6 ms·

Colors, tastes, feelings aren't vague nor are the thoughts, imaginations, dreams they makeup. They're the stuff of consciousness, and somehow you have to demons

Colors, tastes, feelings aren't vague nor are the thoughts, imaginations, dreams they makeup. They're the stuff of consciousness, and somehow you have to demonstrate how awareness results in those experiences. Shifting definitions to avoid the hard problem doesn't cut it.

barrkel 7y ago
You have no idea if you live in a world of zombies who just say they perceive qualia, who just give the appearance of seeing red. I don't see it as a real problem. If a program or machine asserts that it perceives qualia, who are we to argue it's wrong? We are in no better a position to prove the qualia of our subjective conscious experience other than our physical resemblance to our interlocutor. Maybe qualia is what it's like for matter to be in a feedback loop with physical interaction. Panpsychism is pretty much my position.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Xenograph 7y ago
  > I don't see it as a real problem. If a program or machine asserts that it perceives qualia, who are we to argue it's wrong? Right now, we are in no position to argue it's wrong, because we have no accepted framework for understanding qualia. That said, we can still make some simple assertions with confidence such as: 1: A one-line program which prints "I am afraid" does not experience fear qualia. 2: A human being which utters the words "I am afraid" may be experiencing fear qualia (and thus perhaps experiencing pain/suffering). If you assert that the world is full of philosophical zombies rather than humans like yourself, you may not agree with assertion #2. But we build our ethical and legal frameworks around the idea that we aren't philosophical zombies, rather, that we have feelings and want to avoid suffering. Once you start talking about more complicated programs, though, we don't know what the right assertions are. We don't have an understanding of what things can suffer and what things cannot, for starters. We generally agree that, say, dogs can suffer. That's why we have laws against animal abuse. But what about programs? It is absolutely a real problem, because some day we will have to build laws and culture around how we treat AI. Whether or not an AI can suffer (ie. by experiencing qualia that can be considered undesirable) will likely affect how we treat that AI. If we have no way to answer "can this program suffer?", then we are setting ourselves up for regret.
  - CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
    Once an AI is advanced enough to make the question hard to answer, isn’t the odds that the AI will be advanced enough to simply decide the answer for us? I imagine thane once someone manage to produce an AI with enough agency to seem sentient it will far exceed human capabilities.
    - vermilingua 7y ago
      I’d say the question is already potentially hard to answer. We have deep learning systems that perceive and strategise. Who’s to say that AlphaGo doesn’t have some experience of playing out millions of games?
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Please read Solaris. Or talk to an ant. There's no reason to expect to be able to understand something's ideas just because it's smarter than you.
  - gugagore 7y ago
    "that's why we have laws against animal abuse" I think there is a step or two missing in between. Abusing dogs isn't just as bad as abusing something that suffers. It's, e.g., doing something that has no value to society (unlike animals being mistreated in a feed lot), or it's something that sews unacceptable levels of aggression. It feels much more complicated than you make it seem.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      If you try to find a logical basis for hypocritical laws, you're gonna have a bad time.
    - jshevek 7y ago
      I took it as necessary condition, not a sufficient condition. The other necessary conditions were omitted because they aren't important to the line of reasoning being presented.
  - 7y ago
- goatlover 7y ago
  Ned Block covers this in his paper on the Harder Problem of Consciousness. Other humans share a similar biology, so we have good enough justification to think they're conscious. It won't defeat solipsism, but it's enough to make a reasonable assumption. Data or whatever AI/Android doesn't share our biology. And since we can't tell whether it's the functioning of our biology or the biology itself which provides us with consciousness, we lack any reasonable justification for assuming Data is conscious. And then he goes further into functional isomorphs at different levels and how that might or might not matter for Data, but we can't tell.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    > Other humans share a similar biology, so we have good enough justification to think they're conscious. That's the way it goes with these arguments: it always comes down to an appeal to what's reasonable or plausible (those who insist consciousness must be an algorithm are doing the same thing, at least until we have algorithms that seem to be making some progress on the hard problem.) One might equally say other humans share a similar physics. When Dennett said "we are all p-zombies", I suspect he was making the point that it would be highly tendentious to take the position that anything both behaving and functioning physically in the manner of a human would not be conscious, except for humans themselves.
  - barrkel 7y ago
    I see a lot of resemblance in biology between myself and cats, does that mean that cats have qualia? I infer they dream from their twitches as they sleep. How about mice? Lizards? Fish? Insects? Nematodes? At what point do qualia stop occurring? I see a more or less continuous decline in similarity. I don't see any justification for a cut-off. I don't think data is conscious. I suspect consciousness might be a side-effect physical computation. I don't believe there's any magic to the human brain's inputs and outputs which cannot be computed, and thus display the appearance of consciousness. In fact I see the Turing test as a thought experiment more than any actual test, a way of removing the appearance of a human body from the task of evaluating an artificial intelligence as a thinking, conscious being. If it quacks like a duck, a rose by any other name, etc. In fact I'm not entirely convinced that the Western conception of consciousness isn't a learned cultural artifact, that there aren't people who have a more expansive notion of self which includes close family, for example. Have you ever suffered watching a relative hurt themselves? Ever had false memories of injury from childhood which you found out later happened to someone else?
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  We have all discussed this in your absence, and we have decided that only you are a zombie.
joe_the_user 7y ago
As far as I understand it, the "hard problem of consciousness" is the claim that consciousness is something absolutely separate, that there is a jump between constructive processes that make up the informal view of consciousness and the full formal, philosophical view. That approach always seemed like a complete dead end. I mean, "philosophical zombie" construct would seem to experience "Colors, tastes, feelings" and whatever concrete, they just would lack the ineffable quality of (philosophical, formal) consciousness - you could brain pattern akin to color sensation for example. This final view is kind of meaningless and I think people are attracted to the view by misunderstanding, by thinking something concrete is involved here.
- goatlover 7y ago
  The concreteness is your own subjective experience. All this other stuff about constructive processes and zombies is word play. It doesn't change your experience. The issue is providing a scientific explanation for how the physical world produces, emerges, or is identical to consciousness. Arguments like p-zombies and Mary the color scientist are meant to showwe don't know how to come up with such an explanation, because our scientific understanding is objective and abstract, while our experiences are subjective and concrete. I prefer Nagel's approach to the hard problem, as he goes to the heart of the matter, which is the difference between objective explanation and subjective experience. Science is the view from nowhere (abstract, mathematic, functional), while we experience the world as being from somewhere as embodied beings, not equations.
proverbialbunny 7y ago
In your example of qualia (Colors, tastes, feelings), how is that not awareness? That is what is the difference between awareness and consciousness here? In your example the abstractions of qualia (thoughts, imaginations, dreams), how are they not labels of experience? That is what ML does, after all. Today ML may, for all intents and purposes, have roughly the intelligence of a bug, but it has to have awareness to label data. Where does consciousness come in beyond labeling and awareness that ML does not have today?
- goatlover 7y ago
  Do you think that ML algorithms are having experiences when they label data? We label experiences with different words because we have different kinds of experiences. But it's the experiences and not the labels that matter, and the labeling of those experiences does not cause the experience. We say we have dreams because we do have dreams in the first place. You're proposing that labelling data is the same thing as having an experience, but you haven't explained how data is experience, or why the labelling matters for that.
  - chr1 7y ago
    ML algorithms have very beautiful dreams and halucinations https://www.google.com/search?q=neural+net+dreams https://www.google.com/search?q=neural+net+dreams ;) More seriously though, if we agree that the brain is described by physics, then all it can do, a turing machine can do as well, so at the root all experiences have to be data and computation.
    - goatlover 7y ago
      Perhaps, but keep in mind that physics is a human description of the universe, not the universe itself. So it may also not be data and computation, as those might just be useful abstractions we create to model reality. Same with math. But that gets into metaphysics, which is notoriously tricky.
      - 7y ago

barrkel 7y ago

You have no idea if you live in a world of zombies who just say they perceive qualia, who just give the appearance of seeing red. I don't see it as a real problem. If a program or machine asserts that it perceives qualia, who are we to argue it's wrong? We are in no better a position to prove the qualia of our subjective conscious experience other than our physical resemblance to our interlocutor. Maybe qualia is what it's like for matter to be in a feedback loop with physical interaction. Panpsychism is pretty much my position.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Xenograph 7y ago
> I don't see it as a real problem. If a program or machine asserts that it perceives qualia, who are we to argue it's wrong? Right now, we are in no position to argue it's wrong, because we have no accepted framework for understanding qualia. That said, we can still make some simple assertions with confidence such as: 1: A one-line program which prints "I am afraid" does not experience fear qualia. 2: A human being which utters the words "I am afraid" may be experiencing fear qualia (and thus perhaps experiencing pain/suffering). If you assert that the world is full of philosophical zombies rather than humans like yourself, you may not agree with assertion #2. But we build our ethical and legal frameworks around the idea that we aren't philosophical zombies, rather, that we have feelings and want to avoid suffering. Once you start talking about more complicated programs, though, we don't know what the right assertions are. We don't have an understanding of what things can suffer and what things cannot, for starters. We generally agree that, say, dogs can suffer. That's why we have laws against animal abuse. But what about programs? It is absolutely a real problem, because some day we will have to build laws and culture around how we treat AI. Whether or not an AI can suffer (ie. by experiencing qualia that can be considered undesirable) will likely affect how we treat that AI. If we have no way to answer "can this program suffer?", then we are setting ourselves up for regret.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  Once an AI is advanced enough to make the question hard to answer, isn’t the odds that the AI will be advanced enough to simply decide the answer for us? I imagine thane once someone manage to produce an AI with enough agency to seem sentient it will far exceed human capabilities.
  - vermilingua 7y ago
    I’d say the question is already potentially hard to answer. We have deep learning systems that perceive and strategise. Who’s to say that AlphaGo doesn’t have some experience of playing out millions of games?
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Please read Solaris. Or talk to an ant. There's no reason to expect to be able to understand something's ideas just because it's smarter than you.
- gugagore 7y ago
  "that's why we have laws against animal abuse" I think there is a step or two missing in between. Abusing dogs isn't just as bad as abusing something that suffers. It's, e.g., doing something that has no value to society (unlike animals being mistreated in a feed lot), or it's something that sews unacceptable levels of aggression. It feels much more complicated than you make it seem.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    If you try to find a logical basis for hypocritical laws, you're gonna have a bad time.
  - jshevek 7y ago
    I took it as necessary condition, not a sufficient condition. The other necessary conditions were omitted because they aren't important to the line of reasoning being presented.
- 7y ago
goatlover 7y ago
Ned Block covers this in his paper on the Harder Problem of Consciousness. Other humans share a similar biology, so we have good enough justification to think they're conscious. It won't defeat solipsism, but it's enough to make a reasonable assumption. Data or whatever AI/Android doesn't share our biology. And since we can't tell whether it's the functioning of our biology or the biology itself which provides us with consciousness, we lack any reasonable justification for assuming Data is conscious. And then he goes further into functional isomorphs at different levels and how that might or might not matter for Data, but we can't tell.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  > Other humans share a similar biology, so we have good enough justification to think they're conscious. That's the way it goes with these arguments: it always comes down to an appeal to what's reasonable or plausible (those who insist consciousness must be an algorithm are doing the same thing, at least until we have algorithms that seem to be making some progress on the hard problem.) One might equally say other humans share a similar physics. When Dennett said "we are all p-zombies", I suspect he was making the point that it would be highly tendentious to take the position that anything both behaving and functioning physically in the manner of a human would not be conscious, except for humans themselves.
- barrkel 7y ago
  I see a lot of resemblance in biology between myself and cats, does that mean that cats have qualia? I infer they dream from their twitches as they sleep. How about mice? Lizards? Fish? Insects? Nematodes? At what point do qualia stop occurring? I see a more or less continuous decline in similarity. I don't see any justification for a cut-off. I don't think data is conscious. I suspect consciousness might be a side-effect physical computation. I don't believe there's any magic to the human brain's inputs and outputs which cannot be computed, and thus display the appearance of consciousness. In fact I see the Turing test as a thought experiment more than any actual test, a way of removing the appearance of a human body from the task of evaluating an artificial intelligence as a thinking, conscious being. If it quacks like a duck, a rose by any other name, etc. In fact I'm not entirely convinced that the Western conception of consciousness isn't a learned cultural artifact, that there aren't people who have a more expansive notion of self which includes close family, for example. Have you ever suffered watching a relative hurt themselves? Ever had false memories of injury from childhood which you found out later happened to someone else?
mensetmanusman 7y ago
We have all discussed this in your absence, and we have decided that only you are a zombie.

joe_the_user 7y ago

As far as I understand it, the "hard problem of consciousness" is the claim that consciousness is something absolutely separate, that there is a jump between constructive processes that make up the informal view of consciousness and the full formal, philosophical view. That approach always seemed like a complete dead end. I mean, "philosophical zombie" construct would seem to experience "Colors, tastes, feelings" and whatever concrete, they just would lack the ineffable quality of (philosophical, formal) consciousness - you could brain pattern akin to color sensation for example. This final view is kind of meaningless and I think people are attracted to the view by misunderstanding, by thinking something concrete is involved here.

goatlover 7y ago
The concreteness is your own subjective experience. All this other stuff about constructive processes and zombies is word play. It doesn't change your experience. The issue is providing a scientific explanation for how the physical world produces, emerges, or is identical to consciousness. Arguments like p-zombies and Mary the color scientist are meant to showwe don't know how to come up with such an explanation, because our scientific understanding is objective and abstract, while our experiences are subjective and concrete. I prefer Nagel's approach to the hard problem, as he goes to the heart of the matter, which is the difference between objective explanation and subjective experience. Science is the view from nowhere (abstract, mathematic, functional), while we experience the world as being from somewhere as embodied beings, not equations.

proverbialbunny 7y ago

In your example of qualia (Colors, tastes, feelings), how is that not awareness? That is what is the difference between awareness and consciousness here? In your example the abstractions of qualia (thoughts, imaginations, dreams), how are they not labels of experience? That is what ML does, after all. Today ML may, for all intents and purposes, have roughly the intelligence of a bug, but it has to have awareness to label data. Where does consciousness come in beyond labeling and awareness that ML does not have today?

goatlover 7y ago
Do you think that ML algorithms are having experiences when they label data? We label experiences with different words because we have different kinds of experiences. But it's the experiences and not the labels that matter, and the labeling of those experiences does not cause the experience. We say we have dreams because we do have dreams in the first place. You're proposing that labelling data is the same thing as having an experience, but you haven't explained how data is experience, or why the labelling matters for that.
- chr1 7y ago
  ML algorithms have very beautiful dreams and halucinations https://www.google.com/search?q=neural+net+dreams https://www.google.com/search?q=neural+net+dreams ;) More seriously though, if we agree that the brain is described by physics, then all it can do, a turing machine can do as well, so at the root all experiences have to be data and computation.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    Perhaps, but keep in mind that physics is a human description of the universe, not the universe itself. So it may also not be data and computation, as those might just be useful abstractions we create to model reality. Same with math. But that gets into metaphysics, which is notoriously tricky.
    - 7y ago