Consciousness as a Gödel sentence in the language of science

Consciousness as a Gödel sentence in the language of science

Erik Hoel

Why the Hard Problem (might be) so Hard

Let's say you lived in a universe where you really were some sort of incarnated soul in a corporeal body. Or some sort of agent from a vaster reality embedded in a simulation (depending on definitions, the two scenarios might not be that different). What would the science in such a dualistic universe look like...

...What would the state of the rest of science be there? For one, their version of neuroscience would lag significantly behind. Which again, looks like our universe, where there is no accepted lawful way to relate brain states to conscious experiences—what it is like to be you...

What else? Well, it’s likely that in the incarnated-soul universe, their version of AI would suspiciously have nothing to do with how the brain works. It would be as if they had discovered this totally orthogonal form of intelligence, one based more on all the actual sensible physical rules, and not based off of mysterious confusing soul stuff. An orthogonality which, uh—and things are getting uncomfortable here—is arguably also the case in our universe.

One could go whole hog and say that this all points to proof of religion. But which one? What details? A gap of inexplicability doesn't recommend anything.

And it feels a bit too easy, right? For there is another explanation, one rarely explored, which is that there is no way to set up a universe without this sort of confusion. Which ends up being the same as asking: Are all scientific facts knowable? Or is science fundamentally incomplete?

This is an interesting view but there are issues -

 - If the only escape for Physicalism is appeal to paradox, this seems like a "Mysterian" position where Physicalism is taken on faith.

- There are arguments that the very ability to conceptualize systems and notice paradoxes are indicators that Mind is not "material"....whatever "material" stuff is supposed to be...

There are arguments that the very ability to conceptualize systems and notice paradoxes are indicators that Mind is not "material"....whatever "material" stuff is supposed to be...

Do you have a link to that argument? It sounds like a more tractable idea, and it is intuitively very plausible.

It is also interesting that he mentions an example from physics where Godel's theorem seems to apply.

It has always seemed to me that there must be loads of undecidable statements in mathematics waiting to be discovered.

Unfortunately, I always feel as if my head might explode if I think too long about such things.

David

Do you have a link to that argument? It sounds like a more tractable idea, and it is intuitively very plausible.

It is also interesting that he mentions an example from physics where Godel's theorem seems to apply.

It has always seemed to me that there must be loads of undecidable statements in mathematics waiting to be discovered.

Unfortunately, I always feel as if my head might explode if I think too long about such things.

David

While it's really anti-Computationalist over anti-Physicalist the arguments Penrose has made in Emperor's New Mind & Shadows of the Mind deal with how Incompleteness means no AI will be able to offer an explanation for Consciousness.

Godel himself was a Platonist-Dualist, though I'd have to look back at how much Incompleteness influenced those beliefs.

As for the immateriality of the intellect, Aristotle had a long version. However the basics of the argument are that the intellect uses concepts with abstract commonalities and that all thoughts are determinate ->

- The "material" world has particular things, such as a specific biological creatures, vegetation, rocks, etc. When we say there are "dogs" or "liquids" we are utilizing the intellect to abstract commonalities our reason tells us are valid, yet these universals are of the mind and not in the "material". 

 You can write about concepts, draw diagrams, and so on but without an existing mind these have no inherent meaning.

- A thought about something is determinate, such as a thought about a salt shaker is only about that item. However, from what Physicalists tell us, "material" stuff is not inherently about anything. You can even pick up a salt shaker and say it represents a pepper shaker.

Admittedly this is a very short summary. You can find a longer argument for the non-"material" nature of concepts here, and of the determinant - not to be confused w/ determinism! - nature of thought vs the indeterminant nature of "material" stuff here. (Good chance you've seen these before)

As a side note, what I think is interesting about these sorts of arguments for the immorality of the soul is that they seem to hold even if Idealism were true because you still have a difference between the sensory experience of the external world and the private experience of your own mind...

While it's really anti-Computationalist over anti-Physicalist the arguments Penrose has made in Emperor's New Mind & Shadows of the Mind deal with how Incompleteness means no AI will be able to offer an explanation for Consciousness.

Wow - of course, I forgot that book! I remember when I read it a long time back, I felt that he had almost proved that the mind did not run on a fully physicalist basis. Since he had shown that a computation can't be conscious, and since the operation of almost any object can be thought of as a computation, there was a search for non-computational processes. Then I think the whole controversy died down!

David