Poll: Do you think that the mind is physical or not?

[solipsist]

Although partially inspired by this survey (http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/what-is-consciousness/), I have been curious about this concept for a while. That is, what the mind and its consciousness really are.

In a sense, there are only two views that you can have with regards to this mind-body problem:

  Physicalism - The mind (its mental functions, consciousness, sense of
   identity, etc.) are nothing more than physical properties.

  Dualism - The mind is composed of a different substance or property
   than physical matter is

It'd be great to see your perspectives on this issue.

[dasil003]

Although the nuances of the debate are interesting, I'm always a little disappointed when hackers and scientists lean towards physicalism. If you are of an analytical mindset, it's tempting to be drawn to explainable phenomena and to reject pie-in-the-sky and intractable philosophical questions.

I think that just displays a disappointing lack of imagination, a fear of the unknowable, or both. That's why I had to opt for the neglected third-option.

I just don't feel like we have sufficiently solid axioms to even approach such a question with any reasonable degree of certainty. Physicalism vs Dualism, for instance, hinges on the definition of physical, which might be conveniently defined as phenomena within the current physical subsystems we are aware of. In that case, what is defined as Dualism today could become Physicalism tomorrow as physics evolves. Or indeed, there may be dimensions of reality that are incomprehensible by us consciously due to the very nature of our meat brains, but which nevertheless we have some connection and effect on our brains but which will never be comprehensible due to limitations of our reasoning which has evolved under the constraints of meatspace. The idea that predictable behavior implies determinism will never be credible in my mind because we will never be able to observe anywhere near enough of the universe and crunch all the numbers to be sure that there aren't unobservable inputs that we've missed. There is no microscope or telescope powerful enough.

edit: I don't normally complain about downvotes, but a driveby downvote on something this carefully written is a truly cowardly act. Why not step up and actually justify your kneejerk reaction?

[Udo]

That's odd, I'm always disappointed when hackers or scientists lean towards an esoteric view of consciousness, mainly because we should be supremely well suited to realize that the mind is not a concept that somehow requires supernatural augmentation to be feasible. Dealing with both information processing and the nature of reality every day, I feel there is really no excuse for hackers and scientists to evoke the metaphysical. I also think postulating a supernatural component to consciousness prevents an observer from really noticing the phenomenal beauty of the natural processes involved.

[noonespecial]

Is software physical? The computer certainly is, but what is the software?

I'd have to say dualist with reservations. Certainly the mind can't exist without the brain, but the brain is a constantly refreshing and changing thing. Eventually every cell I'm made up of will be a different cell than before...

Is a wave on the ocean water?

It seems like a lot of interesting things in reality in that the closer you look, the harder it is to say anything with certainty.

[dazzawazza]

Of course software is physical. It comes in two common forms: electrons stored on silicon wafer and magnetic particles stored on a platter. It also exists in light form (fibre optic transmission) and ink form (but only during the 1980s).

If you think these representations are any different from humans or the mind then you've got a lot of explaining to do.

[barkmadley]

The problem with Dualism, is that we have no way of determining the communication mechanism by which the non-physical part of the mind affects the physical part of the brain, so it is unlikely that one exists at all. If no communication gateway exists between a particular mind and a particular body, then it is almost impossible to say that Dualism can be correct.

[solipsist]

I think that comprehending the non-physical part is just as hard as comprehending the communication gateway. In other words, if you can comprehend one, you can probably comprehend the other.

[shasta]

You left out Solipsism - "I believe that the physical is all in my mind"

[solipsist]

Irony at its greatest

[hrrld]

And by you, you mean I.

[solipsist]

Functionalism is very similar to physicalism. An interesting corollary to functionalism is that mental states are "said to be realized on multiple levels." In other words, computers and other systems could have the same sense sense of identity as humans.

From Wikipedia's article on Functionalism:

"Since mental states are identified by a functional role, they are said to be realized on multiple levels; in other words, they are able to be manifested in various systems, even perhaps computers, so long as the system performs the appropriate functions. While computers are physical devices with electronic substrate that perform computations on inputs to give outputs, so brains are physical devices with neural substrate that perform computations on inputs which produce behaviors."

Just something interesting to think about...

[JoeAltmaier]

All well and good to decribe the process of "identifying" mental states. But we all know, being inside of a brain and thinking as we read this, that something other than behavior is involved with consciousness.

[shawndumas]

Gordon H. Clark:

"If [...] a thought is a physical or chemical motion inside the brain, it can be illustrated by a pitched ball in Yankee Stadium. The stadium represents the brain or body; the pitched ball is the thought. Suppose the first pitch of the game is an inside curve. Now, since the pitch is a dated event, it cannot have happened previously to this game, nor can it be repeated in a later inning. Of course, a pitch in the third inning may also be an inside curve; but it cannot be identical to the first. The inside curve in the third inning comes fifteen minutes later; its speed is not precisely the same; and it breaks about a half-inch higher. That means that I can never have the same thought twice. If I think thought X at 2:21 P.M., I cannot have that thought again at 3:12 or ever after. Behaviorism makes memory impossible.

The most obvious answer to this is that these two pitches resemble each other so closely that one cannot tell the difference between them. Hence, though we can never have the exact same thought, we can nonetheless have a similar thought. But this reply complicates the situation. The thought that the curve in the third inning is similar to the curve in the first inning has to be a newly pitched ball (e.g. the knuckle ball in the fourth inning). Similarity is itself a chemical motion inside the brain. It is as much a dated pitch as the other two. It came five or ten minutes after the pitch in the third inning. How then can a chemical motion ten minutes after the second curve connect two motions that no longer exist? Behaviorism therefore cannot discover that any two chemical motion are similar.

There is a further complication. It is all the more obvious that none of these pitches, nor any other in the Yankee Stadium, can be the motion of a different ball in San Diego. The San Diego diamond is a different mind. Two minds can never have the same pitch. That is why no one else can have the least idea of what Skinner and Ryle mean. Nor can they themselves have any idea of what they wrote, now that the inning is over."

[JoeAltmaier]

Goofy thinking. Just because two things are demonstrably different instances of something, doesn't mean they can't be in all meaningful ways congruent.

The pitched-ball metaphor doesn't begin to touch memory, learning and association, which we use to compare ideas.

[faitswulff]

You say "nothing more than physical" as if we've figured out physics.

I shall abstain from voting, as physics remains mind blowing.

[endtime]

I voted for physicalism, but I don't really like this framing. I wouldn't say that, say, the Y combinator is a physical object. But I do think it's possible to implement it in hardware (or in software running on hardware). Likewise, our minds are implemented in hardware, but to say they are hardware feels slightly awkward.

Of course, I don't mean to justify dualism, which is kind of a mysterious answer to a mysterious question [1].

1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_...

[parfe]

I understand your reasoning, but I don't think you took it far enough. If something can be implemented in hardware, than it is hardware. If your mind could exist as a machine than I could print out schematics with every switch/gate/electron position set so your mind could be rebuilt elsewhere.

YCombinator is physical because a mapping of the ram, physical storage, and CPU state would be enough to reproduce this site. Nothing about this website exists beyond our understanding of physics.

[Figs]

Unless you happen to be religious, this would seem to be more of a problem of word usage than a question about reality.

It's not entirely obvious how to classify things that exist only as representations imposed on a different medium. Others have already pointed out that you have the same problem with software. You could construct quite a number of such confusing cases -- for example, is a spoken word a physical thing? What about a football game? How about the stock market? The issue here with these sorts of things is that meaning is attached to the state of some physical matter, but the meaning is not an inherent part of the matter itself -- at least as we'd usually classify it.

I think probably the best thing to do with something like this is just to acknowledge it as a semantics issue and move on; I don't think you'll get much more insight into the subject of interest (thought, software, language, football, stocks, or whatever...) by worrying too much about its classification status as "physical" or not -- unless you're actually studying it for the point of studying the meta-issue of "problems relating to the attachment of meaning to physical things".

[jasonzemos]

Consider a synthesis of the two -- and then perhaps this is the wrong question to be asking. The mind may appear physical in the ways we can observe it, even if we were to record and analyze every single neuron and synapse and draw accurate conclusions on thought. This is the same as if you were to write a 3D game called 'medschool' and have doctors in training, who are also programs inside that program, dissect brains to see how they operate -- yet the code is running elsewhere. Is that mind, which is just a rendering, considered physical?

The dualist argument appears akin to the Bergsonian Élan vital. It seems to imply there is a hypostasis where physical matter meets this otherness matter. Consider that, according to that theory, if the brain were to be fully observed in the manner stated above, there would be no conclusions able to be drawn from its actions. What a flaw in the universe! I do not believe this system which has been so elegantly designed would have such a gaping hole. Physicalism++

[prodigal_erik]

Take a sand castle. The sand clearly exists here and now, as do the bonds holding it together. But I see no reason to presume some (undetectable) layer of reality in which the castle would really exist in the same sense the sand does. The castle is just our rolled-up perception of how the bonded sand happens to behave until the tide returns.

[aphyr]

The mind is a process loosely defined by functional behaviors such as communicating, reasoning, and feeling. It arises from and is nothing more than the state of a sufficiently complex physical system and as such can be said to be physical. However it is important to recognize that systems may not be "physical" in the sense that electrons are physical. :)

[DonCarlitos]

I have always viewed the mind, which extends through the CNS to fingers & toes, as a platform for cognition & memory. It is very likely that actual information is contained, processed and stored in the temporary geometric constructs created when multiple synapses fire. Think "fabric storage." So in that model, the "mind" is both.

[aswanson]

How about, yes and no. Is information processing physical or a property of a physical mechanism performing a function. The question, in my opinion, is akin to asking "Is my web browser physical or not?" It runs on a physical medium and is a consequence of physical matter and laws...so again, yes and no.

[marssaxman]

The question is poorly formed. What other kind of matter is there than "physical matter"?

[hfinney]

The problem with functionalism is the difficulty of unambiguously determining whether a given system implements a given calculation. This is inconsistent with the need to say that a given system definitely either is or is not conscious.

[RuadhanMc]

I'll let you know in about 100 years.

[acidblue]

Unfortunately, I believe in Physicalism. I say unfortunately because it would be awesome if there was something beyond it but, it just is what it is.