3 ms·

This seems like a reasonable next step after considering the failure of Totoni's IIT. IIT has the "problem" that a diode is a little conscious; the authors embr

This seems like a reasonable next step after considering the failure of Totoni's IIT. IIT has the "problem" that a diode is a little conscious; the authors embrace and extend this "problematic" viewpoint to cover the informal popular idea that compression is knowledge. Their view on the Hard Problem is not new. They say that the main trick to the Hard Problem is compressing information about a "self" which is repeatedly re-quantified. However, they then must rely on some notion of human individuality in order to explain why qualia are subjective. The only problems I have with this approach are the normal criticisms of panpsychic approaches: It's hard to observe, there's few useful predictions, rocks are a little conscious, etc. However, rocks are a little conscious, or at least a little alive, thanks to lithophile bacteria which form microscopic filaments threading through the rock; this wasn't known in Berkeley's time!

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
That doesn't mean rocks are conscious, it means the things that live on rocks are conscious - an interesting idea that appears to scale well. There is no CS solution to the hard problem, because the hard problem is not about information, or behaviour, or data compression, or rocks. It's about subjectivity, and there isn't even a working definition of what subjectivity is, never mind any experiment that can be done to confirm that it exists. Subjectivity is essentially metaphysical in the sense that it's outside of science. It's impossible to make a testable statement about any phenomenon of any kind that isn't filtered through human perception and all the layers of human cognitive processing. In a very real sense it's objectivity that's the illusion. Try to make a statement about anything whatsoever that is truly independent of collective human sense perception and human mental processes and see how far you get. Whatever you think you're doing in science or math, you're looking out through a distorted window whose properties you're not aware of, and trying to correlate your observations with others looking out through windows with similar distortions. The best you'll get is an interesting list of distortions which everyone agrees on. Even if they have predictive power, that doesn't make them truly objective - it just makes them a spiky median of collective experience instead of an outlier of individual experience.
- arithma 6y ago
  This kind of reminds me of the usual interview question: can you make a fair die from an unfair one. Similarly, us as humans, could possibly have the ability to get over some/all of our distorted senses. I am not talking about every day life here. It's in principle possible to deal with the logical fallacies that we're programmed with, but it requires effort. What am more interested to convey is: our potential for objectivity is troubled with subjectivity. It is, however, not impossible on just the account of having subjective distortions. Those can be overrun. There are many other similar analogies that come to mind, one that is prominent: digital systems made from purely analog ones.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  I agree with your direction, but have qualms with your points. Suppose for absurdity I replay my original argument, but with humans, and you reply "that doesn't mean humans are conscious; it means that the things which are housed within skulls are conscious". I understand the nuance you're introducing, but don't think that it helps. Part of the difficulty of the Combination Problem is that the boundary of conscious control extends beyond the nexus of thought. I'll accept that rocks are just the substrate, but integrated circuits are just carefully cooked rocks; substrate-vs-consciousness thinking might be wrong. I agree with you that science is done empirically, and thus doesn't experience objectivity. However, maths is quite formal, and in the past century we managed to achieve "formal formality" with category theory. We now can talk of certain objects as existing universally; in their context, not only do they exist, but they uniquely exist. For example, `1+1=2`, which is to say that there's an equivalence between any pair of objects selected one by one, and any pair taken both at a time; for any particular counting context, there's only one natural numbers object. I am not quite as pessimistic as you regarding the quality of the conclusions that we reach. Rather than saying that our filters make us subjective, I would simply say that the experiences of humanity are essentially human. There's an anthropic bias because humans can't experience anything that isn't human; we can't think truly alien ideas or build truly alien artifacts. Everything we think is non-human is actually human. This doesn't prevent us from drawing conclusions, but it does forbid objectivity.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

That doesn't mean rocks are conscious, it means the things that live on rocks are conscious - an interesting idea that appears to scale well. There is no CS solution to the hard problem, because the hard problem is not about information, or behaviour, or data compression, or rocks. It's about subjectivity, and there isn't even a working definition of what subjectivity is, never mind any experiment that can be done to confirm that it exists. Subjectivity is essentially metaphysical in the sense that it's outside of science. It's impossible to make a testable statement about any phenomenon of any kind that isn't filtered through human perception and all the layers of human cognitive processing. In a very real sense it's objectivity that's the illusion. Try to make a statement about anything whatsoever that is truly independent of collective human sense perception and human mental processes and see how far you get. Whatever you think you're doing in science or math, you're looking out through a distorted window whose properties you're not aware of, and trying to correlate your observations with others looking out through windows with similar distortions. The best you'll get is an interesting list of distortions which everyone agrees on. Even if they have predictive power, that doesn't make them truly objective - it just makes them a spiky median of collective experience instead of an outlier of individual experience.

arithma 6y ago
This kind of reminds me of the usual interview question: can you make a fair die from an unfair one. Similarly, us as humans, could possibly have the ability to get over some/all of our distorted senses. I am not talking about every day life here. It's in principle possible to deal with the logical fallacies that we're programmed with, but it requires effort. What am more interested to convey is: our potential for objectivity is troubled with subjectivity. It is, however, not impossible on just the account of having subjective distortions. Those can be overrun. There are many other similar analogies that come to mind, one that is prominent: digital systems made from purely analog ones.
Kednicma 6y ago
I agree with your direction, but have qualms with your points. Suppose for absurdity I replay my original argument, but with humans, and you reply "that doesn't mean humans are conscious; it means that the things which are housed within skulls are conscious". I understand the nuance you're introducing, but don't think that it helps. Part of the difficulty of the Combination Problem is that the boundary of conscious control extends beyond the nexus of thought. I'll accept that rocks are just the substrate, but integrated circuits are just carefully cooked rocks; substrate-vs-consciousness thinking might be wrong. I agree with you that science is done empirically, and thus doesn't experience objectivity. However, maths is quite formal, and in the past century we managed to achieve "formal formality" with category theory. We now can talk of certain objects as existing universally; in their context, not only do they exist, but they uniquely exist. For example, `1+1=2`, which is to say that there's an equivalence between any pair of objects selected one by one, and any pair taken both at a time; for any particular counting context, there's only one natural numbers object. I am not quite as pessimistic as you regarding the quality of the conclusions that we reach. Rather than saying that our filters make us subjective, I would simply say that the experiences of humanity are essentially human. There's an anthropic bias because humans can't experience anything that isn't human; we can't think truly alien ideas or build truly alien artifacts. Everything we think is non-human is actually human. This doesn't prevent us from drawing conclusions, but it does forbid objectivity.
- tsimionescu 6y ago