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Are you aware of a human ever describing their own consciousness or qualia without having been exposed to the idea first? I understand your "can't prove it" re

Are you aware of a human ever describing their own consciousness or qualia without having been exposed to the idea first? I understand your "can't prove it" regarding animals, but if your only way of "proving it" doesn't work for most examples, I would continue to say the concept is one that is not defined in a meaningful way, at least not meaningful when it comes to any sort of scientific analysis or even being able to say whether an entity other than yourself has it.

mikeash 10y ago
I know at least one human did without being exposed to it, and I know at least one other human is also conscious. For me, this is sufficient evidence to say that humans in general are likely conscious. It would be very weird for the two of us to be different in this way. I agree that it remains fairly poorly defined, but I don't think it's correct to say that you can't even analyze it from the outside. There are many circumstances where you can't, but you can at least glean a little bit of information in some cases.
- robbrown451 10y ago
  How do you know one human did? It is quite possible the concept evolved over a very long time, so no single human came up with the idea.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    I don't think that matters much. The idea that it would evolve over time in a population where nobody experiences consciousness doesn't strike me as remotely probable.
    - robbrown451 10y ago
      So, you've convinced yourselves that humans are conscious (whatever that means). The point, though, was how do we tell if something else is. You haven't given us much in order to show one way or another if either an animal or a human-created thing is. So I'm saying the concept is so weakly defined as to be essentially meaningless. Also, you say that because humans have somehow developed the ability to talk about something, it must exist. What exactly have they said? That there is this thing that they can't define objectively but they swear it exists because it seems like it does? And that proves that it exists? Do you not see how circular that is?
      - mikeash 10y ago
        It would be circular if it weren't so intimately connected with the very concept of "seems." How would humans have arrived at the idea of qualia if they didn't experience it? What's your proposed alternate explanation for this?
        robbrown451 10y ago
        Alternate explanation for the fact that people describe having qualia? I've seen qualia described as "qualities or feelings, like redness or pain, as considered independently of their effects on behavior and from whatever physical circumstances give rise to them." I go into a good bit of detail about how such a thing is unsurprising in this thing I wrote (8 years ago). http://www.karmatics.com/docs/violet.html http://www.karmatics.com/docs/violet.html The thing is, you have this intuitive feeling that something (say, redness) is real. Fine. But the external behavior you are describing as "proof"? I would consider that beyond weak. There is nothing at all surprising about an entity that can communicate, expressing that there is a certain something that it is having trouble communicating directly.
        mikeash 10y ago
        If I"ve understood you correctly so far, your overall approach to the problem seems to be that if we can't define it in a reasonably rigorous way, then we don't really know what we're referring to, and so it's not real. For example: > I can't help but have a lingering feeling that there must be more to the concept of "subjective experience" than "arbitrary details of the internal implementation of an algorithm that don't affect the results," but alas, I can't come up with words to describe whatever else there might be. I sympathize, but disagree. It's quite clear to me that the sensation of perceiving things, whether it's redness or sweetness or pain, has something about it that is not just arbitrary details of how my brain works. There is a me which is qualitatively different from the rest of the universe in some way. No, I can't really describe it very well, but that doesn't make it any less real. You do have me wondering, though, if maybe not everyone has this. Take aphantasia, for example. Some people can see things in their mind, and some can't. For a long time, neither group realized that the other even existed. Those who could see things just assumed everyone could, and those who couldn't assumed everyone couldn't. Maybe some subset of humanity consists of p-zombies, and they only know of these concepts because they've heard of them from others.

mikeash 10y ago

I know at least one human did without being exposed to it, and I know at least one other human is also conscious. For me, this is sufficient evidence to say that humans in general are likely conscious. It would be very weird for the two of us to be different in this way. I agree that it remains fairly poorly defined, but I don't think it's correct to say that you can't even analyze it from the outside. There are many circumstances where you can't, but you can at least glean a little bit of information in some cases.

robbrown451 10y ago
How do you know one human did? It is quite possible the concept evolved over a very long time, so no single human came up with the idea.
- mikeash 10y ago
  I don't think that matters much. The idea that it would evolve over time in a population where nobody experiences consciousness doesn't strike me as remotely probable.
  - robbrown451 10y ago
    So, you've convinced yourselves that humans are conscious (whatever that means). The point, though, was how do we tell if something else is. You haven't given us much in order to show one way or another if either an animal or a human-created thing is. So I'm saying the concept is so weakly defined as to be essentially meaningless. Also, you say that because humans have somehow developed the ability to talk about something, it must exist. What exactly have they said? That there is this thing that they can't define objectively but they swear it exists because it seems like it does? And that proves that it exists? Do you not see how circular that is?
    - mikeash 10y ago
      It would be circular if it weren't so intimately connected with the very concept of "seems." How would humans have arrived at the idea of qualia if they didn't experience it? What's your proposed alternate explanation for this?
      - robbrown451 10y ago
        Alternate explanation for the fact that people describe having qualia? I've seen qualia described as "qualities or feelings, like redness or pain, as considered independently of their effects on behavior and from whatever physical circumstances give rise to them." I go into a good bit of detail about how such a thing is unsurprising in this thing I wrote (8 years ago). http://www.karmatics.com/docs/violet.html http://www.karmatics.com/docs/violet.html The thing is, you have this intuitive feeling that something (say, redness) is real. Fine. But the external behavior you are describing as "proof"? I would consider that beyond weak. There is nothing at all surprising about an entity that can communicate, expressing that there is a certain something that it is having trouble communicating directly.
        mikeash 10y ago
        If I"ve understood you correctly so far, your overall approach to the problem seems to be that if we can't define it in a reasonably rigorous way, then we don't really know what we're referring to, and so it's not real. For example: > I can't help but have a lingering feeling that there must be more to the concept of "subjective experience" than "arbitrary details of the internal implementation of an algorithm that don't affect the results," but alas, I can't come up with words to describe whatever else there might be. I sympathize, but disagree. It's quite clear to me that the sensation of perceiving things, whether it's redness or sweetness or pain, has something about it that is not just arbitrary details of how my brain works. There is a me which is qualitatively different from the rest of the universe in some way. No, I can't really describe it very well, but that doesn't make it any less real. You do have me wondering, though, if maybe not everyone has this. Take aphantasia, for example. Some people can see things in their mind, and some can't. For a long time, neither group realized that the other even existed. Those who could see things just assumed everyone could, and those who couldn't assumed everyone couldn't. Maybe some subset of humanity consists of p-zombies, and they only know of these concepts because they've heard of them from others.