5 ms·

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?

by 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.
  - ppod 8y ago
    > 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. I completely agree that this is maybe the most interesting general field of inquiry out there, I just think that the consciousness literature/debate has almost nothing of interest to say on it. I think the fields of interest are evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, and at a higher level the interface between sociology and behavioural psychology. >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 I like analogies like this and am totally on board with you here. But again, things like 'Mary's Room' are not at all interesting or detailed addresses to this when we know so much about how brains and bodies and artificial neural networks can hold and use so many kinds of knowledge at different levels. You're getting kind of towards Penrose territory at the end there with suggesting that there could be senses or phenomenologies that we currently know nothing of the mechanisms of. I agree that this is true in principle but I think that the evidence that we have from biology and from artificial intelligence suggests that we could probably explain all of our abilities just with physical properties that we already understand. I wouldn't rule out some quantum component though. I think that it's likely the problem is one of scale and complexity rather than a qualitatively new kind of process. The brain is not only huge but is designed by a messy ad-hoc evolutionary process that is hostile to interpretation by our own reflexive symbolic investigation, and I'd say that's where the difficulty lies. I completely agree with your line of thinking though.
    - goatlover 8y ago
      > I like analogies like this and am totally on board with you here. But again, things like 'Mary's Room' are not at all interesting or detailed addresses to this when we know so much about how brains and bodies and artificial neural networks can hold and use so many kinds of knowledge at different levels. Mary's Room demonstrates that's there's more to knowing the world than just third person descriptions. There's also experience. Whether you want to call experience a form of knowledge, or something else like an ability is the crux of whether that particular argument works or not, since it's based on whether knowing all the physical facts leaves some knowledge out (experiential). But I think it works to show that our physical theories of the world can't capture our experience of the world, because one is abstract and mathematical, and the other is how we perceive and feel. So nothing about biology, physics or ANNs bridges that gap, I don't think, since they're expressed in third person terminology. That's the hard problem.
- Omnus 8y ago
  It is entirely unremarkable that people should put "feeling" in italics in order to emphasize it, because it is precisely the thing gets handwavy non-explanations (like yours) from people who refuse to acknowledge the deep mystery (or "puzzle", if you want). What is remarkable, to the point of comedy, is the reliability with which this refusal is accompanied by one or two sentence explanations that imply a miraculous end to the long, complex philosophical exploration of the mind-body problem that humanity has struggled with for millennia. "They are processes in an organism, and we construct models of the self to help us get through the day" is one such meaningless explanation. You've answered nothing. You've done nothing. The problem of qualia? The unity problem? The knowledge problem? The comparison with gravity was indeed unfair, but not in the way you think. It is unfair in that the problems of phenomenology and consciousness are much harder (see Knowledge Problem) because of their resistance to modeling (or any other kind of study that doesn't involve introspection). To call "consciousness" and "feeling" folk terms and use that to dismiss incredibly simple and clear questions is the intellectual equivalent of tapping out. It's so simple: "what is the nature of the feelings themselves, apart from the dynamics of the system they are correlated with?"

amthewiz 8y ago

> brain scans of subjects under these conditions find anything interesting It is certainly possible, but currently not practical. Imaging technologies have limited spatiotemporal resolutions and coverage areas. Direct electrode reading are too intrusive, and so on. There is limited understanding of which brain areas might contribute to certain complex behavior so we might have to measure entire brain's activity. We don't know what resolution is useful - each spike or firing frequency or only dynamics (changes), etc. If we assume the availability of whole brain scan at spike resolution over extended time periods, theoretically a regression type algorithm could figure out relationship between brain activity and behavior. Firmly out of currently technology's reach though. > definition/enumeration of self-awareness Philosophers have been working on that for a long time. Some terms are well settled now, even though a term might cover a range of concepts. See that for "consciousness" here - https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/consciousness/ https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/consciou.... This addresses mostly the western thought process and leaves out the eastern concepts. Most eastern concepts are too vague to pin down, though some are concrete enough to provide some insights (e.g. http://heavenmeetsearthyoga.com/news-features/the-meaning-of-the-symbol-of-om/ http://heavenmeetsearthyoga.com/news-features/the-meaning-of... matches reasonably well with modern understanding).

mistermann 8y ago
Is this based on common sense or intuition, or are you actually familiar enough with the current state of the art AI to say for certain that we actually do need the level of precision you refer to to get anywhere? Of course, the higher the precision the better, but do you know we can't get anywhere without it?
- amthewiz 8y ago
  Current state of the art precision has yielded insights at the sensory-motor (e.g. precise understanding of what sensory inputs cause what neural activity) and at subsystem level (e.g. what mental activity "uses" what brain subsystems). I am sure more can be done with existing technology, but a grand unified theory would probably need more precision. It is somewhat akin to attempts at finding the grand unified theory of Physics that works both at quantum and cosmological scales.
  - mistermann 8y ago
    I wonder if I did a poor job asking the question. What I'm getting at is, I wonder if common & reproducible brain patterns that might not formerly have been noticeable (perhaps due to a lack of precision when observing them in isolation) might reveal themselves when running assisted deep learning on a large number of subjects' results across a broad but "strictly defined" set of mental experiences that are known to produce "extreme psychological reactions". Might we discover associations (at the brain wave level) between experiences where our current understanding of the brain would not suggest there might be any? Would this type of analysis even need high precision? Out of curiosity, was it you that downvoted my question? I'm struggling to understand what has changed on HN lately, where purely unopinionated and relevant questions are now very commonly downvoted. It's this type of thing that has caused my curiosity in this area, I'm interested in finding an underlying reason why people increasingly seem to be offended or disagree so strongly with things that only a few years ago were generally considered completely innocuous? Perhaps it was the tone of the question? But again, I don't think that would have garnered any downvotes on HN 5 years ago - what's changed? Might we be able to detect something in brain activity that could lead us to some new paths to study to explain this widespread behavior? Possibly related, but not necessarily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting https://www.quora.com/In-machine-learning-is-more-data-always-better-than-better-algorithms https://www.quora.com/In-machine-learning-is-more-data-alway...