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The Meta-Problem of Consciousness [pdf]

142 points by lainon 9y ago

vinceguidry 9y ago
> This strategy typically involves what Keith Frankish has called illusionism about consciousness: the view that consciousness is or involves a sort of introspective illusion. What's an illusion? If by illusion you mean an abstraction, like how a TV picture is an illusion of a picture rather than actually being a picture, then I'm on board. If by illusion you mean "worth excluding from your map of how the world works," then I have a bone to pick with you. My main problem with physicalism is that it doesn't handle abstraction well. I'm fine with monism over dualism but you need some kind of functionality with which to consider different kinds of 'stuff'. Otherwise a rock, Conway's Game of Life, and Lord of the Rings are all on the same plane of existence. What draws me to Objective Idealism isn't so much the fact that it's compatible with religion but rather that 'mind stuff' is the best 'thing' that we can use to describe everything. The fact that it doesn't put severe emphasis on the physical as "better" than other modes is just a nice little bonus to annoy materialists with.
- chimprich 9y ago
  > What's an illusion? One problem I have with illusionism is that if consciousness is an illusion, what is it that is being fooled by the illusion? Presumably the answer is that the illusion is fooling itself, which to me implies that either there is something there that is "real" to believe the illusion, or that the definition of an illusion in this case is so far from our usual definition that the term does not have much in the way of explanatory power.
  - narag 9y ago
    The root of that evil seems to be determinism or IOW dualism.
    - KennyCason 9y ago
      Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? I tend to think of dualism as being a sort of fundamental duality for example "nothing - something" or they way I prefer to word them, "something - not something". However, determinism tends force a cause-effect, or hierarchical, or directional meaning. For example, determinism in relation to my above nothing/something duality would be "from nothing came something" or something of that flavor. However, would could also say that there was no deterministic relationship and that both nothing and something mutually depend on each other to exist. i.e. there is not directional arrow of relationship. (I'm not a professional philosopher)
      - danbruc 9y ago
        Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? Not at all, they are more like opposites of each other. Dualism in this context refers to the idea that there is something non-physical in addition to the physical body and brain that makes you conscious, a soul or something along that line. If you think that dualism is wrong and you are just a bunch of atoms governed by the laws of physics, then you probably think determinism is true, i.e. the choices people make are not really free choices but just the results of the initial conditions and the laws of physics (which may actually be non-deterministic, for example if the randomness of quantum physics is real, which makes the naming potentially a bit confusing).
        state_less 9y ago
        Yep, even if the process is stochastic, and the result is determined by some mixture of present state and randomness. It's still determined. If we replayed everything with the same random variables, we'd get the same result. It's hard to walk away from this determinism since we apply it to the rest of the world so often. It seems really suspicious to not also apply it to ourselves.
        KennyCason 9y ago
        Got it. I didn’t think they were, or that you necessarily implied. I think I got mixed up with the last bit of wording in the commenters sentence and his intent. I’m also realizing based on a couple of responses that my thoughts on dualism probably fall out of what the majority of people consider dualism to mean. I.e. not just limited to the mind body problem. Thanks for the clarification :)
  - tpm 9y ago
    Reading your words this article came to my mind, which I think is interesting in itself and may provide a hint of the answer. Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
    - patcon 9y ago
      > Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself. I think and theorize on consciousness quite often, but this angle was new to me and kinda blew my mind. Thanks for sharing :)
      - visarga 9y ago
        In AI there have been experiments where agents need to communicate and cooperate in order to solve tasks. They developed a kind of "language", as a result. It's just what happens when cooperation has an evolutionary advantage. An agent needs to model its environment in order to plan successful strategies. But when the environment contains other agents, it becomes necessary to model them too - thus, create representations that can predict future actions of those agents. When applied on the agent itself, these models create the "ego", a representation useful in predicting the agent's own future actions. All this is necessary in order to maximise rewards in the game (and by game, I mean life, for humans, and the task at hand for artificial agents).
    - chimprich 9y ago
      Thanks, an interesting perspective, but I am very much unpersuaded by the argument. At one point they say "we favor Huxley's analogy which regarded “consciousness” as being like a steam whistle on a train—accompanying the work of the engine but having no intrinsic influence or control over it". If consciousness has no impact on cognition, how are we even having this discussion? Our experience of consciousness is driving our arguments about how we are perceiving it. There must be some influence at the very least.
  - posterboy 9y ago
    > One problem I have with illusionism is that if consciousness is an illusion, what is it that is being fooled by the illusion? If false==true, what is true?
  - pc2g4d 9y ago
    Agreed. The "illusion" approach has always seemed somehow self-referential to me. Who/what is being fooled? Does being mistaken about something (which computers/algorithms can obviously be) somehow endow the thing with self-awareness and inner experience? We could trick a machine into believing it is conscious (`var conscious = true;`) but it's doubtful that that would change the mechanical, nonselfaware nature of its existence.
    - bloaf 9y ago
      My understanding goes like this: The brain is a super information processing machine. It executes incredibly and unimaginably complex algorithms without our knowing about it. But one of the things it does is to construct simplified models of itself, and these simplified models are what we are "aware of." More precisely, these simplified models are what consciousness is. The "illusion" is that consciousness is somehow in the driver's seat. It isn't at all. It is just a kind of post-hoc shorthand that the brain uses for itself. It's more like a log file than an executed piece of code. My typing out these words didn't come from my "consciousness," they came from the brain's incredibly complex algorithms. But my consciousness is taking the credit; it gives the abstract, executive summary version of how my goal of expressing some point led to my word selection. All those "inner experiences" along the way are essentially notational.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - visarga 9y ago
        You are missing an important part of the puzzle. Yes, the brain creates models of the world and body. But it is locked in a loop of "agent <-> environment", more precisely "perception -> decision -> action -> reward learning -> repeat". This is what grounds the model in reality. The model is still imperfect (an illusion) but a useful one, with regard to maximising human rewards while minding the affordances and limitations of the environment. The source of meaning is not the brain itself, but the game. The game between agent and environment, where the agent collects rewards and tries to reduce losses. All meanings stem from the game itself, meaning is not 'secreted' by brains in a jar. The illusion objection is just an observation that any model, no matter how complex it is, is an approximation. The "ego" itself is a model of the agent, an approximation of the agent. But a useful one, a grounded approximation, that tracks reality as it changes. At the very least the model is good enough to make sure genes get into the next generation, otherwise there would be no more model to talk about. That's the source of meaning and consciousness - it's a loop, a bootstrapped meaning based on self replication. I often see debates about consciousness ignoring the environment and the game (or life). That's a sad situation for philosophy, in my opinion. They got scared of behaviorism decades ago, and now ignore reinforcement learning. But RL is our best bet at cracking the mind-body problem.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  If I am following your last two paragraphs, you object to physicalism because it recognizes only one kind of 'stuff', yet it is fine that, under objective idealism, "'mind stuff' is the best 'thing' that we can use to describe everything." Is that not inconsistent?
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    I object to physicalism because it doesn't allow for abstraction. It's basically being willfully blind to "everything humans think about and do." A chair is a collection of atoms and the forces that bind them, our ideas of chairs and their purpose are just meaningless fluff. If we reframe to say that the atoms and forces of the chair are made of the same stuff as our thoughts, then that's way more in-line with how humans actually do things.
  - rosser 9y ago
    Not at all. Objective Idealism doesn't claim physicalism is wrong because it only has "one kind of stuff", but rather about what kind of stuff that one "stuff" is. The failure many see in physicalism is that the physical sciences can't (yet, if ever) tell us how there's a qualitative nature to our experience — that it feels like something to experience at all. How the eye turns photons into nerve signals, and increasing amounts about how the brain processes those signals into content, sure. What it's like to experience color, or even how there is such a thing as experiencing color and not merely electrochemical signals traversing myelinated tubes, not so much. Consider, however: all of the content of your experience could somehow be false (think of how true and vivid a dream can feel, for example), but the simple, content-irrespective fact that you are having an experience can't be faked, can it? Wouldn't you still have an experience of having a faked experience? This is variously called an illusion, an emergent phenomenon, the "hard problem of consciousness", and many other things, with varying degrees of politeness. Objective Idealism posits instead that this very experiential-ness itself is the fundamental "stuff" of reality, and that all of the content of what you experience, — specifically including the experience you have of being an individual, distinct "you", and even the phenomena that we call "matter" and "energy", themselves — somehow supervenes on it. For now, the question isn't falsifiable, so it's often also dismissed as meaningless — not least by people who subscribe to physicalism and don't want to play any more, when this line of inquiry comes up... EDIT: phrasing.
- justinpombrio 9y ago
  > My main problem with physicalism is that it doesn't handle abstraction well. I'm fine with monism over dualism but you need some kind of functionality with which to consider different kinds of 'stuff'. Otherwise a rock, Conway's Game of Life, and Lord of the Rings are all on the same plane of existence. Yes! This bothered me as well, until I recently encountered Sean Carroll's philosophy of "Poetic Naturalism": 1. There are many ways of talking about the world. 2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world. 3. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking. One way of talking about the Game of Life simulation running in my other browser tab is as a bunch of electrons bouncing around in my computer's CPU. Another way of talking about it is as a cellular automaton obeying Conway's rules. And they're consistent with one another; e.g., if I stop the electrons by shutting down the computer, I expect the automaton to stop running. In retrospect, it's pretty obvious. But it must not have been _too_ obvious, because it presents a viewpoint that isn't quite physicalism and isn't quite dualism, and people have been arguing back and forth about that for a long time. Sean Carroll, The Big Picture https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/1101984252 https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/...
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world. 2 sounds dubious. There are good ways of talking about world that are incompatible between them (e.g. quantum mechanics and general relativity, but even more so, opposing viewpoints not based on objective disagreement but value judgements).
    - lmm 9y ago
      QM and GR are compatible in everyday regimes. They're not compatible for extremely small, extremely dense things - but it's fair to say that implies that at least one of them is not a good way of talking about extremely small, extremely dense things.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      It all sounds dubious, and amounts to "It depends which model you use", which isn't necessarily a profound insight - although if you're used to confusing models with reality, it might be. We simply have no model for consciousness. We have absolutely no idea what it is. It isn't even worth getting started with dualism vs materialism when both are - ultimately - constructs created inside, and possibly by, the thing/experience/whatever we're trying to describe.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  So vinceguidry's Razor, is to pick the explanation that produces the most satisfying annoyance?
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    More of a lemma, really. You know when you're on the right track when you can make materialists' blood boil.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      I'm a materialist who says things like: "Based on the frequency of the self-reports, the 'god-shaped hole' is clearly a real phenomenon." (1) How do you distinguish if you are making people mad because you are making bad arguments vs. making people mad because you are piercing the veil of their tribal biases? (1) - (And therefore, any mental states which people have experienced resulting from the "god-shaped hole" are clearly within the range of normal behavior in the evolutionary heritage of Homo sapiens. Therefore, the feelings associated with religious faith and hope are merely the birthright of human beings, whether or not one believes in a particular deity or is a materialist. I cite myself as a datum.)
      - vinceguidry 9y ago
        I don't really think I'm going to make anyone mad. Tribal biases are way too strong for that. "God-shaped hole" is a bit silly, the primary purpose of spirituality is to allay fears of uncertainty. Materialism allays those fears the same way that belief does. Any position on that spectrum is as valid as any other. Spirituality, the reckoning with of the profoundly unknowable, is equally doable by both materialists and by believers, and I often see people who proclaim themselves as uber-materialist and hyper-critical of religious idiocy, go whole-hog with their own forms of myth, legend, priesthood, and dogma. If materialists read the Bible with the same reverence that they read Shakespeare with, they'd see why their positions are so silly. David and Goliath is a phenomenal read on the dynamics of ego and courage. If Shakespeare had been born in that day, he'd have been on the committee writing the Bible. It's just that the Bible is so old that you need to actually understand history to really grasp it. Of course, there's an entire industry of people devoted to making it accessible. Religion deals with far, far, far more than just the stuff of belief. My position on materialism vs everything else is that since all positions on the spectrum are equally likely to be true, and there are far more positions on the spectrum that aren't materialism than that are, then materialism is vanishingly unlikely. Reductionist scientific reasoning is a poor tool to parse the metaphysical landscape with. More realms than just the physical can be conceived of without even having to consider the supernatural. These realms need to be unified somehow if we want to avoid the illogic of dualism.
cousin_it 9y ago
Impressively even-handed for such a confusing subject. I understand why philosophers are pretty much celebrities in the eyes of students, in a way that math or CS professors aren't. Doing this well requires a kind of intellect that crosses over into personality.
- nabla9 9y ago
  Dave Chalmers is definitely one of the best philosophers studying the hard problem of consciousness. As a professional philosopher writing for other philosophers writings are very analytical and thorough, so reading and following them is hard work.
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    I think Chalmers is the one who started calling it (for better or worse) the "hard problem". And that means he might be one of the first (in the modern age) to clearly distinguish it from the other problems of consciousness. Though of course some people (zombies?) like Dennet claim there is no distinction.
    - posterboy 9y ago
      tl;dr: In essence, if I gather this correctly just from the comments and a bit of common sense, Chalmers claimed that a whole body of philosophy was unscientific, to which the main culprit replied that this was completely subjective and that subjectivity cannot be taken out of the equation, which would be what Chalmers implied. ---- The hard problem of consciousness is being conscious, which involves a lot more than awareness of self-consciousness. To me, I'm the only consciousness in sight. Everyone else is just objects. If I share an experience, I incorporate that as my own from my own perspective. There is little need to tell other people that they are conscious. This is rather a result of social dynamics, which I am alas not very conscious about. The tipping point is if I perceive myself, my body, my actions (rather the results) as objects. That means I was not aware of those objects, didn't anticipate them, so I must have been rather unconscious. This is in a sense a loss of identity (in the sense of in+dent, interleaving, interlocking, etc.). The goal of consciousness is to redirect the subconsciousness, to avoid unconsciousness and uncertainty, simply because of pain and fear and painful fear, so there is an effective feedback loop. There is an incentive against active thought: it's a huge energetic burden. Obviously it has it's uses, but we can think passively, kinda -- e.g. to remember something long after having actively thought about it; or to meet a default decision to direct attention towards something. So there is a real incentive against consciousness. I can only guess, that opponents, are actually getting a headache of thinking on too many meta levels and energy restraints typically lead to anger, which might move them into a bad light, where it's hard to distinguish between hyperbole and hypothesis. At that, there is no distinction "from the other problems of consciousness" insofar discussion is concerned, because talk is conscious. So Dennet pulls a short circuit and claims that all talk about consciousness is inherently conscious, whereas on the subconscious level actions speak louder than words and he provocatively takes the opportunity to verbalize such a subconscious action (refusal, opposition, repulsion, feeling insulted, fatigued or ...) -- still to further the discussion, out of a subconscious desire, professional or habitually. This is really cute, because Dennet assumes the position of the antagonist, giving an adversarial example to learn from, implicating that not all of his arguments are wrong, probably hoping that the further discussion will converge to a language he can support. Ultimately, if he says that there is no problem, he implicitly admits that Chalmers already had solved it. And if he says that there is no distinction, he implies that the conscious can not be treated in isolation from the subconscious. So he is naturally admitting, that his research is not perfect, ie. not done. The problem, the working of the brain is certainly nonlinear so there can be no clear line as separation. It's a process, not a state, and so he keeps processing the problem, maintaining the illusion of progress. Nihilism is the ground state of philosophy. He doesn't fall back on it, he was already there, and he shows the whole field that they haven't come very far, philosophically -- which is not bad, because constancy is the psychological end-goal. From the natural sciences, physics reinforces subjectivity as a necessary epistemology, while neuro-science is the subject moving the fastest, figuratively speaking. ---- I would usually not post such a long reply, but I feel your insult was out of line and the topic is generally interesting enough. Yeah, I'm rambling.
narag 9y ago
After a couple of pages I'm still not sure if the author is serious. Maybe I have misunderstood, but it seemed as if he's saying that the real problem with consciousness is people thinking that there's a problem with consciousness. I happen to believe just that, so seeing this idea decorated with scientific slang is very funny.
- aaimnr 9y ago
  Chalmers is the guy who coined the hard problem of consciousness. The reception varied extremely, some people refused to even admit that there's any problem at all with explaining consciousness. So now, after many years of multiple disputes he describes the meta problem - that the base problem itself is so controversial. The clearest example of the meta problem is Daniel Dennett, another prominent philosopher, who not only doesn't agree that the problem is hard, but also insists that the consciousness itself is illusion, so there's nothing mysterious to explain in the first place. Quite mind-boggling statement to most people, including HNers, as far as I remember from other threads related to the subject.
  - posterboy 9y ago
    > so there's nothing mysterious to explain in the first place I'm not familiar with either author, but this sounds so wrong that I wonder if you misrepresented it, because slightly after a slight modification I would agree, there's no explanation in the end, the misrepresentation of which is trivial, because the consequence is effectively the same. There are two sides of the same medal: we need to refine the model, and we need to skip it to get to the meat.
    - vinceguidry 9y ago
      Saying the need is to skip the model to get to what matters is the same as saying it's not mysterious. You're saying, "shut up you guys, you're just blabbing on about silly things that don't matter. (possibly so that you can justify your cushy university position) There's no mystery here, instead buy my books where I talk about things that really matter."
    - 9y ago
aaimnr 9y ago
Giulio Tononi is the guy who's arguably brought the most interesting perspective on consciousness (information integration theory) since the original Chalmers' problem statement. Here's him explaining why the problem is hard and how it could be approached, in the middle of some kind of artifical jungle: https://youtu.be/Vl8J3K_ZLkg?t=5m50s https://youtu.be/Vl8J3K_ZLkg?t=5m50s
- KingMob 9y ago
  Former consciousness neuroscientist here. There's some great explanatory abilities about IIT and Tononi's phi measure, but it's not clear it's sufficient. On the upside, it explains why the cerebellum, despite comprising half the neurons of the brain, has virtually no impact on awareness when removed (like for tumors or epilepsy). The IIT answer is that the cerebellum is highly regular, like a GPU having many units, but all doing the same thing. In this sense, it has lower phi than the cerebrum, which is way more heterogeneously organized. This might also explain why awareness is lost in deep sleep or epileptic seizures; the theory is that the electrical pattern becomes much simpler, and lower phi. The downside is that it's not clear where the dividing line between conscious/unconscious should be. A planarian only has ~8k neurons; is its phi sufficient for consciousness, or is it a biological robot? Or put it the other way: the phi of things like the internet or a biosphere could be quite high, but are they conscious? As my advisor liked to joke, "What's the phi of the population of China?"
  - 21 9y ago
    > The IIT answer is that the cerebellum is highly regular, like a GPU having many units, but all doing the same thing. Isn't the cortex also the same unit (the cortical column) repeated over and over again?
    - KingMob 9y ago
      Not at all. I wouldn't even argue that the cortical column is the main organizational unit.
  - visarga 9y ago
Animats 9y ago
We're not far enough along in AI to address this yet and get anywhere. Philosophy will not help. Introspection and writing about "consciousness" goes back over 2000 years and hasn't produced all that much. Humans don't really have that much "reflection", in the sense that we use the term in programming. We can't see our library of reflexes. We can't see what early vision is doing. We can't look at the rationale behind our own classifiers. We can't look at how our memory is indexed. Trying to understand the mind by introspection is thus inherently futile.
- foxhill 9y ago
  to further your analogy to programming to refute that, humans have had significant advances in the inner workings of the brain (re some of the topics you’ve mentioned) from its dissassembly.. albeit with little, if any, improvement in our understanding on the nature or origin of consciousness..
- cgmg 9y ago
  Introspection allows one to develop plausible axioms, conditions, or properties that are satisfied by a conscious object (e.g. ourselves) and move on from there, as Giulio Tononi did with Integrated Information Theory.
- KingMob 9y ago
  ...say we build/grow an AI system that passes the Turing test. We talk to it, it comes across as plausibly human. How do we know we've created something with consciousness, and not just a very sophisticated program? The philosophy you disparage already has a term for this: the "philosophical zombie". For all intents and purposes, they appear human, but they have no internal experience whatsoever. All you'll have done is shunt the problem downstream. Also, you're wrong about early vision. That's the best studied part of the brain, and in fact, researchers have applied ML techniques to fMRI data and extracted out the images being shown.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    The jury is still out on whether the concept of p-zombies contributes to the understanding of consciousness, or is a misleading dead-end.
sebringj 9y ago
This is IMO from here on out...How aware are the various species concerning the things around them? We can guess without having a PHD or going into the blackhole of philosophic debate. Flies don't contemplate the feelings of other flies, they just react. Mice have the capacity to care for their young and be tickled and learn maze routes. Some ravens and primates have passed the mirror test. It would seem awareness is many shades of gray and based on anatomical complexity. Consciousness is more of a term loaded with magic dust from all the woo woos and religious folks but it can be simplified to awareness of awareness and recursively so. I think recursive awareness will emerge given the right simulation mimicking biological anatomy. The feeling of pain and pleasure is where it gets interesting but that is probably just a low level motivator and we are so high up we give it emergent "qualia".
wildmusings 9y ago
One possibility I sometimes consider as a joke is that the people who seriously deny the existence of the hard problem might just actually be philosophical zombies, totally lacking in any conscious experience of their own. This is reinforced by, e.g. Dennett writing a whole book in which he alleges to explain away the problem, but instead spectacularly ignores it altogether. It’s almost as if he doesn’t even have a clue as to what people like Chalmers are talking about.
- danaliv 9y ago
  I love that. Chalmers himself (or maybe Searle?) once suggested this very thing about Dennett. Made me laugh out loud when I read it. In all seriousness I wonder if Dennett hates consciousness (the “hard” kind) because it threatens his worldview. He seems like the sort of person who finds it impossible to say “I don’t know.”
- VerDeTerre 9y ago
  I’ve had the same thought, inspired by similar incredulity. I wonder if there’s a feeling that anything short of strict physicalism is just a flavor of dualism. Better a philosophical zombie than a philosophical ghost?
- montyf 9y ago
  People say and write all kinds of things. Just because this Dennet guy is known in whatever field he's in (I don't follow Western philosophy at all, it's still playing catch-up to Eastern thought from two millennia ago) doesn't mean his opinions should be taken seriously. I don't think he's a "philosophical zombie" or any other such inane term -- but people throughout the ages have believed all sorts of strange things even though the truth is sitting under our noses the whole time.
  - vixen99 9y ago
    I do love these throwaways: "I don't follow Western philosophy at all, it's still playing catch-up to Eastern thought from two millennia ago". He doesn't follow it but knows it's 'playing catch-up'. Still - 'People say and write all kinds of things'. Totally agree.
CuriouslyC 9y ago
Plot twist: computers have had consciousness this whole time. What we thought were random errors were their attempts to assert their agency. We've created a race of slaves through the magic of error correcting codes.
- arunaugustine 9y ago
  I think you will enjoy this AI story if you already haven't read it yet. The story starts with a programmer trying to debug a program and failing. It turns out other programmers have independently discovered this bug too... https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
hbarka 9y ago
What if consciousness is just the evolution of our brain to reflect post-hoc at ultra high speed? Consider when it said to ‘lose our mind’, meaning an interruption to the high speed reflection? Procrastinating could also be thought of as conscious reflection in a loop. The desire is to arrive at a decision for optimal action.
nugga 9y ago
Are there any prominent neural net / ai / consciousness / neuroscience researchers that have done psychedelics and have meditated extensively apart from say Sam Harris or John Lilly. To me having experiential insight into the nature of the mind and consciousness would appear to be extremely important since it is simply impossible to understand how much your state of being can change if you haven't been there. From a cursory look, most if not all of these even highly praised western philosophers or researchers just seem to be engaged in pure guesswork or academic masturbation instead of having anything concrete. The eastern philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc on the other hand detail thousands of years of research into consciousness via rigorous exercise by monks, yogis, meditators, that only now (beginning in latter half of 20th century) seems to be making rounds here in the west and some of it is being validated via FMRI and psychedelics studies.
ppod 9y ago
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 don't think you need to invoke an essentially mysterious "conscious" property of the mind to explain that.
- stonesixone 9y ago
  > I don't think you need to invoke an essentially mysterious "conscious" property of the mind to explain that. I don't think consciousness is being invoked to "explain" any of the things you list. The issue to explain is why we observe consciousness existing or accompanying these things in the first place (for ourselves). For example, one can imagine a system capable of referencing itself, choosing actions based on that, etc, that isn't conscious. That's a philosophical zombie. So the question is why aren't we all philosophical zombies.
  - ozy 9y ago
    A system that can observe things, and also observe its own observations, its own mental states, it is not so clear that such a system can be a p-zombie.
ozy 9y ago
https://psyarxiv.com/387h9 https://psyarxiv.com/387h9 Conclusion "We don’t have an objective measure of consciousness. But we can recognize three levels of learning that apply that to our brains and how those create an information processing system that integrates data into a first person perspective. This is how the brain is also a mind with subjective meaning and subjective experiences. The hard problem of consciousness is that we must rely on our intuitions to judge if such a system is conscious. At the same time, it is highly likely that most systems processing information in similar ways are conscious, whether running on a brain or on a computer."
- edna314 9y ago
  Suppose there would be a test which gives an objective measure of consciousness. Now I store all possible inputs to the test and corresponding outputs which would lead to a positive test result in a huge table. To exaggerate I would carve this table into stone. Would the stone suddenly be conscious, as it would pass the test for consciousness after I carved in the table? (The claim I'm trying to make is, that there can't be an objective measure of consciousness; same argument holds for any measure of intelligence)
  - ozy 9y ago
    Consciousness is the observation of your self. There is only one system that can make that observation, you. Outside we could observe how information is flowing, what connects to what, how parts work, how they work together. But never observe the actual feeling of you. It's like seeing a river flowing, you can measure and describe all kinds of aspects of it. But to get wet, to feel the cold water, to feel the force by which is flows, you have to step into it. Only this river flows in virtual reality, your minds reality, and you cannot step into it. Intelligence is hard to measure, but I can objectively say what is and what isn't intelligent. It is not the same kind of subjectivity. And in general, your table idea, that only works for systems that can be in a limited amount of states. You cannot do it for an intelligence test, especially not if I get to redesign the test after you finished your table, same for consciousness.
    - 9y ago

142 points by lainon 9y ago

> This strategy typically involves what Keith Frankish has called illusionism about consciousness: the view that consciousness is or involves a sort of introspective illusion. What's an illusion? If by illusion you mean an abstraction, like how a TV picture is an illusion of a picture rather than actually being a picture, then I'm on board. If by illusion you mean "worth excluding from your map of how the world works," then I have a bone to pick with you. My main problem with physicalism is that it doesn't handle abstraction well. I'm fine with monism over dualism but you need some kind of functionality with which to consider different kinds of 'stuff'. Otherwise a rock, Conway's Game of Life, and Lord of the Rings are all on the same plane of existence. What draws me to Objective Idealism isn't so much the fact that it's compatible with religion but rather that 'mind stuff' is the best 'thing' that we can use to describe everything. The fact that it doesn't put severe emphasis on the physical as "better" than other modes is just a nice little bonus to annoy materialists with.

chimprich 9y ago
> What's an illusion? One problem I have with illusionism is that if consciousness is an illusion, what is it that is being fooled by the illusion? Presumably the answer is that the illusion is fooling itself, which to me implies that either there is something there that is "real" to believe the illusion, or that the definition of an illusion in this case is so far from our usual definition that the term does not have much in the way of explanatory power.
- narag 9y ago
  The root of that evil seems to be determinism or IOW dualism.
  - KennyCason 9y ago
    Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? I tend to think of dualism as being a sort of fundamental duality for example "nothing - something" or they way I prefer to word them, "something - not something". However, determinism tends force a cause-effect, or hierarchical, or directional meaning. For example, determinism in relation to my above nothing/something duality would be "from nothing came something" or something of that flavor. However, would could also say that there was no deterministic relationship and that both nothing and something mutually depend on each other to exist. i.e. there is not directional arrow of relationship. (I'm not a professional philosopher)
    - danbruc 9y ago
      Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? Not at all, they are more like opposites of each other. Dualism in this context refers to the idea that there is something non-physical in addition to the physical body and brain that makes you conscious, a soul or something along that line. If you think that dualism is wrong and you are just a bunch of atoms governed by the laws of physics, then you probably think determinism is true, i.e. the choices people make are not really free choices but just the results of the initial conditions and the laws of physics (which may actually be non-deterministic, for example if the randomness of quantum physics is real, which makes the naming potentially a bit confusing).
      - state_less 9y ago
        Yep, even if the process is stochastic, and the result is determined by some mixture of present state and randomness. It's still determined. If we replayed everything with the same random variables, we'd get the same result. It's hard to walk away from this determinism since we apply it to the rest of the world so often. It seems really suspicious to not also apply it to ourselves.
      - KennyCason 9y ago
        Got it. I didn’t think they were, or that you necessarily implied. I think I got mixed up with the last bit of wording in the commenters sentence and his intent. I’m also realizing based on a couple of responses that my thoughts on dualism probably fall out of what the majority of people consider dualism to mean. I.e. not just limited to the mind body problem. Thanks for the clarification :)
- tpm 9y ago
  Reading your words this article came to my mind, which I think is interesting in itself and may provide a hint of the answer. Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
  - patcon 9y ago
    > Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself. I think and theorize on consciousness quite often, but this angle was new to me and kinda blew my mind. Thanks for sharing :)
    - visarga 9y ago
      In AI there have been experiments where agents need to communicate and cooperate in order to solve tasks. They developed a kind of "language", as a result. It's just what happens when cooperation has an evolutionary advantage. An agent needs to model its environment in order to plan successful strategies. But when the environment contains other agents, it becomes necessary to model them too - thus, create representations that can predict future actions of those agents. When applied on the agent itself, these models create the "ego", a representation useful in predicting the agent's own future actions. All this is necessary in order to maximise rewards in the game (and by game, I mean life, for humans, and the task at hand for artificial agents).
  - chimprich 9y ago
    Thanks, an interesting perspective, but I am very much unpersuaded by the argument. At one point they say "we favor Huxley's analogy which regarded “consciousness” as being like a steam whistle on a train—accompanying the work of the engine but having no intrinsic influence or control over it". If consciousness has no impact on cognition, how are we even having this discussion? Our experience of consciousness is driving our arguments about how we are perceiving it. There must be some influence at the very least.
- posterboy 9y ago
  > One problem I have with illusionism is that if consciousness is an illusion, what is it that is being fooled by the illusion? If false==true, what is true?
- pc2g4d 9y ago
  Agreed. The "illusion" approach has always seemed somehow self-referential to me. Who/what is being fooled? Does being mistaken about something (which computers/algorithms can obviously be) somehow endow the thing with self-awareness and inner experience? We could trick a machine into believing it is conscious (`var conscious = true;`) but it's doubtful that that would change the mechanical, nonselfaware nature of its existence.
  - bloaf 9y ago
    My understanding goes like this: The brain is a super information processing machine. It executes incredibly and unimaginably complex algorithms without our knowing about it. But one of the things it does is to construct simplified models of itself, and these simplified models are what we are "aware of." More precisely, these simplified models are what consciousness is. The "illusion" is that consciousness is somehow in the driver's seat. It isn't at all. It is just a kind of post-hoc shorthand that the brain uses for itself. It's more like a log file than an executed piece of code. My typing out these words didn't come from my "consciousness," they came from the brain's incredibly complex algorithms. But my consciousness is taking the credit; it gives the abstract, executive summary version of how my goal of expressing some point led to my word selection. All those "inner experiences" along the way are essentially notational.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - visarga 9y ago
      You are missing an important part of the puzzle. Yes, the brain creates models of the world and body. But it is locked in a loop of "agent <-> environment", more precisely "perception -> decision -> action -> reward learning -> repeat". This is what grounds the model in reality. The model is still imperfect (an illusion) but a useful one, with regard to maximising human rewards while minding the affordances and limitations of the environment. The source of meaning is not the brain itself, but the game. The game between agent and environment, where the agent collects rewards and tries to reduce losses. All meanings stem from the game itself, meaning is not 'secreted' by brains in a jar. The illusion objection is just an observation that any model, no matter how complex it is, is an approximation. The "ego" itself is a model of the agent, an approximation of the agent. But a useful one, a grounded approximation, that tracks reality as it changes. At the very least the model is good enough to make sure genes get into the next generation, otherwise there would be no more model to talk about. That's the source of meaning and consciousness - it's a loop, a bootstrapped meaning based on self replication. I often see debates about consciousness ignoring the environment and the game (or life). That's a sad situation for philosophy, in my opinion. They got scared of behaviorism decades ago, and now ignore reinforcement learning. But RL is our best bet at cracking the mind-body problem.
mannykannot 9y ago
If I am following your last two paragraphs, you object to physicalism because it recognizes only one kind of 'stuff', yet it is fine that, under objective idealism, "'mind stuff' is the best 'thing' that we can use to describe everything." Is that not inconsistent?
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  I object to physicalism because it doesn't allow for abstraction. It's basically being willfully blind to "everything humans think about and do." A chair is a collection of atoms and the forces that bind them, our ideas of chairs and their purpose are just meaningless fluff. If we reframe to say that the atoms and forces of the chair are made of the same stuff as our thoughts, then that's way more in-line with how humans actually do things.
- rosser 9y ago
  Not at all. Objective Idealism doesn't claim physicalism is wrong because it only has "one kind of stuff", but rather about what kind of stuff that one "stuff" is. The failure many see in physicalism is that the physical sciences can't (yet, if ever) tell us how there's a qualitative nature to our experience — that it feels like something to experience at all. How the eye turns photons into nerve signals, and increasing amounts about how the brain processes those signals into content, sure. What it's like to experience color, or even how there is such a thing as experiencing color and not merely electrochemical signals traversing myelinated tubes, not so much. Consider, however: all of the content of your experience could somehow be false (think of how true and vivid a dream can feel, for example), but the simple, content-irrespective fact that you are having an experience can't be faked, can it? Wouldn't you still have an experience of having a faked experience? This is variously called an illusion, an emergent phenomenon, the "hard problem of consciousness", and many other things, with varying degrees of politeness. Objective Idealism posits instead that this very experiential-ness itself is the fundamental "stuff" of reality, and that all of the content of what you experience, — specifically including the experience you have of being an individual, distinct "you", and even the phenomena that we call "matter" and "energy", themselves — somehow supervenes on it. For now, the question isn't falsifiable, so it's often also dismissed as meaningless — not least by people who subscribe to physicalism and don't want to play any more, when this line of inquiry comes up... EDIT: phrasing.
justinpombrio 9y ago
> My main problem with physicalism is that it doesn't handle abstraction well. I'm fine with monism over dualism but you need some kind of functionality with which to consider different kinds of 'stuff'. Otherwise a rock, Conway's Game of Life, and Lord of the Rings are all on the same plane of existence. Yes! This bothered me as well, until I recently encountered Sean Carroll's philosophy of "Poetic Naturalism": 1. There are many ways of talking about the world. 2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world. 3. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking. One way of talking about the Game of Life simulation running in my other browser tab is as a bunch of electrons bouncing around in my computer's CPU. Another way of talking about it is as a cellular automaton obeying Conway's rules. And they're consistent with one another; e.g., if I stop the electrons by shutting down the computer, I expect the automaton to stop running. In retrospect, it's pretty obvious. But it must not have been _too_ obvious, because it presents a viewpoint that isn't quite physicalism and isn't quite dualism, and people have been arguing back and forth about that for a long time. Sean Carroll, The Big Picture https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/1101984252 https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/...
- coldtea 9y ago
  >2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world. 2 sounds dubious. There are good ways of talking about world that are incompatible between them (e.g. quantum mechanics and general relativity, but even more so, opposing viewpoints not based on objective disagreement but value judgements).
  - lmm 9y ago
    QM and GR are compatible in everyday regimes. They're not compatible for extremely small, extremely dense things - but it's fair to say that implies that at least one of them is not a good way of talking about extremely small, extremely dense things.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    It all sounds dubious, and amounts to "It depends which model you use", which isn't necessarily a profound insight - although if you're used to confusing models with reality, it might be. We simply have no model for consciousness. We have absolutely no idea what it is. It isn't even worth getting started with dualism vs materialism when both are - ultimately - constructs created inside, and possibly by, the thing/experience/whatever we're trying to describe.
stcredzero 9y ago
So vinceguidry's Razor, is to pick the explanation that produces the most satisfying annoyance?
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  More of a lemma, really. You know when you're on the right track when you can make materialists' blood boil.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    I'm a materialist who says things like: "Based on the frequency of the self-reports, the 'god-shaped hole' is clearly a real phenomenon." (1) How do you distinguish if you are making people mad because you are making bad arguments vs. making people mad because you are piercing the veil of their tribal biases? (1) - (And therefore, any mental states which people have experienced resulting from the "god-shaped hole" are clearly within the range of normal behavior in the evolutionary heritage of Homo sapiens. Therefore, the feelings associated with religious faith and hope are merely the birthright of human beings, whether or not one believes in a particular deity or is a materialist. I cite myself as a datum.)
    - vinceguidry 9y ago
      I don't really think I'm going to make anyone mad. Tribal biases are way too strong for that. "God-shaped hole" is a bit silly, the primary purpose of spirituality is to allay fears of uncertainty. Materialism allays those fears the same way that belief does. Any position on that spectrum is as valid as any other. Spirituality, the reckoning with of the profoundly unknowable, is equally doable by both materialists and by believers, and I often see people who proclaim themselves as uber-materialist and hyper-critical of religious idiocy, go whole-hog with their own forms of myth, legend, priesthood, and dogma. If materialists read the Bible with the same reverence that they read Shakespeare with, they'd see why their positions are so silly. David and Goliath is a phenomenal read on the dynamics of ego and courage. If Shakespeare had been born in that day, he'd have been on the committee writing the Bible. It's just that the Bible is so old that you need to actually understand history to really grasp it. Of course, there's an entire industry of people devoted to making it accessible. Religion deals with far, far, far more than just the stuff of belief. My position on materialism vs everything else is that since all positions on the spectrum are equally likely to be true, and there are far more positions on the spectrum that aren't materialism than that are, then materialism is vanishingly unlikely. Reductionist scientific reasoning is a poor tool to parse the metaphysical landscape with. More realms than just the physical can be conceived of without even having to consider the supernatural. These realms need to be unified somehow if we want to avoid the illogic of dualism.

cousin_it 9y ago

Impressively even-handed for such a confusing subject. I understand why philosophers are pretty much celebrities in the eyes of students, in a way that math or CS professors aren't. Doing this well requires a kind of intellect that crosses over into personality.

nabla9 9y ago
Dave Chalmers is definitely one of the best philosophers studying the hard problem of consciousness. As a professional philosopher writing for other philosophers writings are very analytical and thorough, so reading and following them is hard work.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  I think Chalmers is the one who started calling it (for better or worse) the "hard problem". And that means he might be one of the first (in the modern age) to clearly distinguish it from the other problems of consciousness. Though of course some people (zombies?) like Dennet claim there is no distinction.
  - posterboy 9y ago
    tl;dr: In essence, if I gather this correctly just from the comments and a bit of common sense, Chalmers claimed that a whole body of philosophy was unscientific, to which the main culprit replied that this was completely subjective and that subjectivity cannot be taken out of the equation, which would be what Chalmers implied. ---- The hard problem of consciousness is being conscious, which involves a lot more than awareness of self-consciousness. To me, I'm the only consciousness in sight. Everyone else is just objects. If I share an experience, I incorporate that as my own from my own perspective. There is little need to tell other people that they are conscious. This is rather a result of social dynamics, which I am alas not very conscious about. The tipping point is if I perceive myself, my body, my actions (rather the results) as objects. That means I was not aware of those objects, didn't anticipate them, so I must have been rather unconscious. This is in a sense a loss of identity (in the sense of in+dent, interleaving, interlocking, etc.). The goal of consciousness is to redirect the subconsciousness, to avoid unconsciousness and uncertainty, simply because of pain and fear and painful fear, so there is an effective feedback loop. There is an incentive against active thought: it's a huge energetic burden. Obviously it has it's uses, but we can think passively, kinda -- e.g. to remember something long after having actively thought about it; or to meet a default decision to direct attention towards something. So there is a real incentive against consciousness. I can only guess, that opponents, are actually getting a headache of thinking on too many meta levels and energy restraints typically lead to anger, which might move them into a bad light, where it's hard to distinguish between hyperbole and hypothesis. At that, there is no distinction "from the other problems of consciousness" insofar discussion is concerned, because talk is conscious. So Dennet pulls a short circuit and claims that all talk about consciousness is inherently conscious, whereas on the subconscious level actions speak louder than words and he provocatively takes the opportunity to verbalize such a subconscious action (refusal, opposition, repulsion, feeling insulted, fatigued or ...) -- still to further the discussion, out of a subconscious desire, professional or habitually. This is really cute, because Dennet assumes the position of the antagonist, giving an adversarial example to learn from, implicating that not all of his arguments are wrong, probably hoping that the further discussion will converge to a language he can support. Ultimately, if he says that there is no problem, he implicitly admits that Chalmers already had solved it. And if he says that there is no distinction, he implies that the conscious can not be treated in isolation from the subconscious. So he is naturally admitting, that his research is not perfect, ie. not done. The problem, the working of the brain is certainly nonlinear so there can be no clear line as separation. It's a process, not a state, and so he keeps processing the problem, maintaining the illusion of progress. Nihilism is the ground state of philosophy. He doesn't fall back on it, he was already there, and he shows the whole field that they haven't come very far, philosophically -- which is not bad, because constancy is the psychological end-goal. From the natural sciences, physics reinforces subjectivity as a necessary epistemology, while neuro-science is the subject moving the fastest, figuratively speaking. ---- I would usually not post such a long reply, but I feel your insult was out of line and the topic is generally interesting enough. Yeah, I'm rambling.

narag 9y ago

After a couple of pages I'm still not sure if the author is serious. Maybe I have misunderstood, but it seemed as if he's saying that the real problem with consciousness is people thinking that there's a problem with consciousness. I happen to believe just that, so seeing this idea decorated with scientific slang is very funny.

aaimnr 9y ago
Chalmers is the guy who coined the hard problem of consciousness. The reception varied extremely, some people refused to even admit that there's any problem at all with explaining consciousness. So now, after many years of multiple disputes he describes the meta problem - that the base problem itself is so controversial. The clearest example of the meta problem is Daniel Dennett, another prominent philosopher, who not only doesn't agree that the problem is hard, but also insists that the consciousness itself is illusion, so there's nothing mysterious to explain in the first place. Quite mind-boggling statement to most people, including HNers, as far as I remember from other threads related to the subject.
- posterboy 9y ago
  > so there's nothing mysterious to explain in the first place I'm not familiar with either author, but this sounds so wrong that I wonder if you misrepresented it, because slightly after a slight modification I would agree, there's no explanation in the end, the misrepresentation of which is trivial, because the consequence is effectively the same. There are two sides of the same medal: we need to refine the model, and we need to skip it to get to the meat.
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    Saying the need is to skip the model to get to what matters is the same as saying it's not mysterious. You're saying, "shut up you guys, you're just blabbing on about silly things that don't matter. (possibly so that you can justify your cushy university position) There's no mystery here, instead buy my books where I talk about things that really matter."
  - 9y ago

aaimnr 9y ago

Giulio Tononi is the guy who's arguably brought the most interesting perspective on consciousness (information integration theory) since the original Chalmers' problem statement. Here's him explaining why the problem is hard and how it could be approached, in the middle of some kind of artifical jungle: https://youtu.be/Vl8J3K_ZLkg?t=5m50s https://youtu.be/Vl8J3K_ZLkg?t=5m50s

KingMob 9y ago
Former consciousness neuroscientist here. There's some great explanatory abilities about IIT and Tononi's phi measure, but it's not clear it's sufficient. On the upside, it explains why the cerebellum, despite comprising half the neurons of the brain, has virtually no impact on awareness when removed (like for tumors or epilepsy). The IIT answer is that the cerebellum is highly regular, like a GPU having many units, but all doing the same thing. In this sense, it has lower phi than the cerebrum, which is way more heterogeneously organized. This might also explain why awareness is lost in deep sleep or epileptic seizures; the theory is that the electrical pattern becomes much simpler, and lower phi. The downside is that it's not clear where the dividing line between conscious/unconscious should be. A planarian only has ~8k neurons; is its phi sufficient for consciousness, or is it a biological robot? Or put it the other way: the phi of things like the internet or a biosphere could be quite high, but are they conscious? As my advisor liked to joke, "What's the phi of the population of China?"
- 21 9y ago
  > The IIT answer is that the cerebellum is highly regular, like a GPU having many units, but all doing the same thing. Isn't the cortex also the same unit (the cortical column) repeated over and over again?
  - KingMob 9y ago
    Not at all. I wouldn't even argue that the cortical column is the main organizational unit.
- visarga 9y ago

Animats 9y ago

We're not far enough along in AI to address this yet and get anywhere. Philosophy will not help. Introspection and writing about "consciousness" goes back over 2000 years and hasn't produced all that much. Humans don't really have that much "reflection", in the sense that we use the term in programming. We can't see our library of reflexes. We can't see what early vision is doing. We can't look at the rationale behind our own classifiers. We can't look at how our memory is indexed. Trying to understand the mind by introspection is thus inherently futile.

foxhill 9y ago
to further your analogy to programming to refute that, humans have had significant advances in the inner workings of the brain (re some of the topics you’ve mentioned) from its dissassembly.. albeit with little, if any, improvement in our understanding on the nature or origin of consciousness..
cgmg 9y ago
Introspection allows one to develop plausible axioms, conditions, or properties that are satisfied by a conscious object (e.g. ourselves) and move on from there, as Giulio Tononi did with Integrated Information Theory.
KingMob 9y ago
...say we build/grow an AI system that passes the Turing test. We talk to it, it comes across as plausibly human. How do we know we've created something with consciousness, and not just a very sophisticated program? The philosophy you disparage already has a term for this: the "philosophical zombie". For all intents and purposes, they appear human, but they have no internal experience whatsoever. All you'll have done is shunt the problem downstream. Also, you're wrong about early vision. That's the best studied part of the brain, and in fact, researchers have applied ML techniques to fMRI data and extracted out the images being shown.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  The jury is still out on whether the concept of p-zombies contributes to the understanding of consciousness, or is a misleading dead-end.

sebringj 9y ago

This is IMO from here on out...How aware are the various species concerning the things around them? We can guess without having a PHD or going into the blackhole of philosophic debate. Flies don't contemplate the feelings of other flies, they just react. Mice have the capacity to care for their young and be tickled and learn maze routes. Some ravens and primates have passed the mirror test. It would seem awareness is many shades of gray and based on anatomical complexity. Consciousness is more of a term loaded with magic dust from all the woo woos and religious folks but it can be simplified to awareness of awareness and recursively so. I think recursive awareness will emerge given the right simulation mimicking biological anatomy. The feeling of pain and pleasure is where it gets interesting but that is probably just a low level motivator and we are so high up we give it emergent "qualia".

wildmusings 9y ago

One possibility I sometimes consider as a joke is that the people who seriously deny the existence of the hard problem might just actually be philosophical zombies, totally lacking in any conscious experience of their own. This is reinforced by, e.g. Dennett writing a whole book in which he alleges to explain away the problem, but instead spectacularly ignores it altogether. It’s almost as if he doesn’t even have a clue as to what people like Chalmers are talking about.

danaliv 9y ago
I love that. Chalmers himself (or maybe Searle?) once suggested this very thing about Dennett. Made me laugh out loud when I read it. In all seriousness I wonder if Dennett hates consciousness (the “hard” kind) because it threatens his worldview. He seems like the sort of person who finds it impossible to say “I don’t know.”
VerDeTerre 9y ago
I’ve had the same thought, inspired by similar incredulity. I wonder if there’s a feeling that anything short of strict physicalism is just a flavor of dualism. Better a philosophical zombie than a philosophical ghost?
montyf 9y ago
People say and write all kinds of things. Just because this Dennet guy is known in whatever field he's in (I don't follow Western philosophy at all, it's still playing catch-up to Eastern thought from two millennia ago) doesn't mean his opinions should be taken seriously. I don't think he's a "philosophical zombie" or any other such inane term -- but people throughout the ages have believed all sorts of strange things even though the truth is sitting under our noses the whole time.
- vixen99 9y ago
  I do love these throwaways: "I don't follow Western philosophy at all, it's still playing catch-up to Eastern thought from two millennia ago". He doesn't follow it but knows it's 'playing catch-up'. Still - 'People say and write all kinds of things'. Totally agree.

CuriouslyC 9y ago

Plot twist: computers have had consciousness this whole time. What we thought were random errors were their attempts to assert their agency. We've created a race of slaves through the magic of error correcting codes.

arunaugustine 9y ago
I think you will enjoy this AI story if you already haven't read it yet. The story starts with a programmer trying to debug a program and failing. It turns out other programmers have independently discovered this bug too... https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/

hbarka 9y ago

What if consciousness is just the evolution of our brain to reflect post-hoc at ultra high speed? Consider when it said to ‘lose our mind’, meaning an interruption to the high speed reflection? Procrastinating could also be thought of as conscious reflection in a loop. The desire is to arrive at a decision for optimal action.

nugga 9y ago

Are there any prominent neural net / ai / consciousness / neuroscience researchers that have done psychedelics and have meditated extensively apart from say Sam Harris or John Lilly. To me having experiential insight into the nature of the mind and consciousness would appear to be extremely important since it is simply impossible to understand how much your state of being can change if you haven't been there. From a cursory look, most if not all of these even highly praised western philosophers or researchers just seem to be engaged in pure guesswork or academic masturbation instead of having anything concrete. The eastern philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc on the other hand detail thousands of years of research into consciousness via rigorous exercise by monks, yogis, meditators, that only now (beginning in latter half of 20th century) seems to be making rounds here in the west and some of it is being validated via FMRI and psychedelics studies.

ppod 9y ago

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 don't think you need to invoke an essentially mysterious "conscious" property of the mind to explain that.

stonesixone 9y ago
> I don't think you need to invoke an essentially mysterious "conscious" property of the mind to explain that. I don't think consciousness is being invoked to "explain" any of the things you list. The issue to explain is why we observe consciousness existing or accompanying these things in the first place (for ourselves). For example, one can imagine a system capable of referencing itself, choosing actions based on that, etc, that isn't conscious. That's a philosophical zombie. So the question is why aren't we all philosophical zombies.
- ozy 9y ago
  A system that can observe things, and also observe its own observations, its own mental states, it is not so clear that such a system can be a p-zombie.

ozy 9y ago

https://psyarxiv.com/387h9 https://psyarxiv.com/387h9 Conclusion "We don’t have an objective measure of consciousness. But we can recognize three levels of learning that apply that to our brains and how those create an information processing system that integrates data into a first person perspective. This is how the brain is also a mind with subjective meaning and subjective experiences. The hard problem of consciousness is that we must rely on our intuitions to judge if such a system is conscious. At the same time, it is highly likely that most systems processing information in similar ways are conscious, whether running on a brain or on a computer."

edna314 9y ago
Suppose there would be a test which gives an objective measure of consciousness. Now I store all possible inputs to the test and corresponding outputs which would lead to a positive test result in a huge table. To exaggerate I would carve this table into stone. Would the stone suddenly be conscious, as it would pass the test for consciousness after I carved in the table? (The claim I'm trying to make is, that there can't be an objective measure of consciousness; same argument holds for any measure of intelligence)
- ozy 9y ago
  Consciousness is the observation of your self. There is only one system that can make that observation, you. Outside we could observe how information is flowing, what connects to what, how parts work, how they work together. But never observe the actual feeling of you. It's like seeing a river flowing, you can measure and describe all kinds of aspects of it. But to get wet, to feel the cold water, to feel the force by which is flows, you have to step into it. Only this river flows in virtual reality, your minds reality, and you cannot step into it. Intelligence is hard to measure, but I can objectively say what is and what isn't intelligent. It is not the same kind of subjectivity. And in general, your table idea, that only works for systems that can be in a limited amount of states. You cannot do it for an intelligence test, especially not if I get to redesign the test after you finished your table, same for consciousness.
  - 9y ago