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I don't see a problem to solve there. Every conscious creation has a limited number of sensors and limited processing capacity to work with, as such they can be

• andybak 5y ago
  It's so strange to read comments from people who think there's nothing to explain. It must be just as strange for those people to hear from the other side of the debate. To me it seems so obvious that there's an explanatory gap between any functional explanation of behaviour and information processing - and the feeling of experiencing something. The various thought experiments around p-zombies crystalises this for me.
  • mypalmike 5y ago
    What gap are you speaking of though? Do you suspect there is some as yet undiscovered fundamental quantity of the universe which lay dormant for billions of years until the human form evolved to make use of it?
    • andybak 5y ago
      > Do you suspect there is some as yet undiscovered fundamental quantity of the universe which lay dormant for billions of years until the human form evolved to make use of it? No idea. That's not what I'm discussing here. The gap is the fact that I indisputably experience things that happen to me. I feel them. There is an "I" to talk about that has genuine meaning in a way that it wouldn't do if a fictional character or a computer programming used the word. It's possible to imagine a form of life as complex as ours with functioning societies where non of the lifeforms experienced the world as an "I". Maybe ants don't have an "I". NPCs in a video game or GPT3 almost certainly don't. At some point GPTx or video game NPCs might become as complex or behaviourly rich as a real person but still lack an "I". This is a p-zombie. The "gap" I'm referring to is the difference beween similar entities, one of which experiences qualia when the other doesn't.
      • CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
        You seem to extrapolate from a single sample that the probabilities of an “I” experience differs between individuals based on how similar they are to you. I would say that if you can imagine other complex life forms without that experience it must be equally valid to assume the same can be true for everyone around you. Perhaps it’s only you.
        • andybak 5y ago
          > Perhaps it’s only you. And thus solipsism rears it's slightly unsightly head once again. Solipsism has always had the virtue of being coherent - unlike many other theories in this area. I think pan-psychism also has this quality. The issue is they are both lead you to some bizarre conclusions. In some ways it's an analogue to the role Many Worlds plays in the philosophy of Quantum Theory. "cheap on assumptions, expensive on universes"... I do lean towards some form of pan-psychism. Or at least I'm not sure you can get to "I" from a strictly materialist starting point. However I think it's also likely that we're missing a fundemental part of the problem and these conversations will one day look like the babblings of children.
          • CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
            I think its not only analogue to the many worlds, I quite suspect it’s the same problem actually. Or rather it seems we’re basically asking the wrong questions and therefore ending up with seemingly bizarre or contradicting things like particle/wave duality or the concept of time. How can we have consciousness when there is no objective “now”? To me the question of which processes experience consciousness is akin to asking if a sound wave is a crescendo or how many image frames in a movie is required to make a scene. Well, it depends... you might say, and the follow up question “depends on what?” is much more interesting. Some physicists say the world is fully determined. That there are at least four fully existing dimensions of space time, or even more than that given some interpretations of quantum mechanics. So we are given a static structure with certain patterns following specific laws of how the structure may be formed. Like if you made a 3D-print of a play of conways game of life. Now in that static structure we have this interesting phenomenon called consciousness that at first approximation looks like paths of focus tracing specific patterns. There might be just a single path, or many, or even a single connected path through them all as you say. I’m a compaibilist here, I don’t think it’s a difference with more substance to it than the particle/wave duality. It’s mostly a matter of perspective.
  • Luc 5y ago
    One can readily find persuasive critiques of Chalmers' theories by professional philosophers. Book length even.
    • antonvs 5y ago
      The GP comment was specifically talking about the "hard problem." That's hardly "Chalmer's theory," although he did name it. There are critiques of the hard problem, like eliminativism. I'm not aware of any that are "persuasive," though. Do you have any recommendations?
  • antonvs 5y ago
    There's an obvious explanation for the differences in perspective, which is covered by the title of this paper: https://philarchive.org/archive/KEACDD https://philarchive.org/archive/KEACDD
    • andybak 5y ago
      That's wonderful. I'm going to read it full later but I've been looking for some writing on this topic.
      • antonvs 5y ago
        The paper isn't quite as directly about what the title says as I might have liked, but since it's a mostly serious academic paper it probably can't be. It does contain some gems though, like: > In spite of his claim to have "long claimed" that the conceivability of zombies is only apparent, one suspects that it is non-zombic humans that Dennett finds if not inconceivable, then unendurable. [...] Zombies are perfect for Dennett! If the human world turned out to be populated only by them, his troubles would be over. Non-zombic humans, by contrast, are a nightmare for Dennett. It's also a serious but short look at the topic, which I found useful.
  • jokethrowaway 5y ago
    I'm firmly on the other side: I don't think there's anything special about consciousness. Consciousness is merely the capacity of the brain to keep track of everything that's happening and adapting behaviour. The I is merely a thought structure, we're just a very complicated deterministic script with lots of inputs. I score quite high for psychopathy and I didn't understand emotions for a long time (as a kid I imagined that people just pretended to have emotions), so the lack of that emotion processing capability, may influence my view in that topic. Either my brain is defective or it's this century version of geocentrism.
    • andybak 5y ago
      It's interesting that you mention psychopathy. I wonder if there's a correlation between these traits and the dismissal of the "hard problem". Maybe you don't experience selfhood in the same way that I do? Or maybe you just find it easier to disregard that aspect than I do.
    • goatlover 5y ago
      > Consciousness is merely the capacity of the brain to keep track of everything that's happening and adapting behaviour. Problem comes in when you take into account color, sound, pain, etc. How does the brain keeping track of itself produce conscious sensations? They're not coming in as such from the outside world. It's just EM radiation, vibrations in the air, molecular motion on the skin, etc. Our nervous system turns that noise into sensations. It's easy to see this problem when you think of how you might go about making a conscious robot. A sophisticated robot can keep track of its sensory inputs and adapt its behavior. But what would you add to turn that into colors and sounds and feels?
      • tsimionescu 5y ago
        > A sophisticated robot can keep track of its sensory inputs and adapt its behavior. But what would you add to turn that into colors and sounds and feels? The common thinking along those lines is that you would add introspection and nothing more. That is, "red" is the brain's interpretation of the brain processes that happen when light of some wavelength is hitting the retina (or perhaps we need a few more layers - the brain's interpretation of the brain processing the information that the brain is processing the information that [...]). Under this general idea, emotions would be similarly explained as analysis of other brain processes, ultimately reacting to even older (evolutionarily speaking) mechanisms for motivation and goal-seeking.
  • hliyan 5y ago
    It's my comment he's responding to, and even though I may not agree with his formulation, I'm sensing he has a point. What if this is a bias that we've acquired while growing up? Perhaps we've conflated consciousness with intent and reactivity (another term introduced by Jaynes 40 years ago). We've gotten used to thinking that a chair, for example, is not conscious by our definition because it reacts in a purely non-intentional way. But does that mean it doesn't have some rudimentary level of "experience" (sans pain, pleasure, a sense of self or other things that come with higher intelligence)?
    • andybak 5y ago
      I agree "consciousness" is a hodgepotch of different things, some of which are easier to fit into a materialist world view than others. But that doesn't detract from my belief that there's an irreducible nub that remains once you've removed all the easy bits. That nub is what I regard as the "hard problem"
  • LinAGKar 5y ago
    Yes, a lot of naturalist seem to think it's just about the ability to process information, but that's not it at all.
  • layer8 5y ago
    The "feeling of experiencing" is just a perception. That became obvious to me after dabbling in meditation/mindfulness exercises. My mental model of this is that in addition to regular sensory perception, the brain also perceives some of its own internal processing. That is, part of the further processing of the sensory data (or more generally of any cognitive processing) becomes itself subject to an internal perception (a bit like a debugger or profiler applied to its own execution). That recursion may even go one or two levels deeper. Or rather, there is no clean separation between the recursion levels, which somewhat obfuscates to the internal observer what is going on. Furthermore, it only perceives parts of its internal processing, so it doesn’t get the whole picture (probably far from it). This is why consciousness seems magic and confusing. But when you think about it, everything we mean when we talk about consciousness is something we perceive ("feel", "experience", "qualia"), so clearly it’s something having a representation in the brain that is being perceived by another part of the brain (or partially the same part). What makes it confusing is that at that level there’s no clear separation between subject and object of the perception. But that fits nicely with the general messiness and staggering complexity of biological systems. With roughly a 100 billion neurons and a 100 trillion synapses in a brain, it shouldn’t be surprising that the internal self-perception can be very detailed, complex, multifaceted, nuanced, subtle, and subject to itself.
    • tandav 5y ago
      Wow, that idea about internal perception recursion is making things much clearer for me and quite enlightening. Thank you for this :)
    • andybak 5y ago
      > The "feeling of experiencing" is just a perception. That's exactly the phenomenon we're trying to explain. You've just said "feeling is just feeling". The question is - why is there someone experiencing a feeling. A machine or algorithm can be self-referential. Is there some magical "amount of recursion" that suddenly results in consciousness? That seems strange to me.
      • layer8 5y ago
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