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> I believe it's fundamentally impossible to test for consciousness. You are talking about "phenomenal consciousness", which is sometimes also referred to as "

> I believe it's fundamentally impossible to test for consciousness. You are talking about "phenomenal consciousness", which is sometimes also referred to as "the hard problem of consciousness". (Though not all philosophers would equate these two terms.) There are quite a few other useful definitions of consciousness, and consequently, all of the different notions of consciousness should not all be lumped together. I actually have a Philosophy degree from MIT, and I spent almost all my philosophical time worrying about and studying this issue. It still keeps me up at night sometimes to this day. I agree with you that the hard problem of consciousness is not amenable to scientific study, and consequently, I don't think that we can ever understand it, unfortunately. I also agree that it is the deepest and most important question about the nature of reality that we could ever have, and it is quite frustrating that we will never know the answer. Back to other notions of consciousness, though: Many of them are interesting, and I think amenable to scientific inquiry. So we shouldn't let the hard problem of consciousness deter us from studying easier problems of consciousness.

the8472 7y ago
> I agree with you that the hard problem of consciousness is not amenable to scientific study What if we assume a brain simulator with good debugging tools?
- NickM 7y ago
  A perfect brain simulator could answer many questions, but it could not answer the hard problem of consciousness. Science is all about objectivity, but there's an element of consciousness that is inherently subjective, and that part - the part the hard problem deals with - is not objectively measurable.
  - nessus42 7y ago
    > Science is all about objectivity, but there's an element of consciousness that is inherently subjective Yes, that is exactly right. Science is all about that which can be studied objectively and the "hard problem of consciousness" is specifically about the component of consciousness that is purely subjective. How can you study something that is purely subjective using objective methods? A. You can't! Here's another question that science can't answer: The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics posit vastly different things about the nature of reality. Unfortunately, they are experimentally indistinguishable from each other. So, if somehow we could narrow QM down to either MW or Bohm, at this point we are stuck. We can never know which interpretation is the right one, even though the answer to this question is up there in importance with the hard problem of consciousness!
    - the8472 7y ago
      But is there anything subjective left if all information is accessible and available to observation, study and even replay on other simulated brains? The QM analogy does not hold because it is about things that are not observable. All information in a hypothetical simulated brain is observable.
      - nessus42 7y ago
        > But is there anything subjective left if all information is accessible and available to observation, study and even replay on other simulated brains? It's impossible to objectively study what it feels like to be another being. One of the canonical examples from the philosophy literature is on what it feels like to be a bat. We can't ever observe what it feels like to be a bat because the only way to know for sure what it feels like to be a bat is to actually BE a bat. But you can't be a bat. Consequently, you cannot know for sure what it feels like to be a bat. Another example from the philosophy literature is the "inverted spectrum hypothesis". Let's say that we make a robot duplicate of you. The robot duplicate of you behaves exactly as you would in all situations. Now let's say that we show the robot a ripe tomato. When you look at this ripe tomato, you will experience a feeling of redness. But for all we know, the robot duplicate of you might feel blueness instead. I.e., it might feel what you feel when you look at the sky on a beautiful summer day. There's no way for us to know the answer to this question. There are also philosophers who argue that a robot duplicate of you would feel nothing at all. E.g., no redness, no blueness. If you want to know more about why someone would believe this, look up Searle's Chinese Room argument. Philosophers who take this point of view believe that any robot will be a "zombie". I.e., it will have all the other sorts of consciousness that we might talk about, but it wouldn't have phenomenal consciousness. This is also sometimes referred to as the "absent spectrum hypothesis".
        the8472 7y ago
        All those things you mention represent information. Information encoded in matter. Information that can be compared. We could hypothetically compare two neural circuits that respond to red and thus see if they have the same activation profiles for redness. Batness could similarly be simulated and then made available to a human brain as read-only stream, perhaps as a dream-like experience. This is entirely speculative, handwavy and would take fantastic levels of technology, but it does not seem information-theoretically impossible unless you assume that there is something immaterial, at which point things just turn into religion. Thus it is within the realm of scientific study, albeit it requiring currently hypothetical instruments. But so does the study of quantum mechanics in strongly curved spacetime. > If you want to know more about why someone would believe this lookup Searle's Chinese Room argument. I am familiar with it and agree with the position that the (turing-complete) chinese room is simply a way to describe an AGI which speaks chinese and the operator of the room is the computational substrate of the AI and thus a red herring. It's really just an anachronistic analogy.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
We can't "really" know anything about the "real" world either - yet hardly anyone takes solipsism seriously...
- nessus42 7y ago
  > We can't "really" know anything about the "real" world either - yet hardly anyone takes solipsism seriously... Philosophers generally take solipsism seriously. They just do something called "bracketing" regarding solipsism. "Bracketing" is a philosopher's way of saying, "Yes, this is a serious issue, but we can't make any progress unless we ignore the problem, so that's what we're going to do. But we'll be sure to keep it in the back of our heads as a possibility, lest it come back and bite us." I.e., virtually every philosophical argument starts with an implicit, "For the sake of argument let's assume that solipsism isn't true." There are also probably dozens of other such worries that are typically bracketed. Mathematicians often do something similar. There are certain mathematical conjectures (usually involving infinities in my experience) which we can prove can neither be proved nor disproved. So mathematicians will just assume some such conjectures for the sake of making progress. One example of this would be the axiom of choice.

the8472 7y ago

> I agree with you that the hard problem of consciousness is not amenable to scientific study What if we assume a brain simulator with good debugging tools?

NickM 7y ago
A perfect brain simulator could answer many questions, but it could not answer the hard problem of consciousness. Science is all about objectivity, but there's an element of consciousness that is inherently subjective, and that part - the part the hard problem deals with - is not objectively measurable.
- nessus42 7y ago
  > Science is all about objectivity, but there's an element of consciousness that is inherently subjective Yes, that is exactly right. Science is all about that which can be studied objectively and the "hard problem of consciousness" is specifically about the component of consciousness that is purely subjective. How can you study something that is purely subjective using objective methods? A. You can't! Here's another question that science can't answer: The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics posit vastly different things about the nature of reality. Unfortunately, they are experimentally indistinguishable from each other. So, if somehow we could narrow QM down to either MW or Bohm, at this point we are stuck. We can never know which interpretation is the right one, even though the answer to this question is up there in importance with the hard problem of consciousness!
  - the8472 7y ago
    But is there anything subjective left if all information is accessible and available to observation, study and even replay on other simulated brains? The QM analogy does not hold because it is about things that are not observable. All information in a hypothetical simulated brain is observable.
    - nessus42 7y ago
      > But is there anything subjective left if all information is accessible and available to observation, study and even replay on other simulated brains? It's impossible to objectively study what it feels like to be another being. One of the canonical examples from the philosophy literature is on what it feels like to be a bat. We can't ever observe what it feels like to be a bat because the only way to know for sure what it feels like to be a bat is to actually BE a bat. But you can't be a bat. Consequently, you cannot know for sure what it feels like to be a bat. Another example from the philosophy literature is the "inverted spectrum hypothesis". Let's say that we make a robot duplicate of you. The robot duplicate of you behaves exactly as you would in all situations. Now let's say that we show the robot a ripe tomato. When you look at this ripe tomato, you will experience a feeling of redness. But for all we know, the robot duplicate of you might feel blueness instead. I.e., it might feel what you feel when you look at the sky on a beautiful summer day. There's no way for us to know the answer to this question. There are also philosophers who argue that a robot duplicate of you would feel nothing at all. E.g., no redness, no blueness. If you want to know more about why someone would believe this, look up Searle's Chinese Room argument. Philosophers who take this point of view believe that any robot will be a "zombie". I.e., it will have all the other sorts of consciousness that we might talk about, but it wouldn't have phenomenal consciousness. This is also sometimes referred to as the "absent spectrum hypothesis".
      - the8472 7y ago
        All those things you mention represent information. Information encoded in matter. Information that can be compared. We could hypothetically compare two neural circuits that respond to red and thus see if they have the same activation profiles for redness. Batness could similarly be simulated and then made available to a human brain as read-only stream, perhaps as a dream-like experience. This is entirely speculative, handwavy and would take fantastic levels of technology, but it does not seem information-theoretically impossible unless you assume that there is something immaterial, at which point things just turn into religion. Thus it is within the realm of scientific study, albeit it requiring currently hypothetical instruments. But so does the study of quantum mechanics in strongly curved spacetime. > If you want to know more about why someone would believe this lookup Searle's Chinese Room argument. I am familiar with it and agree with the position that the (turing-complete) chinese room is simply a way to describe an AGI which speaks chinese and the operator of the room is the computational substrate of the AI and thus a red herring. It's really just an anachronistic analogy.

BlueTemplar 7y ago

We can't "really" know anything about the "real" world either - yet hardly anyone takes solipsism seriously...

nessus42 7y ago
> We can't "really" know anything about the "real" world either - yet hardly anyone takes solipsism seriously... Philosophers generally take solipsism seriously. They just do something called "bracketing" regarding solipsism. "Bracketing" is a philosopher's way of saying, "Yes, this is a serious issue, but we can't make any progress unless we ignore the problem, so that's what we're going to do. But we'll be sure to keep it in the back of our heads as a possibility, lest it come back and bite us." I.e., virtually every philosophical argument starts with an implicit, "For the sake of argument let's assume that solipsism isn't true." There are also probably dozens of other such worries that are typically bracketed. Mathematicians often do something similar. There are certain mathematical conjectures (usually involving infinities in my experience) which we can prove can neither be proved nor disproved. So mathematicians will just assume some such conjectures for the sake of making progress. One example of this would be the axiom of choice.