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This is the standard reductionist position, and the standard strawmannirg of people who don't agree with it. To explain it crudely, yes, it all ultimately redu

This is the standard reductionist position, and the standard strawmannirg of people who don't agree with it. To explain it crudely, yes, it all ultimately reduces to the neuronal substrate and no one in their right mind disagrees. The point is that only looking at this level ignores the important and large set of data that is humans' first-hand observations of consciousness, what you're able to perceive, study, and observe about conscious experience, the kind of observations that Searle makes. To just write off first hand observation data as irrelevant strikes me as anti-scientific if not ideological. I mean, why wouldn't you try to develop a system of consciousness that starts with this data, in tandem with neuronal studies (there's no inherent contradiction)?

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
The problem is that first-hand observations aren't irrelevant, they're perverse. They're the mind viewing itself through its own intuitive folk-theory of mind, which is nowhere near an accurate psychology.
- orthoganol 11y ago
  > They're the mind viewing itself through its own intuitive folk-theory of mind Why do you think I'm suggesting any theory of mind at all? You're stating too much. I'm just suggesting look for patterns and produce models of what you can observe about human subjectivity. Hofstadtr's "strange loop" being an example of one such model.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    >I'm just suggesting look for patterns and produce models of what you can observe about human subjectivity. Well yeah, but the whole problem with subjectivity is that it consists in the mind's model of the environment feeding back into the sensory inferences as inductive bias while the feature data extracted from the sensory inferences also trains the model of the environment. Which is why people's first-hand "observations" aren't really observations in the scientific sense: "sensings" or "appearances" are actually theory-laden inferences.
vectorjohn 11y ago
> large set of data that is humans' first-hand observations of consciousness Actually, there exists only a data set of one. Since I'm the only one I know is conscious. Joking, but not joking.
- orthoganol 11y ago
  That's a narrow viewpoint. Sociology, history, psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, even the hated field of literary theory all provide fertile ground for drawing conclusions about the nature of human subjectivity. The people who claim, apriori, "you can't model human subjectivity and we shouldn't bother" are not going to be on the side of progress, especially with regards to AI.
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
    Oh don't get me wrong, I'm all for AI and I think we can do it. I just think it is inherently impossible to measure subjectivity. Probably. Unless we do discover some mechanism for it, but all the things you describe (psychology, philosophy, etc), none of them give any evidence for subjectivity. Only that things act like they are conscious. I'm just on the side that if something looks and acts like it is conscious, we have to assume it is. But the only being anyone knows is conscious is themselves.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

The problem is that first-hand observations aren't irrelevant, they're perverse. They're the mind viewing itself through its own intuitive folk-theory of mind, which is nowhere near an accurate psychology.

orthoganol 11y ago
> They're the mind viewing itself through its own intuitive folk-theory of mind Why do you think I'm suggesting any theory of mind at all? You're stating too much. I'm just suggesting look for patterns and produce models of what you can observe about human subjectivity. Hofstadtr's "strange loop" being an example of one such model.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >I'm just suggesting look for patterns and produce models of what you can observe about human subjectivity. Well yeah, but the whole problem with subjectivity is that it consists in the mind's model of the environment feeding back into the sensory inferences as inductive bias while the feature data extracted from the sensory inferences also trains the model of the environment. Which is why people's first-hand "observations" aren't really observations in the scientific sense: "sensings" or "appearances" are actually theory-laden inferences.

vectorjohn 11y ago

> large set of data that is humans' first-hand observations of consciousness Actually, there exists only a data set of one. Since I'm the only one I know is conscious. Joking, but not joking.

orthoganol 11y ago
That's a narrow viewpoint. Sociology, history, psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, even the hated field of literary theory all provide fertile ground for drawing conclusions about the nature of human subjectivity. The people who claim, apriori, "you can't model human subjectivity and we shouldn't bother" are not going to be on the side of progress, especially with regards to AI.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  Oh don't get me wrong, I'm all for AI and I think we can do it. I just think it is inherently impossible to measure subjectivity. Probably. Unless we do discover some mechanism for it, but all the things you describe (psychology, philosophy, etc), none of them give any evidence for subjectivity. Only that things act like they are conscious. I'm just on the side that if something looks and acts like it is conscious, we have to assume it is. But the only being anyone knows is conscious is themselves.