3 ms·

I mean, how would you concretely propose we make better progress on this?

by trevyn 8y ago

bencollier49 8y ago
I think any advance that does take place will be a huge curve-ball from outside the field. That said, I think there may be reasons to believe that we will simply be unable to explain it. If I was going to make a call, I'd guess that formal logic may at some point prove our inability to come up with an explanation.
- naasking 8y ago
  > If I was going to make a call, I'd guess that formal logic may at some point prove our inability to come up with an explanation. I'd take that bet. Physics already tells us that humans are merely finite state automatons (due to the Bekenstein bound), so the logic needed to describe us needn't even be that powerful. And given our behaviours were largely shaped to be fairly energy efficient due to evolutionary pressures, consciousness will turn out to be one or more cognitive tricks that convey some adaptive advantage. The hurdle people typically have to accepting this inevitability is because of the internal perception of cognitive continuity, but this property is clearly false. There's are many obvious cases where continuity fails, like sleep, anaesthetic, etc.
  - mbrock 8y ago
    Why is continuity in that sense important rather than the sheer experienceness of experience?
    - naasking 8y ago
      How do you know the redness you woke up seeing this morning is the same redness you experienced yesterday? Continuity is one way. There are many intuition pumps discussing surgical or other interventions that tweak qualia in various seemingly reasonable ways, to the extent that the concept of qualia itself becomes increasingly unreasonable. Dennett has covered a lot of this ground.
      - mbrock 8y ago
        This whole question is obviously kind of tiresome in how it’s repetitively treated on internet boards every day, but I think it’s still fundamentally baffling and I’m always curious to interrogate people who seem to have “figured it out” in some sense. You say conscious beings are obviously just finite state automata. That’s curious to me because it seems strange that I would essentially be a certain mathematical structure. I agree that my structure can in principle be explained as an automaton (except that my lack of a boundary means that I have to be described with a universe-sized map that can’t fit in the universe) but why is it like something to be an automaton? Maybe you’re saying something like this. I have an illusion that there is some subjective realm of experience, exemplified by the visual field, a kind of mirror universe that is mysteriously connected to the “outer” world, and this illusion is what leads to mistakes like body-mind dualism. In fact there is no such subjective realm, and my perception is not different in kind from any other causal system’s different reactions, it’s just so complex and finely tuned that this “illusion” appears especially because of the illusion of continuity. I can’t steelman the argument properly because I really don’t understand, and unfortunately I haven’t read Dennett. It seems to me that why there is perception is as mysterious as why there is energy and these do seem like separate questions so far. Some kind of monism seems reasonable but I don’t see how experience can be assumed to be downstream from the mathematical laws of fundamental physics—that seems like an unproven assumption that’s philosophically tricky and extremely contentious. Happy to hear any thoughts or pointers.
        trevyn 8y ago
        Could this be partially an issue of semantics? - Why do we have subjective experience? vs - What causes us to have/creates subjective experience? - For what reason/purpose do we have subjective experience? - How is subjective experience implemented? The last three seem to be reasonably well fleshed out in the literature. Do you interpret “why” to have an additional meaning?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        8y ago
  - bencollier49 8y ago
    And we're back to category mistakes. What conveys the property of experience on the machine which has adapted a mechanical trick?
    - naasking 8y ago
      You have no evidence that experience is not mechanistic. There is literally no reason to suppose consciousness is any different than any other natural phenomenon we study. So reproducing whatever mechanistic process is at play ensures that such a machine had experience. You're simply assuming there must be a separate category either because you want one to exist, or because you've been fooled into thinking consciousness has some properties that you consider irreducible to more basic components.
      - bencollier49 8y ago
        "When I express the problem in terms of mechanistic logic, I am unable to prove the existence of something which is neither mechanistic nor apparently logical".
        naasking 8y ago
        "When I express the problem using well-defined and coherent terminology, I am unable to prove the existence of something which is neither well-defined or coherent".

I mean, how would you concretely propose we make better progress on this?

by trevyn 8y ago

I mean, how would you concretely propose we make better progress on this?

I think any advance that does take place will be a huge curve-ball from outside the field. That said, I think there may be reasons to believe that we will simply be unable to explain it. If I was going to make a call, I'd guess that formal logic may at some point prove our inability to come up with an explanation.

naasking 8y ago
> If I was going to make a call, I'd guess that formal logic may at some point prove our inability to come up with an explanation. I'd take that bet. Physics already tells us that humans are merely finite state automatons (due to the Bekenstein bound), so the logic needed to describe us needn't even be that powerful. And given our behaviours were largely shaped to be fairly energy efficient due to evolutionary pressures, consciousness will turn out to be one or more cognitive tricks that convey some adaptive advantage. The hurdle people typically have to accepting this inevitability is because of the internal perception of cognitive continuity, but this property is clearly false. There's are many obvious cases where continuity fails, like sleep, anaesthetic, etc.
- mbrock 8y ago
  Why is continuity in that sense important rather than the sheer experienceness of experience?
  - naasking 8y ago
    How do you know the redness you woke up seeing this morning is the same redness you experienced yesterday? Continuity is one way. There are many intuition pumps discussing surgical or other interventions that tweak qualia in various seemingly reasonable ways, to the extent that the concept of qualia itself becomes increasingly unreasonable. Dennett has covered a lot of this ground.
    - mbrock 8y ago
      This whole question is obviously kind of tiresome in how it’s repetitively treated on internet boards every day, but I think it’s still fundamentally baffling and I’m always curious to interrogate people who seem to have “figured it out” in some sense. You say conscious beings are obviously just finite state automata. That’s curious to me because it seems strange that I would essentially be a certain mathematical structure. I agree that my structure can in principle be explained as an automaton (except that my lack of a boundary means that I have to be described with a universe-sized map that can’t fit in the universe) but why is it like something to be an automaton? Maybe you’re saying something like this. I have an illusion that there is some subjective realm of experience, exemplified by the visual field, a kind of mirror universe that is mysteriously connected to the “outer” world, and this illusion is what leads to mistakes like body-mind dualism. In fact there is no such subjective realm, and my perception is not different in kind from any other causal system’s different reactions, it’s just so complex and finely tuned that this “illusion” appears especially because of the illusion of continuity. I can’t steelman the argument properly because I really don’t understand, and unfortunately I haven’t read Dennett. It seems to me that why there is perception is as mysterious as why there is energy and these do seem like separate questions so far. Some kind of monism seems reasonable but I don’t see how experience can be assumed to be downstream from the mathematical laws of fundamental physics—that seems like an unproven assumption that’s philosophically tricky and extremely contentious. Happy to hear any thoughts or pointers.
      - trevyn 8y ago
        Could this be partially an issue of semantics? - Why do we have subjective experience? vs - What causes us to have/creates subjective experience? - For what reason/purpose do we have subjective experience? - How is subjective experience implemented? The last three seem to be reasonably well fleshed out in the literature. Do you interpret “why” to have an additional meaning?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - 8y ago
- bencollier49 8y ago
  And we're back to category mistakes. What conveys the property of experience on the machine which has adapted a mechanical trick?
  - naasking 8y ago
    You have no evidence that experience is not mechanistic. There is literally no reason to suppose consciousness is any different than any other natural phenomenon we study. So reproducing whatever mechanistic process is at play ensures that such a machine had experience. You're simply assuming there must be a separate category either because you want one to exist, or because you've been fooled into thinking consciousness has some properties that you consider irreducible to more basic components.
    - bencollier49 8y ago
      "When I express the problem in terms of mechanistic logic, I am unable to prove the existence of something which is neither mechanistic nor apparently logical".
      - naasking 8y ago
        "When I express the problem using well-defined and coherent terminology, I am unable to prove the existence of something which is neither well-defined or coherent".