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> 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

> 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.
    - nessus42 7y ago
      You're arguing that there is no "hard problem of consciousness". You're wrong. But at least you have plenty of company. Philosophers have been debating this issue rabidly for decades. Huge tomes have been written on the subject, arguing both for and against the "hard problem" being real. We are not going to settle this issue here. I suggest that we come back in a millennium and see if any progress has been made. I don't have high hopes.
      - the8472 7y ago
        You're making it sound more and more like that problem is an invisible pink unicorn.
        nessus42 7y ago
        > You're making it sound more and more like that problem is an invisible pink unicorn. You might have a point if philosophers had been arguing for decades and written huge tomes on whether or not there is an invisible pink unicorn. But they haven't. The academic philosophy community isn't made up of dimwits. You don't do anyone a service by implying that they are.
mihaifm 7y ago
Interesting point. Could you recommend something to read about this topic, or maybe you have some writeups of your own? Mainly interested about the correlation between quantum mechanics and the problem of consciousness.
- nessus42 7y ago
  > Could you recommend something to read about this topic Well, if you want to dive right in, you could read this book by David Chalmers, who is (or at least was when I actively studied such things) the most famous philosopher who has grappled with the "hard problem" of consciousness: https://www.amazon.com/Character-Consciousness-Philosophy-Mind-ebook/dp/B004FPYKW0/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=david+chalmers&qid=1569533961&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Character-Consciousness-Philosophy-Mi... There are a bunch of books and published papers on the topic, of course. But most of them, including the book listed above, would be a slog if you're not taking a philosophy class on the subject. Even then, they'd likely be a slog. Philosophy arguments on this topic can quickly become extremely intricate, and laden with jargon. I've written a number of papers on the topic myself for classes, but don't recall if any of them are accessible to someone with no prior knowledge of the debate. There might be a decent one that I wrote for Douglas Hofstadter when he was a visiting professor at MIT. I can check and send you a copy if it seems like it might be approachable. As for a correlation between consciousness and quantum mechanics, that's not really something I buy into. The famous physicist Roger Penrose, however, wrote a couple of books arguing that computers can never be intelligent because the human brain does special quantum mechanics stuff. If you ask me, his ideas about this are a bunch of claptrap. But in case you are interested, here is one of them: https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Universe-Quantum-Physics-Evolution-ebook/dp/B077RZV7VK/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=roger+penrose&qid=1569534266&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Universe-Quantum-Physic...
  - mihaifm 7y ago
    I am not an expert in either of these fields, but I wouldn’t dismiss the correlation. Quantum mechanics tackles the problem of the observer. If you put a cat in a box, it’s in an undefined state until someone looks at it. If you send your friend over to check the cat, he sees the cat but to you it’s still in an undefined state. Now the friend comes back and tells you the information about the cat, and suddenly your conciousness has indirectly “resolved” the state of the cat. You can extrapolate this to all events in the universe, basically when your consciousness came into existence you have resolved the entire history of the universe.
kanzenryu2 7y ago
Here's an argument for MWI being testable https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DFxoaWGEh9ndwtZhk/decoherence-is-falsifiable-and-testable https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DFxoaWGEh9ndwtZhk/decoherenc...
- nessus42 7y ago
  > Here's an argument for MWI being testable I skimmed the article very quickly. It doesn't even mention the Bohm interpretation. It has long been considered that the Bohm interpretation and MWI are experimentally indistinguishable. Since the article doesn't specifically mention this issue, I'm not sure that it's worth the slog (if all you care about is the philosophical worry that we can never distinguish whether we're in an MWI world vs a Bohm world.) As for MWI/Bohm being distinguishable from other interpretations, it is certainly the case that this is true. Though actually doing so in practice would be extremely difficult. My guess is that this article is really on how me might approach trying to narrow the field down to MWI/Bohm, or exclude them, as the evidence may ultimately show.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
It's interesting how "subjectivity" has been reintroduced into physics and mathematics in the 20th century: Relativity and its frames of reference, Quantum Mechanics and its necessity of entangling yourself with what you want to observe, Statistical Physics showing that entropy was the lack of information that you have about the system, Mathematics - that you were forced to choose a set of postulates that you then wouldn't be able to prove...
- nessus42 7y ago
  So that's interesting. Behaviorism, for instance, was actually an oppressive "science" of the 20th century because it was ideologically opposed to even acknowledging the existence of subjective mental states. The proponents of Behaviorism felt that subjective mental states were inherently unscientific and they wanted to turn Psychology into a respectable science. Behaviorists were operating under the misconception that something can't be both subjective and objective at the same time. It took Cognitive Psychology to rescue us from this sorry state of affairs. But for years, those who wanted to do Cognitive Psychology academically were blocked from publishing and getting tenure, etc., by the entrenched Behaviorist establishment. These days we know that via using FMRI, for instance, psychologists and neuroscientists can often determine objectively more about some of your own thoughts than you yourself might know. Or they can sometimes know what you will come to decide before you believe yourself to have decided. Etc. But certain mental states (i.e., phenomenal ones) seem to have an inherently subjective component that cannot be studied objectively at all. Or at least that's what someone who believes in the "hard problem of consciousness" will say. Others will say, "Pshaw!"
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    I'd say that too many people still seem to equate "objective" with "real"/"physical"... (P.S.: Assuming that a "God's view" of the problem has to exist?) I'm suspecting that physics might end up in a similar situation than mathematics, where we find out that we can't objectively prove everything - and either we'll have an epistemological breakthrough allowing us to deal with subjectivity in a framework that has still some resemblance to a scientific method, or... we won't. (Personally, I'm hopeful that the Hard Problem can be "dissolved" - and this "philosophical zombie" concept just seems to me to be misguided, just like the concept of aether was.)

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.
  - nessus42 7y ago
    You're arguing that there is no "hard problem of consciousness". You're wrong. But at least you have plenty of company. Philosophers have been debating this issue rabidly for decades. Huge tomes have been written on the subject, arguing both for and against the "hard problem" being real. We are not going to settle this issue here. I suggest that we come back in a millennium and see if any progress has been made. I don't have high hopes.
    - the8472 7y ago
      You're making it sound more and more like that problem is an invisible pink unicorn.
      - nessus42 7y ago
        > You're making it sound more and more like that problem is an invisible pink unicorn. You might have a point if philosophers had been arguing for decades and written huge tomes on whether or not there is an invisible pink unicorn. But they haven't. The academic philosophy community isn't made up of dimwits. You don't do anyone a service by implying that they are.

mihaifm 7y ago

Interesting point. Could you recommend something to read about this topic, or maybe you have some writeups of your own? Mainly interested about the correlation between quantum mechanics and the problem of consciousness.

nessus42 7y ago
> Could you recommend something to read about this topic Well, if you want to dive right in, you could read this book by David Chalmers, who is (or at least was when I actively studied such things) the most famous philosopher who has grappled with the "hard problem" of consciousness: https://www.amazon.com/Character-Consciousness-Philosophy-Mind-ebook/dp/B004FPYKW0/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=david+chalmers&qid=1569533961&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Character-Consciousness-Philosophy-Mi... There are a bunch of books and published papers on the topic, of course. But most of them, including the book listed above, would be a slog if you're not taking a philosophy class on the subject. Even then, they'd likely be a slog. Philosophy arguments on this topic can quickly become extremely intricate, and laden with jargon. I've written a number of papers on the topic myself for classes, but don't recall if any of them are accessible to someone with no prior knowledge of the debate. There might be a decent one that I wrote for Douglas Hofstadter when he was a visiting professor at MIT. I can check and send you a copy if it seems like it might be approachable. As for a correlation between consciousness and quantum mechanics, that's not really something I buy into. The famous physicist Roger Penrose, however, wrote a couple of books arguing that computers can never be intelligent because the human brain does special quantum mechanics stuff. If you ask me, his ideas about this are a bunch of claptrap. But in case you are interested, here is one of them: https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Universe-Quantum-Physics-Evolution-ebook/dp/B077RZV7VK/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=roger+penrose&qid=1569534266&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Universe-Quantum-Physic...
- mihaifm 7y ago
  I am not an expert in either of these fields, but I wouldn’t dismiss the correlation. Quantum mechanics tackles the problem of the observer. If you put a cat in a box, it’s in an undefined state until someone looks at it. If you send your friend over to check the cat, he sees the cat but to you it’s still in an undefined state. Now the friend comes back and tells you the information about the cat, and suddenly your conciousness has indirectly “resolved” the state of the cat. You can extrapolate this to all events in the universe, basically when your consciousness came into existence you have resolved the entire history of the universe.

kanzenryu2 7y ago

Here's an argument for MWI being testable https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DFxoaWGEh9ndwtZhk/decoherence-is-falsifiable-and-testable https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DFxoaWGEh9ndwtZhk/decoherenc...

nessus42 7y ago
> Here's an argument for MWI being testable I skimmed the article very quickly. It doesn't even mention the Bohm interpretation. It has long been considered that the Bohm interpretation and MWI are experimentally indistinguishable. Since the article doesn't specifically mention this issue, I'm not sure that it's worth the slog (if all you care about is the philosophical worry that we can never distinguish whether we're in an MWI world vs a Bohm world.) As for MWI/Bohm being distinguishable from other interpretations, it is certainly the case that this is true. Though actually doing so in practice would be extremely difficult. My guess is that this article is really on how me might approach trying to narrow the field down to MWI/Bohm, or exclude them, as the evidence may ultimately show.

BlueTemplar 7y ago

It's interesting how "subjectivity" has been reintroduced into physics and mathematics in the 20th century: Relativity and its frames of reference, Quantum Mechanics and its necessity of entangling yourself with what you want to observe, Statistical Physics showing that entropy was the lack of information that you have about the system, Mathematics - that you were forced to choose a set of postulates that you then wouldn't be able to prove...

nessus42 7y ago
So that's interesting. Behaviorism, for instance, was actually an oppressive "science" of the 20th century because it was ideologically opposed to even acknowledging the existence of subjective mental states. The proponents of Behaviorism felt that subjective mental states were inherently unscientific and they wanted to turn Psychology into a respectable science. Behaviorists were operating under the misconception that something can't be both subjective and objective at the same time. It took Cognitive Psychology to rescue us from this sorry state of affairs. But for years, those who wanted to do Cognitive Psychology academically were blocked from publishing and getting tenure, etc., by the entrenched Behaviorist establishment. These days we know that via using FMRI, for instance, psychologists and neuroscientists can often determine objectively more about some of your own thoughts than you yourself might know. Or they can sometimes know what you will come to decide before you believe yourself to have decided. Etc. But certain mental states (i.e., phenomenal ones) seem to have an inherently subjective component that cannot be studied objectively at all. Or at least that's what someone who believes in the "hard problem of consciousness" will say. Others will say, "Pshaw!"
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  I'd say that too many people still seem to equate "objective" with "real"/"physical"... (P.S.: Assuming that a "God's view" of the problem has to exist?) I'm suspecting that physics might end up in a similar situation than mathematics, where we find out that we can't objectively prove everything - and either we'll have an epistemological breakthrough allowing us to deal with subjectivity in a framework that has still some resemblance to a scientific method, or... we won't. (Personally, I'm hopeful that the Hard Problem can be "dissolved" - and this "philosophical zombie" concept just seems to me to be misguided, just like the concept of aether was.)