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My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus algo

My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus algorithmic breakthroughs will make AI start to crawl up the chain from useful pattern matching from messy data to useful dullard able to reason. And we still won't know why because the "insight" is buried in the network state and our little human brains cannot deal with that level of detail.

pygy_ 7y ago
Emergentism doesn’t explain qualia. You won’t be able to explain the difference between green and magenta to a blind person.
- alansammarone 7y ago
  I've been researching and thinking about consciousness (and specifically the hard problem) for a while now, and while the whole discussion is interesting, it seems to me that invoking qualia as evidence for the existence of the hard problem (or for there being something "to explain") doesn't really make much sense. Its perfectly plausible, if not likelly, that qualia is also part of the emergent phenomenon . I'm saying this more so to hear what your (or anybody else's) thoughts here are - why would qualia lie "above" or be "unexplainable" by materialism alone?
  - shrimpx 7y ago
    The crazy thing is that qualia is materialism. This computer you're typing on is a real thing that's also your qualia. The real failure is to say that qualia is a separate thing that doesn't matter in "materialism".
    - monktastic1 7y ago
      Under materialism, there's a hypothetical "real computer" that is the cause of your computer-qualia, but they are not identical.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    I don't see how it's perfectly plausible. In fact I see no reason to think it's plausible at all. What does qualia (plural, btw) "are part of the emergent phenomenon" mean in practice? That just seems to be begging the question. If you want to explain qualia, you have to do two things. The first is explain the nature of the experiencing entity. This means defining the precise mechanism by which subjective states are experienced by the entity instead of simply existing as objective state correlates. This in turn means explaining the nature of all of subjective experience. The second is to explain the precise mechanism by which external inputs and internal states generate the experiences the entity has. Most of the "Well it's obvious and there's no problem here" positions rely on the fallacy that defining a complicated-enough objective correlate - such as the detailed state of a computer with some form of introspection - solves the problem. It doesn't. In fact it doesn't even begin to understand the problem. It's simply a statement of hope and faith with no empirical support that a complicated-enough state with enough introspection will somehow cross the border from automatic operation to sentient experience, just because it will, obviously.
    - kruasan 7y ago
      > mechanism by which subjective states are experienced by the entity Why are you implying some kind of mental entity that "does the experiencing"?
- steeveblack 7y ago
  Isn't it that, for a blind person, qualia such as green or magenta doesn't emerge?
- roenxi 7y ago
  From an emergentist perspective there is nothing to explain - qualia are an illusion created by having a certain level of complexity in the stimuli fed into a brain. Emergentism has a lot of easy outs once the initial assumption - that it is possible for the self to be an illusion of complexity - is made. If that is palatable then any niggle can be explained away as just part of the illusion. And that initial assumption is a profoundly personal one, the only consciousness anyone has experience with is their own. Even if we share some initial spark of consciousness across humans there is pretty solid evidence that everyone has a different experience of reality (eg, synesthesia) that make arguing from qualia very hard. It is difficult to see how it isn't just a leap of faith either way. If it is possible, then it is basically certain. If it is impossible, then that is the end of it. Either way we can perfectly account for our experiences. A humourous interpretation is maybe I'm a philosophical zombie where my consciousness is an emergent soup and you are a genuine consciousness with all sorts of special experiences. That really muddles the water over what the argument is even about; I would reasonably and rationally never be convinced that consciousness existed. All the evidence for the argument would be inaccessible to me but you couldn't exactly dismiss me as not being equal to yourself because you don't have evidence either way either.
  - pygy_ 7y ago
    That sounds plausible. Another issue I have with emergentism and other functionalist theories is that they don’t seem to account for the persistence of identity across consciousness discontinuities. Your consciousness sometimes vanishes the re-emerges as yourself. Where (or when) is your mind during the leap? Does it perform discrete time travel?
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Why does it have to be somewhere?
      - pygy_ 7y ago
        It doesn’t (it could do a discrete leap forward in time). Still, why do I wake up as myself every morning? One of the papers linked in this thread discusses (lack of) object permanence from a QM perspective, I’d like to understand how subject permanence works as well, and functionalism does’t handle that well.
tremon 7y ago
That's similar to my pet theory, except I don't think it will emerge "naturally" from current AI architectures. I think it is an emergent property from various interconnected, competing networks. For consciousness to emerge, it would require a feedback architecture where multiple RNNs not only operate on the same inputs, but on each other's outputs as well. At least that's my thinking. It's not my area at all.
- turk73 7y ago
  Not only that, but because our brains are "plastic" those inputs and outputs need to be able to re-wire themselves and building hardware that can do that is tough.
normalnorm 7y ago
Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction. We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but they are too complex for us to reason in such terms. With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block. For me, the only coherent way to be an emergentist on consciousness is to also be a panpsychist: everything is conscious to a degree, it's just a brute fact of nature (such as, let's say, the fundamental forces). Maybe this is the case, but I would not bet on that. Consciousness is a phonomenon unlike any other, in the sense that scientist who study it are studying it from the inside. Science is something that happens 100% within human consciousness. This is why I suspect that it is a phenomenon that is beyond the reach of science. It could even be impossible to explain. There is no reason to assume that we can solve all mysteries.
- zadler 7y ago
  Science does take place within consciousness, but also outside of it, since there are discreet conscious entities that can be studied.
  - normalnorm 7y ago
    There is only one conscious entity that you have direct experience of, which is yourself, and as far as you are concerned, all of science is contained within your conscious experience. You (and also me) reason by analogy, and we assume consciousness in other beings, but we cannot directly observe it or measure it, in the sense that we can measure all the things on which we can do empirical investigations (e.g. an electrical field of a weight). So maybe science takes place in multiple consciousnesses (this is what I believe, but I can't prove it), but I don't see how it could take place outside of consciousness.
- hoseja 7y ago
  Why can't they point to "interactions of neurons"?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Merrill 7y ago
Much of the philosophizing about consciousness is complicated by attempts to preserve a role for something other than an information theoretic entity operating on an electrochemical substrate. The attempts are motivated by a desire to have something that might last beyond the death of the substrate - something akin to a "soul" in Western Christian religion.

pygy_ 7y ago

Emergentism doesn’t explain qualia. You won’t be able to explain the difference between green and magenta to a blind person.

alansammarone 7y ago
I've been researching and thinking about consciousness (and specifically the hard problem) for a while now, and while the whole discussion is interesting, it seems to me that invoking qualia as evidence for the existence of the hard problem (or for there being something "to explain") doesn't really make much sense. Its perfectly plausible, if not likelly, that qualia is also part of the emergent phenomenon . I'm saying this more so to hear what your (or anybody else's) thoughts here are - why would qualia lie "above" or be "unexplainable" by materialism alone?
- shrimpx 7y ago
  The crazy thing is that qualia is materialism. This computer you're typing on is a real thing that's also your qualia. The real failure is to say that qualia is a separate thing that doesn't matter in "materialism".
  - monktastic1 7y ago
    Under materialism, there's a hypothetical "real computer" that is the cause of your computer-qualia, but they are not identical.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  I don't see how it's perfectly plausible. In fact I see no reason to think it's plausible at all. What does qualia (plural, btw) "are part of the emergent phenomenon" mean in practice? That just seems to be begging the question. If you want to explain qualia, you have to do two things. The first is explain the nature of the experiencing entity. This means defining the precise mechanism by which subjective states are experienced by the entity instead of simply existing as objective state correlates. This in turn means explaining the nature of all of subjective experience. The second is to explain the precise mechanism by which external inputs and internal states generate the experiences the entity has. Most of the "Well it's obvious and there's no problem here" positions rely on the fallacy that defining a complicated-enough objective correlate - such as the detailed state of a computer with some form of introspection - solves the problem. It doesn't. In fact it doesn't even begin to understand the problem. It's simply a statement of hope and faith with no empirical support that a complicated-enough state with enough introspection will somehow cross the border from automatic operation to sentient experience, just because it will, obviously.
  - kruasan 7y ago
    > mechanism by which subjective states are experienced by the entity Why are you implying some kind of mental entity that "does the experiencing"?
steeveblack 7y ago
Isn't it that, for a blind person, qualia such as green or magenta doesn't emerge?
roenxi 7y ago
From an emergentist perspective there is nothing to explain - qualia are an illusion created by having a certain level of complexity in the stimuli fed into a brain. Emergentism has a lot of easy outs once the initial assumption - that it is possible for the self to be an illusion of complexity - is made. If that is palatable then any niggle can be explained away as just part of the illusion. And that initial assumption is a profoundly personal one, the only consciousness anyone has experience with is their own. Even if we share some initial spark of consciousness across humans there is pretty solid evidence that everyone has a different experience of reality (eg, synesthesia) that make arguing from qualia very hard. It is difficult to see how it isn't just a leap of faith either way. If it is possible, then it is basically certain. If it is impossible, then that is the end of it. Either way we can perfectly account for our experiences. A humourous interpretation is maybe I'm a philosophical zombie where my consciousness is an emergent soup and you are a genuine consciousness with all sorts of special experiences. That really muddles the water over what the argument is even about; I would reasonably and rationally never be convinced that consciousness existed. All the evidence for the argument would be inaccessible to me but you couldn't exactly dismiss me as not being equal to yourself because you don't have evidence either way either.
- pygy_ 7y ago
  That sounds plausible. Another issue I have with emergentism and other functionalist theories is that they don’t seem to account for the persistence of identity across consciousness discontinuities. Your consciousness sometimes vanishes the re-emerges as yourself. Where (or when) is your mind during the leap? Does it perform discrete time travel?
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Why does it have to be somewhere?
    - pygy_ 7y ago
      It doesn’t (it could do a discrete leap forward in time). Still, why do I wake up as myself every morning? One of the papers linked in this thread discusses (lack of) object permanence from a QM perspective, I’d like to understand how subject permanence works as well, and functionalism does’t handle that well.

tremon 7y ago

That's similar to my pet theory, except I don't think it will emerge "naturally" from current AI architectures. I think it is an emergent property from various interconnected, competing networks. For consciousness to emerge, it would require a feedback architecture where multiple RNNs not only operate on the same inputs, but on each other's outputs as well. At least that's my thinking. It's not my area at all.

turk73 7y ago
Not only that, but because our brains are "plastic" those inputs and outputs need to be able to re-wire themselves and building hardware that can do that is tough.

normalnorm 7y ago

Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction. We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but they are too complex for us to reason in such terms. With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block. For me, the only coherent way to be an emergentist on consciousness is to also be a panpsychist: everything is conscious to a degree, it's just a brute fact of nature (such as, let's say, the fundamental forces). Maybe this is the case, but I would not bet on that. Consciousness is a phonomenon unlike any other, in the sense that scientist who study it are studying it from the inside. Science is something that happens 100% within human consciousness. This is why I suspect that it is a phenomenon that is beyond the reach of science. It could even be impossible to explain. There is no reason to assume that we can solve all mysteries.

zadler 7y ago
Science does take place within consciousness, but also outside of it, since there are discreet conscious entities that can be studied.
- normalnorm 7y ago
  There is only one conscious entity that you have direct experience of, which is yourself, and as far as you are concerned, all of science is contained within your conscious experience. You (and also me) reason by analogy, and we assume consciousness in other beings, but we cannot directly observe it or measure it, in the sense that we can measure all the things on which we can do empirical investigations (e.g. an electrical field of a weight). So maybe science takes place in multiple consciousnesses (this is what I believe, but I can't prove it), but I don't see how it could take place outside of consciousness.
hoseja 7y ago
Why can't they point to "interactions of neurons"?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Merrill 7y ago

Much of the philosophizing about consciousness is complicated by attempts to preserve a role for something other than an information theoretic entity operating on an electrochemical substrate. The attempts are motivated by a desire to have something that might last beyond the death of the substrate - something akin to a "soul" in Western Christian religion.