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I don't work directly in this field but I have read a lot of the literature. First of all, here is my opinion, as I have written it in comments on similar artic

by ppod 9y ago

I don't work directly in this field but I have read a lot of the literature. First of all, here is my opinion, as I have written it in comments on similar articles here: --- "I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I"). Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that? I think that Tononi's approach is a good approximation, but it can't be a full solution because the word 'consciousness' is too anthropocentric. One criticism of IIT showed that a seemingly uninteresting complex artificial system could have a very high IIT complexity quotient. The problem is that the things we use to define the term 'consciousness' are things that can be approximated to varying degrees by chimps or dolphins or generative adversarial networks or antfarms or thermometers. But behind our use of the word 'consciousness' there is still almost always a very slightly disguised dualism that uses it as a substitute for the word 'soul'." --- Therefore, I think I agree with what Manzotti is saying here. Certainly I think he is spot-on with this: >Essentially, when Chalmers so dramatically announced “the hard problem,” insisting that we had no solution to the question of consciousness, he simultaneously assumed that the constraints governing any enquiry into it were already well defined and unassailable. The most frustrating part of the debate is that most educated laypeople and some professional philosophers will still say with great confidence: "consciousness is a mystery/we don't know what consciousness is/ we don't understand how the brain works". I don't think these statements stack up against Dennett and Hoftstadter's work, and we have learned an incredible amount about how the brain works in the last 20 years, both through human neuroscience and computational neuroscience, and philosophers of the Chalmers type are wilfully ignorant of it.

goatlover 9y ago
I very much doubt that Chalmers is ignorant of anything that Dennett and Hofstadter are knowledgeable about, given that he's been debating them and participating in conferences where they give their talks for the past 20 years. What philosophers like Chalmers, Block, McGinn, Searle, and Nagel have argued is that the neuroscientific and computations explanations cannot capture subjective experience, because they are fundamentally abstract, objective explanations. They are abstracted from our collective personal, subjective experiences, to a mathematical idealization of the world which we consider to be objective. That abstract idealization fails to capture the subjective experiences of color, sound, pain, pleasure, etc, because it's been divorced from them to gain a God's eye view from nowhere, which has no color, sound, feels, etc. The problem is very deep philosophical one, which goes to the heart of objectivity vs subjectivity, and has been around in some form since ancient philosophy, both East and West.
- ppod 9y ago
  I didn't mean to suggest that Chalmers is ignorant of Dennett and Hofstadter, just of computational neuroscience. I don't necessarily think that Dennett and Hofstadters arguments rely on computational neuroscience, but the two components are complementary, and in combination are fatal to proponents of the "hard problem".

by ppod 9y ago

goatlover 9y ago

I very much doubt that Chalmers is ignorant of anything that Dennett and Hofstadter are knowledgeable about, given that he's been debating them and participating in conferences where they give their talks for the past 20 years. What philosophers like Chalmers, Block, McGinn, Searle, and Nagel have argued is that the neuroscientific and computations explanations cannot capture subjective experience, because they are fundamentally abstract, objective explanations. They are abstracted from our collective personal, subjective experiences, to a mathematical idealization of the world which we consider to be objective. That abstract idealization fails to capture the subjective experiences of color, sound, pain, pleasure, etc, because it's been divorced from them to gain a God's eye view from nowhere, which has no color, sound, feels, etc. The problem is very deep philosophical one, which goes to the heart of objectivity vs subjectivity, and has been around in some form since ancient philosophy, both East and West.

ppod 9y ago
I didn't mean to suggest that Chalmers is ignorant of Dennett and Hofstadter, just of computational neuroscience. I don't necessarily think that Dennett and Hofstadters arguments rely on computational neuroscience, but the two components are complementary, and in combination are fatal to proponents of the "hard problem".