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> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree

by sriku 9y ago

> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".

andybak 9y ago
And yet as I awake for yet another day as me, there's something in need of explanation. Unlike Pluto - this isn't just a debate about labels.
goatlover 9y ago
Pluto is a taxonomy problem. Consciousness is reconciling how we explain the world (science & objectivity) versus how we experience the world (subjectivity). Consider that the world looks colored, is full of sounds, smells, tastes and feels. But the scientific explanation leaves all that out. The scientific world is the ghostly world of equations, theories and data. It's Plato's cave inverted.
- speedplane 9y ago
  Consciousness is at it's heart irrational. Using reason or science to explain it won't work.
  - smaddox 9y ago
    Ironically, you are stating a hypothesis which is fully within the purview of reason and science. While it is in principal possible that the answer is undecidable with existing logical systems, there's certainly no existing proof that it is undecidable.
    - speedplane 9y ago
      Proofs are founded on reason and logic, but reason and logic are themselves a product of consciousness. It would be a tautology.
- otakucode 9y ago
  I have long been of the opinion that consciousness is not a 'thing' or 'state' so much as property. I think Douglas Hofstadtler gets closest to my thinking on the matter in his book 'I Am A Strange Loop'. Just as a single molecule cannot have a temperature, since temperature is a property of multitudes of molecules, any degree of looking at the components will not elucidate their overall interactions and at the end you will simply have to admit 'this is what we call it when that happens' rather than identifying a binary test that can be weighed with complete objectivity. I also think a great deal of the things the scientific explanations omit are things which are expressely stated as the things science does not pursue. I mean that science is inherently dedicated to finding the things which are true regardless of the personal experience of the observer and which would be true without a human observer. So when you want to look at the human observer itself, and at something which is intimately and inextricably linked to the exact biological and historical state of a human animal... you've just left the field. Not that it makes the study any 'less', you just need different tools and there are different pitfalls. We still have all the same cognitive flaws due to our own brain structure, so we do have to try to be rigorous about it.
  - CuriouslyC 9y ago
    Temperature is the aggregate of the energy of many individual particles, modulated by the tendency of those particles to transmit that energy. Thus a single molecule does have a temperature in a sense, you just need an incredibly sensitive detector to register it. Temperature is a fully reducible property. Consider the possibility that consciousness isn't a distinctly human phenomenon, as there is no reason to believe that is the case. In fact, there is no logical reason why it would even be a distinctly biological phenomenon. It appears to me that consciousness isn't so much out of the purview of science as it is intractable to its methods, and thus unattractive as an area of study despite its fundamental character.
    - gus_massa 9y ago
      In a very big molecule [1] that doesn't move, you have so many parts that you can have a reasonable good definition of the temperature. But in a very small molecule/atom, let's pick a single helium atom, you don't have a good definition of temperature. You can define the temperature of a gas of Helium using the average kinetic energy of the atoms, but you must consider that the whole gas is not moving. If you put a balloon with Helium in a car, and the car moves at 100mph, the Helium is not hotter, it is moving. So if you can only see a single atom of Helium, you can't be sure if it's moving because it's hot or all the gas is moving. So you don't have a good definition of temperature. [2] For a molecule with a few atoms (let's say 5 or 10) it's more difficult to be sure if there is a good definition of temperature or not, so I prefer to ignore the intermediate case. [1] My first idea of a big molecules was DNA, because it's big and well known. But DNA is usually surrounded by water, lots of water, and ions and auxiliary proteins, and a lot of stuff. It's very difficult to isolate a true molecule of DNA alone. An easy example of a big molecule is bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite that is the plastic of the old phones. Your old phone case was a gigantic single molecule, and the tube case was another. So they clearly had a temperature. [2] At low temperatures you can assume that a Helium atom is a ball without internal structure. If you increase the temperature of the gas enough (200000K?), the electrons in each Helium atom start to jump between levels and you have some interesting internal structure and may try to define a temperature. But it's still too few parts and too short lived to make me comfortable to define the temperature of a single atom.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Then I don't think we have a problem. We experience the world through sensorimotor statistics: what our sensory nerves, autonomic nervous system, voluntary motor actions, interoceptive nerves, and just generally our bodies are doing at any given point in time. Science is a series of methods, implemented on top of our basic reasoning abilities, to achieve knowledge which can be generalized across individual perspectives, rather than depending on the statistics and circumstances of an individual life. I would figure that this isn't the problem of consciousness, but it is the problem of why we don't "see" a "ghostly world of equations, theories and data".
visarga 9y ago
Being unable to agree on a definition for consciousness is a huge problem. I think this happens because consciousness is being studied at a too abstract (high) level. Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning. Fortunately, at this level definitions are exact and concrete - agent, environment, goal, actions, values. At this level we can understand and simulate what it means to be a worm, or a bat - as agents playing games. I think what the current philosophic theory of consciousness lacks is a focus on the game itself. The agent is but a part of the environment, and the game is much more than the agent. The whole environment-agent-game system is what creates consciousness and also explains the purpose of consciousness (to maximize goals for agents). Analyzing consciousness outside its game is meaningless (such as p-zombies) - the game is the fundamental meaning creator, defining the space of consciousness. The Chinese room is not part of a game, it is not embodied in the world, and has no goals to attain, that is why it is not conscious, it is just a data processing system. On the other part, a bacteria can be conscious on a chemical, electric and foto level even if it can only process data with its gene regulatory network (which is like a small chemical neural net). A bacteria has clear goals (gaining nutrients, replication) thus its consciousness is useful for something - all consciousness needs to have a clear goal otherwise it would not exist in the first place - something rarely emphasized in consciousness articles.
- bladecatcher 9y ago
  >> Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning This sounds a bit naive.
  - visarga 9y ago
    Well, defining the "hard problem" hasn't gotten us any closer to understanding consciousness in the last 22 years. The hard problem just moves consciousness problem into an unfruitful direction. It's time for more practical approaches.
    - bladecatcher 9y ago
quadrangle 9y ago
I don't get your comment. The first sentence seems to say "solving semantic confusion won't get us to the root of the hard problem". Your second sentence seems to say "we should admit that some questions are just semantic confusion". Is that right? The two sentences seem non sequitur together. The hard problem is not a matter of semantics, but yes indeed some confusion may be just semantic. I'm not sure if that plain truth is all you meant to say though.

by sriku 9y ago

andybak 9y ago

And yet as I awake for yet another day as me, there's something in need of explanation. Unlike Pluto - this isn't just a debate about labels.

goatlover 9y ago

Pluto is a taxonomy problem. Consciousness is reconciling how we explain the world (science & objectivity) versus how we experience the world (subjectivity). Consider that the world looks colored, is full of sounds, smells, tastes and feels. But the scientific explanation leaves all that out. The scientific world is the ghostly world of equations, theories and data. It's Plato's cave inverted.

speedplane 9y ago
Consciousness is at it's heart irrational. Using reason or science to explain it won't work.
- smaddox 9y ago
  Ironically, you are stating a hypothesis which is fully within the purview of reason and science. While it is in principal possible that the answer is undecidable with existing logical systems, there's certainly no existing proof that it is undecidable.
  - speedplane 9y ago
    Proofs are founded on reason and logic, but reason and logic are themselves a product of consciousness. It would be a tautology.
otakucode 9y ago
I have long been of the opinion that consciousness is not a 'thing' or 'state' so much as property. I think Douglas Hofstadtler gets closest to my thinking on the matter in his book 'I Am A Strange Loop'. Just as a single molecule cannot have a temperature, since temperature is a property of multitudes of molecules, any degree of looking at the components will not elucidate their overall interactions and at the end you will simply have to admit 'this is what we call it when that happens' rather than identifying a binary test that can be weighed with complete objectivity. I also think a great deal of the things the scientific explanations omit are things which are expressely stated as the things science does not pursue. I mean that science is inherently dedicated to finding the things which are true regardless of the personal experience of the observer and which would be true without a human observer. So when you want to look at the human observer itself, and at something which is intimately and inextricably linked to the exact biological and historical state of a human animal... you've just left the field. Not that it makes the study any 'less', you just need different tools and there are different pitfalls. We still have all the same cognitive flaws due to our own brain structure, so we do have to try to be rigorous about it.
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  Temperature is the aggregate of the energy of many individual particles, modulated by the tendency of those particles to transmit that energy. Thus a single molecule does have a temperature in a sense, you just need an incredibly sensitive detector to register it. Temperature is a fully reducible property. Consider the possibility that consciousness isn't a distinctly human phenomenon, as there is no reason to believe that is the case. In fact, there is no logical reason why it would even be a distinctly biological phenomenon. It appears to me that consciousness isn't so much out of the purview of science as it is intractable to its methods, and thus unattractive as an area of study despite its fundamental character.
  - gus_massa 9y ago
    In a very big molecule [1] that doesn't move, you have so many parts that you can have a reasonable good definition of the temperature. But in a very small molecule/atom, let's pick a single helium atom, you don't have a good definition of temperature. You can define the temperature of a gas of Helium using the average kinetic energy of the atoms, but you must consider that the whole gas is not moving. If you put a balloon with Helium in a car, and the car moves at 100mph, the Helium is not hotter, it is moving. So if you can only see a single atom of Helium, you can't be sure if it's moving because it's hot or all the gas is moving. So you don't have a good definition of temperature. [2] For a molecule with a few atoms (let's say 5 or 10) it's more difficult to be sure if there is a good definition of temperature or not, so I prefer to ignore the intermediate case. [1] My first idea of a big molecules was DNA, because it's big and well known. But DNA is usually surrounded by water, lots of water, and ions and auxiliary proteins, and a lot of stuff. It's very difficult to isolate a true molecule of DNA alone. An easy example of a big molecule is bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite that is the plastic of the old phones. Your old phone case was a gigantic single molecule, and the tube case was another. So they clearly had a temperature. [2] At low temperatures you can assume that a Helium atom is a ball without internal structure. If you increase the temperature of the gas enough (200000K?), the electrons in each Helium atom start to jump between levels and you have some interesting internal structure and may try to define a temperature. But it's still too few parts and too short lived to make me comfortable to define the temperature of a single atom.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Then I don't think we have a problem. We experience the world through sensorimotor statistics: what our sensory nerves, autonomic nervous system, voluntary motor actions, interoceptive nerves, and just generally our bodies are doing at any given point in time. Science is a series of methods, implemented on top of our basic reasoning abilities, to achieve knowledge which can be generalized across individual perspectives, rather than depending on the statistics and circumstances of an individual life. I would figure that this isn't the problem of consciousness, but it is the problem of why we don't "see" a "ghostly world of equations, theories and data".

visarga 9y ago

Being unable to agree on a definition for consciousness is a huge problem. I think this happens because consciousness is being studied at a too abstract (high) level. Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning. Fortunately, at this level definitions are exact and concrete - agent, environment, goal, actions, values. At this level we can understand and simulate what it means to be a worm, or a bat - as agents playing games. I think what the current philosophic theory of consciousness lacks is a focus on the game itself. The agent is but a part of the environment, and the game is much more than the agent. The whole environment-agent-game system is what creates consciousness and also explains the purpose of consciousness (to maximize goals for agents). Analyzing consciousness outside its game is meaningless (such as p-zombies) - the game is the fundamental meaning creator, defining the space of consciousness. The Chinese room is not part of a game, it is not embodied in the world, and has no goals to attain, that is why it is not conscious, it is just a data processing system. On the other part, a bacteria can be conscious on a chemical, electric and foto level even if it can only process data with its gene regulatory network (which is like a small chemical neural net). A bacteria has clear goals (gaining nutrients, replication) thus its consciousness is useful for something - all consciousness needs to have a clear goal otherwise it would not exist in the first place - something rarely emphasized in consciousness articles.

bladecatcher 9y ago
>> Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning This sounds a bit naive.
- visarga 9y ago
  Well, defining the "hard problem" hasn't gotten us any closer to understanding consciousness in the last 22 years. The hard problem just moves consciousness problem into an unfruitful direction. It's time for more practical approaches.
  - bladecatcher 9y ago

quadrangle 9y ago

I don't get your comment. The first sentence seems to say "solving semantic confusion won't get us to the root of the hard problem". Your second sentence seems to say "we should admit that some questions are just semantic confusion". Is that right? The two sentences seem non sequitur together. The hard problem is not a matter of semantics, but yes indeed some confusion may be just semantic. I'm not sure if that plain truth is all you meant to say though.