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This is the latest approach to science's complete inability to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Just declare that it doesn't exist. I think it's rather

This is the latest approach to science's complete inability to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Just declare that it doesn't exist. I think it's rather pitiful, to be honest.

_Schizotypy 8y ago
Just because you don't agree with it, or it offends you somehow, doesn't mean it's wrong.
- bencollier49 8y ago
  Oh, it mildly offends me because I think it's wrong. And a cop-out.
  - _Schizotypy 8y ago
    So why is it wrong then? Can you provide empirical evidence to back up your claim?
    - bencollier49 8y ago
      I'll write a blog post on it later, it'll take more than a few sentences.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      If by consciousness you mean what everybody means by consciousness there are no well-founded claims about it because it's not observable. If you want to redefine consciousness to mean desk lamps, then I strongly disagree with the conclusion that consciousness doesn't exist because I have a desk lamp right here.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > If by consciousness you mean what everybody means by consciousness there are no well-founded claims about it because it's not observable. It is observable, but not externally verifiable; it literally encompasses the entirety of the category of things for which that is true.
    - zipwitch 8y ago
      The author admits that what he's really doing is playing games with definitions, and more interestingly, exploring the question of what conciousness is. To try and exploit shock value via tabloid-style meaning twisting is unworthy of the subject matter.
  - wrs 8y ago
    You can’t explain something in terms of itself. Obviously at some point any process has to be explained in terms of lower level processes that don’t share the characteristics of the higher level process. The cop-out is in refusing to accept that, which results in circular arguments. Like any magic trick (or computer system), once you explain how it works, you’re saying the “magic” doesn’t exist. Consciousness is no exception.
    - bencollier49 8y ago
      But that's not what's going on here. This is like saying Microsoft Word doesn't exist because I can't see it if I look at the electrons in the computer. Or can't abstract it from there. Or possibly even who wrote the program. No, just "It doesn't exist", or "It's an illusion".
      - _Schizotypy 8y ago
        The concept of conscious thought was only created with subjective observation, people had simply assumed what their experience was. We still don't have solid evidence one way or the other but the evidence we do have seems to be pointing towards it being an illusion.
        yepguy 8y ago
        Most scientific methodology tries very hard to exclude subjective experience by design. Well, if you do that then of course there will be a lack of evidence for subjective phenomena! Just in case you're tempted to downplay science's blind spot here, consider that this also means science has next to nothing to say about 99+% of your life. If you take a reductionist stance in this domain you actually have to philosophically ground it in a way that you don't have to worry about too much in other fields of study. Otherwise you'll end up with an embarrassing phlogistic theory of consciousness.
QuercusMax 8y ago
Sounds to me more like they've redefined the words "thought" and "conscious" such that what most people think of as "thoughts" don't count.
- bencollier49 8y ago
  Yep, there are various flavours of it doing the rounds, as far as I can tell. We could call this one the semantic approach.
- _Schizotypy 8y ago
  any thought that we encounter are simply internal reactions to stimuli of various sorts encountering information we have previously processed/learned. what this article is saying is that we do not control these as is normally believed, we are more of a bystander than anything.
donaldknuth123 8y ago
Unfortunately the vast majority of Academic Philosophers disagree with you. Thoughts obviously exist but the idea that you are in control of what you think about is patently false. Take a look at modern stances on Free Will if you doubt that.
- rubicon33 8y ago
  If I'm not in control of what I think, then I am not in control of what I do... In which case, we're all just robots.
  - conception 8y ago
    Yes. But complex and interesting ones.
  - _Schizotypy 8y ago
    in a very simplistic view, yes we are
  - harlanji 8y ago
    Free will in this interpretation is making binary choices to manifest thought forms or not, and consciousness would be having the machinery to interpret thought and exercise free will.
    - donaldknuth123 8y ago
      Not sure I agree with this. I think most people imagine that they have a landscape of possible choices or thoughts in front of them and they have some agency to maneuver through that landscape and modern research and even simple meditation will reveal that this is simply an illusion. I don't really want to chime in on the nature of Consciousness though.
      - harlanji 8y ago
        My thought is that the binary “do not manifest” decision could request delivery of a new set of similar thought forms which could then be manifest. There could be several types of thought forms that let us have the illusion that we are willing in related thoughts. Like an old iPod, perhaps. Consciousness is the most fun topic to speculate about, says the Buddha!
jmcgough 8y ago
This isn't about science, this is an interview with a philosopher.
publicfig 8y ago
This really feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the article's headline instead of any sort of argument as to why you think it may be wrong or what pieces of the interview you disagree with.
- bencollier49 8y ago
  That's fair. There's not really room to deconstruct the various arguments here. I want to blog about it later.
jf- 8y ago
I think it’s more of a misleading title, combined with the usual meandering style that philosophers have. What he’s basically saying is that we consciously experience the outputs of a number of expert systems: those responsible for seeing, hearing, selecting what should be attended to, and that even thought is a kind of expert system to which we have no internal access. We know that we think, that we see and hear, but we don’t know the details of how it happens, nor do we experience the details of this processing. It’s not really very revolutionary, we already know this and it seems obvious when pointed out, it also does nothing to explain how experience of those outputs arises, or what it is.
eigenspace 8y ago
I was pretty riled up too when I read the headline, but after reading the article, I think the interviewee actually has a much more benign view that it seems. He does not appear to deny the hard problem and indeed the domain of his claims appear to not even intersect with the hard problem in any real sense. It appears to me (correct me if I'm wrong), that he is simply claiming that we believe we are having much more rich conscious experiences than we actually are, and that we are often mislead or mistaken about the character of our experience. As a meditator, I can corroborate these claims. None of these claims deny the existence of subjective experience itself which is the basis of the hard problem. He's merely saying that our conscious experiences are much more disconnected, less informationally dense and less orderly than we believe.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >He's merely saying that our conscious experiences are much more disconnected, less informationally dense and less orderly than we believe. If there was only one particle in the universe, it wouldn't have a height. I disagree that the average person has the capacity to be wrong about their consciousness, because without another one to compare it against they have no way to form opinions about it.
  - eigenspace 8y ago
    A person can't be wrong that they have consciousness, but they can be mistaken about about the character of their conscious experiences. We tend to think that we have a very continuous constant stream of attention and thought but in reality if you learn to pay attention, you'll see that your mind is pretty erratic and experience is not at all like your memories tend to represent.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      I don't think most people have a belief about how continuous or erratic their consciousness is, because the only time words are used to describe things is when you are distinguishing between more than one thing.
mehh 8y ago
That isn't what this conversation is actually saying imho. Although I think what it is saying is poorly explained and too simple.

This is the latest approach to science's complete inability to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Just declare that it doesn't exist. I think it's rather pitiful, to be honest.

_Schizotypy 8y ago

Just because you don't agree with it, or it offends you somehow, doesn't mean it's wrong.

bencollier49 8y ago
Oh, it mildly offends me because I think it's wrong. And a cop-out.
- _Schizotypy 8y ago
  So why is it wrong then? Can you provide empirical evidence to back up your claim?
  - bencollier49 8y ago
    I'll write a blog post on it later, it'll take more than a few sentences.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    If by consciousness you mean what everybody means by consciousness there are no well-founded claims about it because it's not observable. If you want to redefine consciousness to mean desk lamps, then I strongly disagree with the conclusion that consciousness doesn't exist because I have a desk lamp right here.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > If by consciousness you mean what everybody means by consciousness there are no well-founded claims about it because it's not observable. It is observable, but not externally verifiable; it literally encompasses the entirety of the category of things for which that is true.
  - zipwitch 8y ago
    The author admits that what he's really doing is playing games with definitions, and more interestingly, exploring the question of what conciousness is. To try and exploit shock value via tabloid-style meaning twisting is unworthy of the subject matter.
- wrs 8y ago
  You can’t explain something in terms of itself. Obviously at some point any process has to be explained in terms of lower level processes that don’t share the characteristics of the higher level process. The cop-out is in refusing to accept that, which results in circular arguments. Like any magic trick (or computer system), once you explain how it works, you’re saying the “magic” doesn’t exist. Consciousness is no exception.
  - bencollier49 8y ago
    But that's not what's going on here. This is like saying Microsoft Word doesn't exist because I can't see it if I look at the electrons in the computer. Or can't abstract it from there. Or possibly even who wrote the program. No, just "It doesn't exist", or "It's an illusion".
    - _Schizotypy 8y ago
      The concept of conscious thought was only created with subjective observation, people had simply assumed what their experience was. We still don't have solid evidence one way or the other but the evidence we do have seems to be pointing towards it being an illusion.
      - yepguy 8y ago
        Most scientific methodology tries very hard to exclude subjective experience by design. Well, if you do that then of course there will be a lack of evidence for subjective phenomena! Just in case you're tempted to downplay science's blind spot here, consider that this also means science has next to nothing to say about 99+% of your life. If you take a reductionist stance in this domain you actually have to philosophically ground it in a way that you don't have to worry about too much in other fields of study. Otherwise you'll end up with an embarrassing phlogistic theory of consciousness.

QuercusMax 8y ago

Sounds to me more like they've redefined the words "thought" and "conscious" such that what most people think of as "thoughts" don't count.

bencollier49 8y ago
Yep, there are various flavours of it doing the rounds, as far as I can tell. We could call this one the semantic approach.
_Schizotypy 8y ago
any thought that we encounter are simply internal reactions to stimuli of various sorts encountering information we have previously processed/learned. what this article is saying is that we do not control these as is normally believed, we are more of a bystander than anything.

donaldknuth123 8y ago

Unfortunately the vast majority of Academic Philosophers disagree with you. Thoughts obviously exist but the idea that you are in control of what you think about is patently false. Take a look at modern stances on Free Will if you doubt that.

rubicon33 8y ago
If I'm not in control of what I think, then I am not in control of what I do... In which case, we're all just robots.
- conception 8y ago
  Yes. But complex and interesting ones.
- _Schizotypy 8y ago
  in a very simplistic view, yes we are
- harlanji 8y ago
  Free will in this interpretation is making binary choices to manifest thought forms or not, and consciousness would be having the machinery to interpret thought and exercise free will.
  - donaldknuth123 8y ago
    Not sure I agree with this. I think most people imagine that they have a landscape of possible choices or thoughts in front of them and they have some agency to maneuver through that landscape and modern research and even simple meditation will reveal that this is simply an illusion. I don't really want to chime in on the nature of Consciousness though.
    - harlanji 8y ago
      My thought is that the binary “do not manifest” decision could request delivery of a new set of similar thought forms which could then be manifest. There could be several types of thought forms that let us have the illusion that we are willing in related thoughts. Like an old iPod, perhaps. Consciousness is the most fun topic to speculate about, says the Buddha!

jmcgough 8y ago

This isn't about science, this is an interview with a philosopher.

publicfig 8y ago

This really feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the article's headline instead of any sort of argument as to why you think it may be wrong or what pieces of the interview you disagree with.

bencollier49 8y ago
That's fair. There's not really room to deconstruct the various arguments here. I want to blog about it later.

jf- 8y ago

I think it’s more of a misleading title, combined with the usual meandering style that philosophers have. What he’s basically saying is that we consciously experience the outputs of a number of expert systems: those responsible for seeing, hearing, selecting what should be attended to, and that even thought is a kind of expert system to which we have no internal access. We know that we think, that we see and hear, but we don’t know the details of how it happens, nor do we experience the details of this processing. It’s not really very revolutionary, we already know this and it seems obvious when pointed out, it also does nothing to explain how experience of those outputs arises, or what it is.

eigenspace 8y ago

I was pretty riled up too when I read the headline, but after reading the article, I think the interviewee actually has a much more benign view that it seems. He does not appear to deny the hard problem and indeed the domain of his claims appear to not even intersect with the hard problem in any real sense. It appears to me (correct me if I'm wrong), that he is simply claiming that we believe we are having much more rich conscious experiences than we actually are, and that we are often mislead or mistaken about the character of our experience. As a meditator, I can corroborate these claims. None of these claims deny the existence of subjective experience itself which is the basis of the hard problem. He's merely saying that our conscious experiences are much more disconnected, less informationally dense and less orderly than we believe.

whatshisface 8y ago
>He's merely saying that our conscious experiences are much more disconnected, less informationally dense and less orderly than we believe. If there was only one particle in the universe, it wouldn't have a height. I disagree that the average person has the capacity to be wrong about their consciousness, because without another one to compare it against they have no way to form opinions about it.
- eigenspace 8y ago
  A person can't be wrong that they have consciousness, but they can be mistaken about about the character of their conscious experiences. We tend to think that we have a very continuous constant stream of attention and thought but in reality if you learn to pay attention, you'll see that your mind is pretty erratic and experience is not at all like your memories tend to represent.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    I don't think most people have a belief about how continuous or erratic their consciousness is, because the only time words are used to describe things is when you are distinguishing between more than one thing.

mehh 8y ago

That isn't what this conversation is actually saying imho. Although I think what it is saying is poorly explained and too simple.