights on our behalf, since we feel pain and suffer, and create engines (but not interstellar ones).
None of us want to tell them they are a little bit wrong in the essays, having picked up rudiments of their language and writings, even though both we and they understand calculus.
Or we could tell them, and propose we are just as important to the idea of an intergalactic organization, although we do just want to borrow some of their schematics around movement and weapons. (For our protection, of course.)
Therefore, the only beings a conscious folk consider likewise are those who may emerge in a fashion to make war to preserve themselves.
Does that mean we should expand consciousness otherwise to species that cannot?
OgsyedIE 21 hours ago [-]
Thermostats are a great toy model for introducing feedback systems in control theory and individual neurons are analogous in a lot of ways that are interesting to think about.
But this article ain't it.
jampekka 20 hours ago [-]
Depends on your interests. Chalmers is probably the most influential philosopher of consciousness, and I find the most reasonable. The article definitely shouldn't be dismissed off-hand, but it may be a bit difficult to appreciate as is, as it's more of a brief comment in a lot wider discussion.
Good starting point to the topic is Chalmers' "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness".
Much of biology and biomes relies on negative feedback loops. The fact our body stays at 37C within +/- 0.5C is pretty remarkable. We already know what it's like to be a thermostat... because we are all thermostats.
rzzzt 20 hours ago [-]
Also pressure regulators and maintainers of solution levels in liquid.
KevinMS 20 hours ago [-]
Stop trying to explain consciousness as something emergent from things. Its easier to explain it the other way around.
qwertox 19 hours ago [-]
Has there been found a way to properly explain consciousness at all?
You frame it as if there's a wrong way and a correct way. We're still watching the effects of the colors of the oil paint smeared on our hands while we just have an idea of the painting, but we don't even know if using a brush would be better than using a painting knife.
If you explain it the other way around, you'll also face some serious issues. Do we live in a shared reality, independent of us, which allows us to "come in" and interact with other beings, with pre-set rules of how this reality shares ours and other's interactions among all of us, or is this an all-encompassing reality which is the result of the imagination of a single being, possibly even one seeing itself through multiple simultaneous interaction points we call conscient beings in this place we call reality, which this thing has invented all by itself, from the ant walking over a grain of sand to you reading this message on a screen, a screen "we" first had to invent? If not even that is clear, how can anything be easy about any of this?
theletterf 20 hours ago [-]
Could you elaborate? Things emerge from consciousness? I don't follow.
KevinMS 18 hours ago [-]
This is new to you? Its only the foundation of two major world religions.
theletterf 18 hours ago [-]
Ah, I see. I sort of hoped it wasn't that.
balamatom 19 hours ago [-]
How do you know that there's something instead of nothing?
jrvieira 18 hours ago [-]
_René has entered the chat_
gitroom 18 hours ago [-]
lol been down so many rabbit holes about how we even know what it feels like to be anything - tbh, i never buy any of those neat clean definitions people try to sell. you think we ever actually get closer to a real answer or we just end up with better questions over time?
balamatom 19 hours ago [-]
This is basically the premise of a very funny embargoed novel. Find me at the Echo Bazaar after sundown.
kalavan 18 hours ago [-]
I just have to find a way to deal with all this prisoner's honey first.
kragen 21 hours ago [-]
One of the most peculiar facts about conscious beings is the way they invert causality. Normally we think, for example, of a fire under a teakettle as being a cause for the water in the kettle eventually boiling. But if I asked you, "Why is this stove burner on?" it would be entirely normal for you to answer, "I'm making tea." Mystically, the tea that does not yet exist, and will never exist if it turns out we're out of tea leaves, is purportedly causing the water to boil (in the future), which in turn is causing the fire to burn, all through the medium of your conscious intention to make tea. It's really a quite surprising ontological claim, and yet nothing could be more quotidian, at least for those of us in the tea-drinking parts of the world.
I walked to the electronics store yesterday morning and bought some opamps. I find it amusing to think of opamps as bringing intentionality to circuits: they invert causality in precisely the same way as you do when you are making tea. The non-inverting input voltage is the op-amp's intention, the inverting input voltage is its observation which it interprets as a model of the world, and its output current is the behavior it controls according to that model to bring the world into accordance with its intentions.
The op-amp's behavior is only effective if there is a "structural similarity" between the world as the op-amp imagines it and the world as it really is, namely, if spewing out more current on its output will raise its inverting input relative to its non-inverting input, and sucking in more or spewing out less will lower it; we normally call this the negative-feedback condition. An op-amp hooked up backwards so the feedback instead is positive and drives it into overload is, in this analogy, like an insane or otherwise irrational person who keeps taking actions that predictably achieve the opposite of their intention, like posting comments on HN in order to enjoy thoughtful conversation.
When we design analog circuits with op-amps, we do routinely use the same kind of inverted-causality reasoning we use with the tea. Suppose it succeeds at making its inputs equal; what then is the situation that must prevail in the circuit? Oh, Vo = V1 + V2 - V3 - V4. Or Vo = -5Vi. And so it is, at least if the op-amp's feedback is not frustrated, or so effective that it sends the circuit into oscillation.
Op-amps (and thermostats) are clearly doing something that shares important features with human goal-directed activity, to the point that it seems practically useful to ascribe intentions to it, saying "this op-amp wants these currents to be equal" in a way that it isn't useful to say "this weight wants to move downward".
So I wonder what it is like to be an LM324N op-amp. I imagine it to be a very simple sort of existence, if not always a happy one. I prefer to be a human, but, failing that, I'd rather be a bacterium than an op-amp.
So it's amusing to see that Chalmers had the same thought. I wonder if I got it from him through indirect memetic contagion. (Though as far as I can tell he doesn't discuss oscillation, positive feedback runaway, or this peculiar inversion of causality. But I really doubt those are original to me, either.)
Ashymad 21 hours ago [-]
Your comment came at a right moment, right after my lecture in ontology yesterday where the proffesor presented the inverted casuality of a controller feedback loop as an example of a 2 types of causes described by aristotle that are lost in modern materialistic thinking, the formal cause and the final cause.
Great examples with the tea and the opamp for how a final cause be in the "future" of the effect, I'll remember them for the exam :)
throw0101d 18 hours ago [-]
> an example of a 2 types of causes described by aristotle
For the record, Aristotle had a total of four types of causes:
Yeah i meant the 2 causes that are lost. The other 2 are still in use
kragen 21 hours ago [-]
I am delighted!
Yet I think of electrical engineering as the epitome of modern materialism, however mystical the jargon about imaginary current phasors and complex permittivity may seem to the uninitiated. Electrical engineers think of electrical fields as material things that exist in the universe and follow probabilistic but all-encompassing laws, not as supernatural spiritual entities. Could your professor be wrong?
Ashymad 19 hours ago [-]
He wasn't saying that the engineers believe that in ontological sense. Rather he was presenting the difference in how we usually think about complex systems (i.e. the thermostat "wants" to keep a stable temperature). We abstract away the materialism we believe in because it's not practical and in a way we come back to the causes that aristotle wrote about, just metodologically not ontologically.
With vibe coding, one could even say that you can believe in the computer's intent to write the code and the code working through that intent. You might not even know how the code looks after all.
balamatom 19 hours ago [-]
Modern materialistic thinking is causally downstream from the erasure from language of the distinction between the 2 types of causes -- as exemplified by the following buffonade:
Arlecchino: does something stupid
Pierrot: smacks Arlecchino across the back of the head
Arlecchino: Ow! What for?
Pierrot: Not "what for", but "why", dumbass.
(Been a bacterium btw. Strong emotions all around, as there's nothing to temper them with. Do not recommend. An opamp is nicer - as long as they make sure to keep you within operating parameters, and not put you in a configuration experiencing infinite positive feedback, lmao)
kragen 18 hours ago [-]
Condolences, glad you got better!
mcapodici 20 hours ago [-]
I am trying to understand the tea example.
When someone says "I am making tea", to me, they mean "I have a plan! The execution of that plan has begun. The goal is to make tea." and in the context, because that's the answer to the question, they are also saying "The reason the stove is on is because I am executing that very plan."
Is this just idiomatic English? If we went formal logic on every sentence it would be a verbose world. Maybe other languages are more explicit.
kragen 19 hours ago [-]
That seems like a reasonable analysis to me, and you can apply it equally well to the op-amp or the thermostat.
norrius 19 hours ago [-]
> But if I asked you, "Why is this stove burner on?" it would be entirely normal for you to answer, "I'm making tea."
This is a confusion specific to the English language, not consciousness in general. Some languages distinguish between the past-oriented cause-why and the future-oriented goal-why explicitly (e.g. Russian: почему vs зачем).
kragen 18 hours ago [-]
Interesting! But it's not just a linguistic coincidence; it's really part of the causal structure of the world, arguably because there are conscious beings in it. In my example, if I use up the last of the tea leaves today, that can cause the stove burner to stay off tomorrow, because you might realize that the lack of tea leaves means you can't make tea. Me using up the tea leaves might cause you to visit the grocery store, too.
immibis 18 hours ago [-]
> LM324N op-amp
<s>An incredibly obsolete part btw~~</s> oops, that's the the LM741
kragen 18 hours ago [-]
It's not all that bad; it's certainly no μA741. The LM324B is fine, but that isn't what my neighborhood electronic parts shop had in stock. Does yours?
There are better alternatives to the LM324B but almost all of them are more expensive.
This cybernetic alchemist also invented functional air conditioning, a perpetual motion machine (wound a clock powered by daily changes in barometric pressure), solar powered fountains and the first functional submarine (along with torpedos).
I have a full sized replica of his wooden submarine in Amsterdam. He also invented a mechanism for generating oxygen — necessary for the rowers, of course.
His thermostat was used to incubate eggs. It appeared in Chinese literature, with illustrations, within 50 years.
https://drebbel.net/2013%20Drebbels%20Athanor.pdf
This is pre steampunk — alchemy-punk?
Both Shakespeare and Ben Johnson wrote plays with characters based on Drebbel.
He also invented magic lanterns (projection devices) and camera obscures for painters.
He was widely discussed by members of the Royal Society, but had been generally forgotten. Largely because a few early Dutch scientists thought he was a charlatan.
I don’t like it because it’s so fundamentally unproductive, trying to fit formal logic onto the fuzziness of the language.
For who? It’s wonderful for creative thinking [1].
It’s unproductive to deliver _new_ facts.
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/spring/feature/louis-kah...
The problem in many branches of philosophy is becoming the opposite: people debating without shared definitions and thus not even talking about the same thing.
Chalmers has been central in trying to find reasonable shared definitions for (some of) the many different phenomena that are all too often referred to as "consciousness".
That’s part of what I dislike. It’s not enough (for the philosopher) for the definition to be useful inside a field of study. It has to be binding for everyone, presumably because it then can be used to persuade people in other matters.
And the first step in reducing some phenomenon of the contingent world, such as "heat" or "work" or "light" or "circle" or "strategy", to an abstraction you can apply math to, is precisely to "take[] some word from the natural language and tries to [invent] a formal definition for it with necessary and sufficient conditions." That's how you start applying the hypothetico-deductive method to anything.
You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy", but Plato, Newton, Kant, and Gauss would say you were full of shit.
Ancient Egyptians didn’t know why the height of a pile of grain doesn’t grow linearly with the amount of grain in a column etc, instead mathematics was seen as a useful shortcut. Which has always been what applied mathematics ends up as.
> You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy"
There’s a far longer list of famous people including philosophers, scientists, etc who disagree with that idea than agree with it. Fundamentally they operate in different directions with philosophy attacking from the top down and science and mathematics from the bottom up.
Plato specifically disagreed with the notion that observation alone can lead to truth.
Whether Plato believed that you could figure out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter from pure logic, or whether that required empirical observation, is irrelevant to the fact that he considered figuring out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter to be properly part of philosophy. This is an assertion that it would never have occurred to anyone to challenge until very recently, with the advent of the useless popular definition of "philosophy" you seem to be championing for some random reason.
Plato specifically argued for truth independent of physical reality where Aristotle believed in empiricism.
As to your edit> You seem to want to redefine "philosophy" to mean "philosophy that doesn't work", which admittedly is a widespread definition today among the common people. But if we stipulate that definition, it has the practical problem that we cannot tell whether what Chalmers is up to here is "philosophy" or not until we find out whether it was a productive line of inquiry or not, perhaps in two or three hundred years.
Hardly, I specifically mentioned that some philosophers are open to observation but they get there as a philosophical stance first. Meanwhile Thomas Aquinas and many others argued that truth flowed from religious text. It’s easy to dismiss such reasoning especially when it disagrees with observed reality but that doesn’t erase such people from history.
Edit2: I’m done responding to your edits.
For a Pythagorean, the world is made of math: “All is Number.” The math exists in immaterial reality — and harmonies in math manifested as harmonies in the material world (ie “harmony of the spheres”).
Plato merely critiqued that a focus on empirical mathematical modeling distracted from how geometry and other pure mathematics revealed basic truths about reality. I can provide source texts as well.
Edit: He didn’t take the real world as a 1:1 mapping with Forms. So, deeper truths flowed from his abstract ideals, but they didn’t directly describe the physical world. We think of physics as descriptive an electron with respond this way to an electrical field, but that wasn’t how he thought of physics. Which is why he would argue studying the world isn’t a path to truth.
There, I’m familiar with how Plato associated the four classical elements—earth, air, fire, and water—with specific geometric solids:
Fire: Tetrahedron
Air: Octahedron
Water: Icosahedron
Earth: Cube
The geometrical properties corresponded to the physical properties; for instance, the sharp points of the tetrahedron caused the penetrating nature of fire; whereas the cube produced solidity, etc.
It’s not a single line but rather a mental model I found that makes reading what he wrote seem more consistent. I can support the argument, but there’s a reason people write long books about several thousand year old works.
Trying to wade through ancient philosophy even when reading translations is a difficult process as they fundamentally think in different terms. For us the moon and the stars are just different physical places we could in theory visit, I’ve touched moon rock and seen photos taken on other planets. However, for much of human history it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to treat the stars as other. I can’t really prove how someone thought that, but it definitely fits a great deal of writing.
> Nagel challenges the possibility of explaining "the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena" by reductive materialism (the philosophical position that all statements about the mind and mental states can be translated, without any loss or change in meaning, into statements about the physical). For example, a reductive physicalist's solution to the mind–body problem holds that whatever "consciousness" is, it can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body.[5]
[…]
> The paper argues that the subjective nature of consciousness undermines any attempt to explain consciousness via objective, reductionist means. The subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a system of functional or intentional states. Consciousness cannot be fully explained if the subjective character of experience is ignored, and the subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a reductionist; it is a mental phenomenon that cannot be reduced to materialism.[6] Thus, for consciousness to be explained from a reductionist stance, the idea of the subjective character of experience would have to be discarded, which is absurd. Neither can a physicalist view, because in such a world, each phenomenal experience had by a conscious being would have to have a physical property attributed to it, which is impossible to prove due to the subjectivity of conscious experience. Nagel argues that each and every subjective experience is connected with a "single point of view", making it infeasible to consider any conscious experience as "objective".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
But the subjective quality of "what is it like to be X" is not easily captured by such descriptions - not unless you make some kind of panpsychist assumption that everything that has self-reference is subjectively conscious.
That said, a number of materialists say that there's no there there, and thus no problem. We're just all deluding ourselves into thinking that we have subjective experience. I don't think that argument is very strong, but it is made, and could explain why some find the whole business of consciousness seemingly trivial while others consider the hard problem to be very hard.
More information can be found at https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/
What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42548641 - Dec 2024 (80 comments)
But the hunters still eat us.
The hunters have a faction who agitate for equal rights on our behalf, since we feel pain and suffer, and create engines (but not interstellar ones).
None of us want to tell them they are a little bit wrong in the essays, having picked up rudiments of their language and writings, even though both we and they understand calculus.
Or we could tell them, and propose we are just as important to the idea of an intergalactic organization, although we do just want to borrow some of their schematics around movement and weapons. (For our protection, of course.)
Therefore, the only beings a conscious folk consider likewise are those who may emerge in a fashion to make war to preserve themselves.
Does that mean we should expand consciousness otherwise to species that cannot?
But this article ain't it.
Good starting point to the topic is Chalmers' "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness".
https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
You frame it as if there's a wrong way and a correct way. We're still watching the effects of the colors of the oil paint smeared on our hands while we just have an idea of the painting, but we don't even know if using a brush would be better than using a painting knife.
If you explain it the other way around, you'll also face some serious issues. Do we live in a shared reality, independent of us, which allows us to "come in" and interact with other beings, with pre-set rules of how this reality shares ours and other's interactions among all of us, or is this an all-encompassing reality which is the result of the imagination of a single being, possibly even one seeing itself through multiple simultaneous interaction points we call conscient beings in this place we call reality, which this thing has invented all by itself, from the ant walking over a grain of sand to you reading this message on a screen, a screen "we" first had to invent? If not even that is clear, how can anything be easy about any of this?
I walked to the electronics store yesterday morning and bought some opamps. I find it amusing to think of opamps as bringing intentionality to circuits: they invert causality in precisely the same way as you do when you are making tea. The non-inverting input voltage is the op-amp's intention, the inverting input voltage is its observation which it interprets as a model of the world, and its output current is the behavior it controls according to that model to bring the world into accordance with its intentions.
The op-amp's behavior is only effective if there is a "structural similarity" between the world as the op-amp imagines it and the world as it really is, namely, if spewing out more current on its output will raise its inverting input relative to its non-inverting input, and sucking in more or spewing out less will lower it; we normally call this the negative-feedback condition. An op-amp hooked up backwards so the feedback instead is positive and drives it into overload is, in this analogy, like an insane or otherwise irrational person who keeps taking actions that predictably achieve the opposite of their intention, like posting comments on HN in order to enjoy thoughtful conversation.
When we design analog circuits with op-amps, we do routinely use the same kind of inverted-causality reasoning we use with the tea. Suppose it succeeds at making its inputs equal; what then is the situation that must prevail in the circuit? Oh, Vo = V1 + V2 - V3 - V4. Or Vo = -5Vi. And so it is, at least if the op-amp's feedback is not frustrated, or so effective that it sends the circuit into oscillation.
Op-amps (and thermostats) are clearly doing something that shares important features with human goal-directed activity, to the point that it seems practically useful to ascribe intentions to it, saying "this op-amp wants these currents to be equal" in a way that it isn't useful to say "this weight wants to move downward".
So I wonder what it is like to be an LM324N op-amp. I imagine it to be a very simple sort of existence, if not always a happy one. I prefer to be a human, but, failing that, I'd rather be a bacterium than an op-amp.
So it's amusing to see that Chalmers had the same thought. I wonder if I got it from him through indirect memetic contagion. (Though as far as I can tell he doesn't discuss oscillation, positive feedback runaway, or this peculiar inversion of causality. But I really doubt those are original to me, either.)
Great examples with the tea and the opamp for how a final cause be in the "future" of the effect, I'll remember them for the exam :)
For the record, Aristotle had a total of four types of causes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes
Yet I think of electrical engineering as the epitome of modern materialism, however mystical the jargon about imaginary current phasors and complex permittivity may seem to the uninitiated. Electrical engineers think of electrical fields as material things that exist in the universe and follow probabilistic but all-encompassing laws, not as supernatural spiritual entities. Could your professor be wrong?
With vibe coding, one could even say that you can believe in the computer's intent to write the code and the code working through that intent. You might not even know how the code looks after all.
Arlecchino: does something stupid
Pierrot: smacks Arlecchino across the back of the head
Arlecchino: Ow! What for?
Pierrot: Not "what for", but "why", dumbass.
(Been a bacterium btw. Strong emotions all around, as there's nothing to temper them with. Do not recommend. An opamp is nicer - as long as they make sure to keep you within operating parameters, and not put you in a configuration experiencing infinite positive feedback, lmao)
When someone says "I am making tea", to me, they mean "I have a plan! The execution of that plan has begun. The goal is to make tea." and in the context, because that's the answer to the question, they are also saying "The reason the stove is on is because I am executing that very plan."
Is this just idiomatic English? If we went formal logic on every sentence it would be a verbose world. Maybe other languages are more explicit.
This is a confusion specific to the English language, not consciousness in general. Some languages distinguish between the past-oriented cause-why and the future-oriented goal-why explicitly (e.g. Russian: почему vs зачем).
<s>An incredibly obsolete part btw~~</s> oops, that's the the LM741
There are better alternatives to the LM324B but almost all of them are more expensive.
Oh, I see your edit. Yeah, I confuse them too.