8 ms·

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 v

by ppod 8y 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.

Omnus 8y ago
People used to make this same argument about why things fall to the ground when you let go of them. "Is it really surprising? Why wouldn't they just fall down? What kind of answer do you want?". You have to allow yourself to be puzzled by things. So yes, it is surprising. You don't seem to understand the most basic principles underlying the so-called hard problem. Nowhere in your description about "complex things" and "integrating" and "complicated external stimuli" and "communicating about its state" have you even attempted to point out why it actually DOES feel like something to be that system. Why does all this stuff actually lead to the feeling of pain, or intense grief, or pleasure, or anything at all. That is the fundamental mystery - why does it feel like anything at all when this "stuff" happens, and what is the nature of the feelings themselves. There are tons of mysteries here that you can't gloss over by saying "well why wouldn't it??".
- ppod 8y ago
  I am very familiar with the literature on the hard problem. It's remarkable how often people respond to this line of argument by putting the words "feeling" or "understanding" in italics. I don't know what kind of causal explanation you want for pain or grief. They are processes in an organism, and we construct models of the self to help us get through the day, as Dennett has elucidated many teams. To answer your first question: I believe in puzzles, not mysteries. When we don't know how something works (like a spray bottle), we call it a puzzle, unless it challenges some sacred theological or humanist tenets, in which case we call it a mystery. I don't agree with the comparison to gravity --- mechanics has well defined and refined concepts that allow us to create more general and parsimonious models with precision. "Consciousness" and "feeling" and "experience" are folk terms with neither a precise definition nor a clear process for arriving at a precise definition.
  - mistermann 8y ago
    > To answer your first question: I believe in puzzles, not mysteries. When we don't know how something works (like a spray bottle), we call it a puzzle, unless it challenges some sacred theological or humanist tenets, in which case we call it a mystery. Rather than the boundary between the biological and "non-biological" brain, I am interested in the notion or aspect of consciousness that relates to why people behave the way they do, think the way they think, and are not only largely oblivious to it (the idea of examining behavior and the ~motivations behind it) but commonly hostile to it, sometimes extremely so. Or even more interestingly, the ability to easily notice the behavior in others, but utterly incapable of seeing the same thing in oneself. For someone that has no background in the subject, would Dennett be a good place to start, or could you suggest any other names? > "Consciousness" and "feeling" and "experience" are folk terms with neither a precise definition nor a clear process for arriving at a precise definition. I agree, but I "feel" like this is where progress can be made (unless, it already has and I'm simply not aware of it). An attempt to give a hint at the aspects that I'm thinking of: reality, at least as far as humans perceive it, consists of observations of physical events, or at least we know that much for sure. One thing that the layman overlooks is that there are far more observable dimensions involved in reality than are commonly discussed, some of which I suspect are easily observable to some people, but practically invisible to others (a terrible analogy might be how humans can see one segment of the light spectrum, while other mammals can see others, and machines can see more). Similar to the formerly "invisible" portions of the light spectrum, are there other "dimensions" (for lack of not knowing a more proper term) that we can't currently observe, but with the proper experiments, consistently and with decent accuracy "detect", which might lead us in more specific directions when studying the mind? For example, if we can identify a highly reproducible but currently completely unexplained phenomenon (behavior, reaction, etc) common across large quantities of people (but perhaps not among other groups), might ML algorithms run on brain scans of subjects under these conditions find anything interesting? (Possibly relevant: Moran Cerf: "Decoding Thoughts and Dreams Using In-Brain Electrodes" | Talks at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVj3sU37gdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVj3sU37gdI) I also realize this may very well be a very stupid idea, so anything substantiating that possibility is also welcome. EDIT: Or, another different way of thinking about it is, an attempt to form an aggregate (across all people & cultures) definition/enumeration of self-awareness.
amelius 8y ago
Ok, can you explain if my laptop has consciousness? Does it like to work for me, or hate it? At what point will the first question be true? And how can we construct machines that find working for us pleasurable?
- ppod 8y ago
  Any reasonable definition of consciousness should IMO be a continuum, so your laptop has some consciousness (not very much). I don't think concepts of like or hate are meaningful for the consciousness of your laptop. These kinds of responses probably arise from the kinds of goals that are created for agents by processes of natural selection. We evolve them. We already have, they're called dogs.
  - amelius 8y ago
    > These kinds of responses probably arise from the kinds of goals that are created for agents by processes of natural selection. You're speaking of "response", but it is supposed to be a concept internal to the laptop. Please be more clear, as the topic demands it. Anyway, how do I create a laptop that finds pleasure in its work? Do I throw away the ones that don't work, and keep the ones that work? Is that enough selection? And once I have a laptop that experiences some pleasure, why does it experience that amount of pleasure and not, say, ten times that amount?
    - ppod 8y ago
      I meant that the internal state of like/hate would be a response to something that the laptop experienced. >Please be more clear, as the topic demands it. You are using terms like 'pleasure' and 'experience' that have no scientific definition. I find your entire line of thinking unclear, but it doesn't help the tone of the argument to demand clarity. >Anyway, how do I create a laptop that finds pleasure in its work? Do I throw away the ones that don't work, and keep the ones that work? Is that enough selection? As with dogs, the internal state of the laptop would need to be malleable per generation, with generations of reproduction under adaptive pressures that favour the human owner. We currently don't have laptops of this kind.
goatlover 8y ago
Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world have conscious experiences? They consist of complex bit patterns, or more accurately, electricity. If you think they would, then let's take it one step further. A billion Chinese people are tasked with writing out the 1s and 0s on paper to implement the world simulation. This may take generations and the felling of forests, but it's done. Would the process of writing down that program result conscious experiences the same as if the program was run on digital computers? What about when the task is done? Would the paper be conscious or the ink on it? What if all the papers were separated by thousands of miles? If you've read Greg Egan's Permutation City, then a similar sort of questioning was explored with the uploaded brain copies. The author ends up with his own weird "dust theory of consciousness", because there really isn't a good explanation for why any physical state would be conscious.
- ppod 8y ago
  >Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world have conscious experiences? They consist of complex bit patterns, or more accurately, electricity. I think yes. I find the arguments for functionalism convincing. After this you're rehashing Searle's Chinese room. As I've said, 'conscious experience' is not a properly defined concept, so I can only answer for what my own impressionistic judgement of its meaning is. For me, the entire system of people writing could maybe be described as having an experience if it directly encoded causally connected perceptions and actions of an agent in the virtual world. The whole thing is so far from how we use the word 'experience' that it is, as Dijkstra said, as interesting as asking whether a submarine can swim --- that is, not interesting at all.
- mjrpes 8y ago
  Of all thought experiments, I've found the billion workers communicating with 1 and 0's to be the strongest illustration of the mind/body problem. It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there. I've wondered, too, whether there is a connection between the mind/body problem and the problem of existence (why is there something rather than nothing). These two problems seem to be fundamentally insurmountable.
mr_toad 8y ago
Not only that, but as social creatures we have evolved mental models of other people, what we expect them to do, and say, and how we expect them to react to us, which in turn means we need to have models of our own behaviour in relation to theirs.
collyw 8y ago
Do plants have a sense of self or references to its own "body" (my instinct tells me no, but honestly I have no idea). They interact with the world and stimuli around them much like animals do, albeit on a slower time frame.

by ppod 8y ago

Omnus 8y ago

People used to make this same argument about why things fall to the ground when you let go of them. "Is it really surprising? Why wouldn't they just fall down? What kind of answer do you want?". You have to allow yourself to be puzzled by things. So yes, it is surprising. You don't seem to understand the most basic principles underlying the so-called hard problem. Nowhere in your description about "complex things" and "integrating" and "complicated external stimuli" and "communicating about its state" have you even attempted to point out why it actually DOES feel like something to be that system. Why does all this stuff actually lead to the feeling of pain, or intense grief, or pleasure, or anything at all. That is the fundamental mystery - why does it feel like anything at all when this "stuff" happens, and what is the nature of the feelings themselves. There are tons of mysteries here that you can't gloss over by saying "well why wouldn't it??".

ppod 8y ago
I am very familiar with the literature on the hard problem. It's remarkable how often people respond to this line of argument by putting the words "feeling" or "understanding" in italics. I don't know what kind of causal explanation you want for pain or grief. They are processes in an organism, and we construct models of the self to help us get through the day, as Dennett has elucidated many teams. To answer your first question: I believe in puzzles, not mysteries. When we don't know how something works (like a spray bottle), we call it a puzzle, unless it challenges some sacred theological or humanist tenets, in which case we call it a mystery. I don't agree with the comparison to gravity --- mechanics has well defined and refined concepts that allow us to create more general and parsimonious models with precision. "Consciousness" and "feeling" and "experience" are folk terms with neither a precise definition nor a clear process for arriving at a precise definition.
- mistermann 8y ago
  > To answer your first question: I believe in puzzles, not mysteries. When we don't know how something works (like a spray bottle), we call it a puzzle, unless it challenges some sacred theological or humanist tenets, in which case we call it a mystery. Rather than the boundary between the biological and "non-biological" brain, I am interested in the notion or aspect of consciousness that relates to why people behave the way they do, think the way they think, and are not only largely oblivious to it (the idea of examining behavior and the ~motivations behind it) but commonly hostile to it, sometimes extremely so. Or even more interestingly, the ability to easily notice the behavior in others, but utterly incapable of seeing the same thing in oneself. For someone that has no background in the subject, would Dennett be a good place to start, or could you suggest any other names? > "Consciousness" and "feeling" and "experience" are folk terms with neither a precise definition nor a clear process for arriving at a precise definition. I agree, but I "feel" like this is where progress can be made (unless, it already has and I'm simply not aware of it). An attempt to give a hint at the aspects that I'm thinking of: reality, at least as far as humans perceive it, consists of observations of physical events, or at least we know that much for sure. One thing that the layman overlooks is that there are far more observable dimensions involved in reality than are commonly discussed, some of which I suspect are easily observable to some people, but practically invisible to others (a terrible analogy might be how humans can see one segment of the light spectrum, while other mammals can see others, and machines can see more). Similar to the formerly "invisible" portions of the light spectrum, are there other "dimensions" (for lack of not knowing a more proper term) that we can't currently observe, but with the proper experiments, consistently and with decent accuracy "detect", which might lead us in more specific directions when studying the mind? For example, if we can identify a highly reproducible but currently completely unexplained phenomenon (behavior, reaction, etc) common across large quantities of people (but perhaps not among other groups), might ML algorithms run on brain scans of subjects under these conditions find anything interesting? (Possibly relevant: Moran Cerf: "Decoding Thoughts and Dreams Using In-Brain Electrodes" | Talks at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVj3sU37gdI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVj3sU37gdI) I also realize this may very well be a very stupid idea, so anything substantiating that possibility is also welcome. EDIT: Or, another different way of thinking about it is, an attempt to form an aggregate (across all people & cultures) definition/enumeration of self-awareness.

amelius 8y ago

Ok, can you explain if my laptop has consciousness? Does it like to work for me, or hate it? At what point will the first question be true? And how can we construct machines that find working for us pleasurable?

ppod 8y ago
Any reasonable definition of consciousness should IMO be a continuum, so your laptop has some consciousness (not very much). I don't think concepts of like or hate are meaningful for the consciousness of your laptop. These kinds of responses probably arise from the kinds of goals that are created for agents by processes of natural selection. We evolve them. We already have, they're called dogs.
- amelius 8y ago
  > These kinds of responses probably arise from the kinds of goals that are created for agents by processes of natural selection. You're speaking of "response", but it is supposed to be a concept internal to the laptop. Please be more clear, as the topic demands it. Anyway, how do I create a laptop that finds pleasure in its work? Do I throw away the ones that don't work, and keep the ones that work? Is that enough selection? And once I have a laptop that experiences some pleasure, why does it experience that amount of pleasure and not, say, ten times that amount?
  - ppod 8y ago
    I meant that the internal state of like/hate would be a response to something that the laptop experienced. >Please be more clear, as the topic demands it. You are using terms like 'pleasure' and 'experience' that have no scientific definition. I find your entire line of thinking unclear, but it doesn't help the tone of the argument to demand clarity. >Anyway, how do I create a laptop that finds pleasure in its work? Do I throw away the ones that don't work, and keep the ones that work? Is that enough selection? As with dogs, the internal state of the laptop would need to be malleable per generation, with generations of reproduction under adaptive pressures that favour the human owner. We currently don't have laptops of this kind.

goatlover 8y ago

Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world have conscious experiences? They consist of complex bit patterns, or more accurately, electricity. If you think they would, then let's take it one step further. A billion Chinese people are tasked with writing out the 1s and 0s on paper to implement the world simulation. This may take generations and the felling of forests, but it's done. Would the process of writing down that program result conscious experiences the same as if the program was run on digital computers? What about when the task is done? Would the paper be conscious or the ink on it? What if all the papers were separated by thousands of miles? If you've read Greg Egan's Permutation City, then a similar sort of questioning was explored with the uploaded brain copies. The author ends up with his own weird "dust theory of consciousness", because there really isn't a good explanation for why any physical state would be conscious.

ppod 8y ago
>Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world have conscious experiences? They consist of complex bit patterns, or more accurately, electricity. I think yes. I find the arguments for functionalism convincing. After this you're rehashing Searle's Chinese room. As I've said, 'conscious experience' is not a properly defined concept, so I can only answer for what my own impressionistic judgement of its meaning is. For me, the entire system of people writing could maybe be described as having an experience if it directly encoded causally connected perceptions and actions of an agent in the virtual world. The whole thing is so far from how we use the word 'experience' that it is, as Dijkstra said, as interesting as asking whether a submarine can swim --- that is, not interesting at all.
mjrpes 8y ago
Of all thought experiments, I've found the billion workers communicating with 1 and 0's to be the strongest illustration of the mind/body problem. It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there. I've wondered, too, whether there is a connection between the mind/body problem and the problem of existence (why is there something rather than nothing). These two problems seem to be fundamentally insurmountable.

mr_toad 8y ago

Not only that, but as social creatures we have evolved mental models of other people, what we expect them to do, and say, and how we expect them to react to us, which in turn means we need to have models of our own behaviour in relation to theirs.

collyw 8y ago

Do plants have a sense of self or references to its own "body" (my instinct tells me no, but honestly I have no idea). They interact with the world and stimuli around them much like animals do, albeit on a slower time frame.