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My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a m

My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

psyc 5y ago
I'm pretty sure I've written this exact comment before. I'd have so much more respect for philosophers who simply admit that nobody has made any progress on the hard problem (other than increased clarity on what it is) than those who dismiss, minimize, or otherwise pooh-pooh the hard problem. The fact that the problem is "unproductive" is not a problem with the hard problem, it's only a problem for philosophers' career advancement.
sebastianconcpt 5y ago
Had you ever experienced an OBE? PS: I like your P-Zombie joke :D
ganzuul 5y ago
Qualia may be operating on a different system of reasoning. I have always wondered why new qualia felt so familiar like there was nothing new to learn, but if time is as illusory as every theory says it is then it makes more sense. To answer the hard part.... To be completely honest, I think qualia are dualistic emanations of the One Source of Truth and understanding, and describable as convex optimizations in the kinds of spaces that Incompleteness deals with. I think love and honor are hyperparameters for the hypercomputers that we refer to as our hearts and that simulation is much more likely than material because of dichotomy / reality gap.
abernard1 5y ago
> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but at the expense of forcibly ignoring the essence of what constitutes material reality. In the case of QM, the "just run the equations" view of the world has been dominant since Einstein reluctantly ceded ground on this issue. To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world. (fwiw, I am something of a materialist, which is why I have thought of this problem beforehand.)
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Entanglement is part of material reality - the "classical" world where there is no entanglement is a simplified approximation. The fact that it might feel less "material" to us is an irrelevant feature of improperly-applied intuition. It's no different than someting like e.g. the wave nature of light. In fact, complex entangled states made of many interrelated "qubits" or degrees of freedom are one of the most promising candidates for the physical correlate of similarly-complex phenomenological experience. Complex-enough quantum computers might just feel stuff, as a matter of basic reality.
  - abernard1 5y ago
    > Entanglement is part of material reality Yes, but what is material reality? The current understanding of entanglement in QM is indistinguishable from math. And then we need to ask: are the equations real? Seriously, are they? Or are they just an approximate description of something we don't understand that well? Because if entanglement is part of material reality as defined by the good ol' gauge theorists and the equations, then we really do live in a math equation, and it's not clear how or why that math equation runs the way it does. Or what it runs on for that matter. Or if it exists at all and our senses are just hallucinating this. This is fundamentally different from the understanding of philosophical, physical materialism.
    - simonh 5y ago
      For me, material reality is tied to the notion that the world is consistent and conducive to analytical reasoning, that it functions like a machine. It has components which relate to each other in consistent ways that we can model and understand. The fact that these components are best described by field equations rather than newtonian mechanics is incidental. The main alternative viewpoint to materialism, dualism, posits some further 'external' influence that acts on the world to account for phenomena we poorly understand like consciousness, and for some people psychic or religious phenomena. I think that's just fuzzy thinking, and I don't even really know what they mean. How can something not 'of the world' interact with the world? Surely 'the world' is everything that can act on or influence each other, right? I'm not sure how else to define it.
misja111 5y ago
Your comment reminds me of religious people, whose argument that God exists is similar: that you will realize that He exists as soon as you believe in Him. And that you can't possibly understand it otherwise. Consciousness is a hard problem until you realize that most of it is an illusion. Which is the very reason that it is so hard to understand: there's nothing to understand, because it's not real.
- blueflow 5y ago
  Believing in God is a good coping mechanism if you cant deal with the fact that things, both good and bad, happen for no reason all the time. Knowing "why" gives comfort in the vast chaos that is reality.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Plenty of people believe in God(s) yet don't think that things are controlled or predestined.
- whaaswijk 5y ago
  Serious question: how can consciousness be an illusion? I’m not even sure what that would mean. One could argue that many things are illusory (e.g. the external world). But it’s quite hard to dismiss the notion of actual experience occurring in the world. Our experiences could lead us to false conclusions, sure, but we cannot deny their existence.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Either it's inane wordplay or it's obviously nonsense for most definitions of conscious. An illusion must be perceived, so in that sense the proposition is self-refuting. Also, you have empirical evidence against it: you know when you're conscious and that sometimes you aren't (and that it's a spectrum.) Thirdly, you can behaviorally define conscious. Fourthly, if I'm not mistaken, you can measure its presence neurologically. To say that all of this is an illusion is stupidity or being very obtuse for attention (like clickbait.)
  - 5y ago
simonh 5y ago
Fellow materialist here. For me materialism, and more specifically a strong degree of determinism, is the only coherent solution to the problem of responsibility and agency. After all, if my decisions do not flow from my state, including my experience, memories, preferences, etc, how can we say they are meaningfully mine? I fully accept a degree of randomness in the process, quantum mechanics is a thing, but randomness is just noise. No determinism, no agency.
pessimizer 5y ago
Count me as a P-Zombie. I think the reason that consciousness is a hard problem is that it's largely used as a word referring to nothing in particular, and as such can be argued about endlessly. The real problem is locality. Why am I located in me instead of in you? Why is it so much easier for me to see out of my eyes than it is for me to see out of yours? What's the connection between my perspective and my body? The idea that self-awareness/consciousness ("I am me") is the big problem is weird. I have no problem locating that in the material world. If I program a computer to poll all of its peripherals, report on its RAM and processors, and adjust how it runs its programs based on that, that's as much self-awareness as I have, if not more.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > What's the connection between my perspective and my body? Your body is doing the experiencing. It is what's perceiving. Your mind is just your body's UI for the world and your body is the user.
  - zubspace 5y ago
    The interesting bit is not the sensory input. We mostly know how the sensors work and how they are triggered. The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing? It's like we're sitting with a VR headset in our brain, playing that game we call life. But, where exactly are we and how is that headset connected to our sensors?
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      > The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing? Again, your body. Think about it. Your body is experiencing what your brain has generated out of your sensory input. You don't need a homunculus, you are a body. You are your body and there's nothing else to you.
      - pessimizer 5y ago
carapace 5y ago
> people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem I've come to the same conclusion. Meaning no disrespect or insult to them, it seems to me that it must be the case that some folks just haven't noticed themselves. P.D. Ouspensky talks about learning to "remember myself" in "In Search of the Miraculous" and describes how it was for him to practice changing from thinking one is self-aware to actually becoming self-aware moment-to-moment. There's a passage... > Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep. I suspect people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem must be still "asleep" in this sense, effectively P-Zombies, although the potential is there to become self-aware beings. - - - - > as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. Okay, fair enough, but then you have the infinite regress problem. How do you explain material itself materialistically?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  > "some folks just haven't noticed themselves" Some folks don't enjoy tying themselves in knots. You are absolutely welcome to spend your precious seconds of limited life on it, but it doesn't make you superior, however much you would like to think it does. It's just a choice, like between working and playing.
  - carapace 5y ago
    I didn't say anything about "superior". Is being a "P-Zombie" inferior to being self-aware? By what metric could such a comparison be made? Is the water inferior to the wave? Also, "tying themselves in knots" != "noticed themselves", if anything it's the opposite: all knots untie.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
matt-attack 5y ago
What’s really interesting is that the materialistic view is sufficient to describe everything else in the world including all other humans. But the one thing it fails to explain is yourself and your own subjective experience. I frankly have zero evidence that anyone else but me is experiencing consciousness. And there’s nothing you can utter that can change that.
jsnodlin 5y ago
It’s not particularly hard to see consciousness and our emotions purely a result of concoctions released into our brains.
davidhs 5y ago
I was a physicalist (and in some sense still am). In a nutshell your self and everything you experience and can experience is simulated. I live inside a simulation. The simulation is running on a physical brain, part of a physical human which is part of a physical universe. This can also be probed with science. If we know how the brain wires itself, what it is computing and representing then I think we'll find these patterns in the brain. This is how I best understand these things. I can also go into more detail how I came to think about this this way and how I got to this point.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
You might not be very far off- apparently many people do not have an inner voice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue#Absence_of_an_internal_monologue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue#Absence_of_... I now worry about some form of future cyborg racism where those without the gift are considered untouched by god or subhuman
calebm 5y ago
A program running in a computer would have a difficult time distinguishing itself from the computer hardware on which it runs. And it would have no direct perception of the programmer.
- jstanley 5y ago
  A program running in a computer doesn't perceive anything at all. Why we do is the hard problem.
bondarchuk 5y ago
Very funny, of course, but one can easily reply that those who do believe consciousness is a hard problem are just deluding themselves. Especially when (as is usually the case) a clear definition of the concept "hard problem" is not even given.
- psyc 5y ago
  I hardly think Chalmers (and others) forgot to define what the problem is. It's more likely you haven't read and/or understood them.
  - bondarchuk 5y ago
    The definition given in Chalmers (1995, facing up to...) following Nagel, i.e. using the linguistic construction "what it is like", is incomprehensible and ill-defined. I believe this is the origin of the term "hard problem". Some other arguments for the existence of a hard problem build on the dogma that "philosophical zombies" are conceivable (which we can deny by saying they aren't). Others depend on inverted qualia thought experiments, which we can deflate by denying that inverted qualia are possible at all (or by denying that "qualia" is a coherent and well-defined concept). If there's an unambiguous and clear explanation of the concept of "hard problem of consciousness", or a clear argument for the existence of such a problem not built on shaky assumptions, I'd love to hear it. By the way, there is a whole line of debate on the sense or nonsense of the ever-present "what it is like" phrasing: >‘What it is like’ talk (‘WIL-talk’) — the use of phrases such as ‘what it is like’ — is ubiquitous in discussions of phenomenal consciousness. It is used to define, make claims about, and to offer arguments concerning consciousness. But what this talk means is unclear, as is how it means what it does: how, by putting these words in this order, we communicate something about consciousness. Without a good account of WIL-talk, we cannot be sure this talk sheds light, rather than casts shadows, on our investigations of consciousness. (Jonathan Farrell - ‘What it is Like’ Talk is not Technical Talk)
GeorgeKangas 5y ago
If you start with material mechanisms, you'll never get subjective experience (SE) as a conclusion. Start instead with SE, and then any sort of material universe can be the contents of it.

psyc 5y ago

I'm pretty sure I've written this exact comment before. I'd have so much more respect for philosophers who simply admit that nobody has made any progress on the hard problem (other than increased clarity on what it is) than those who dismiss, minimize, or otherwise pooh-pooh the hard problem. The fact that the problem is "unproductive" is not a problem with the hard problem, it's only a problem for philosophers' career advancement.

sebastianconcpt 5y ago

Had you ever experienced an OBE? PS: I like your P-Zombie joke :D

ganzuul 5y ago

Qualia may be operating on a different system of reasoning. I have always wondered why new qualia felt so familiar like there was nothing new to learn, but if time is as illusory as every theory says it is then it makes more sense. To answer the hard part.... To be completely honest, I think qualia are dualistic emanations of the One Source of Truth and understanding, and describable as convex optimizations in the kinds of spaces that Incompleteness deals with. I think love and honor are hyperparameters for the hypercomputers that we refer to as our hearts and that simulation is much more likely than material because of dichotomy / reality gap.

abernard1 5y ago

> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but at the expense of forcibly ignoring the essence of what constitutes material reality. In the case of QM, the "just run the equations" view of the world has been dominant since Einstein reluctantly ceded ground on this issue. To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world. (fwiw, I am something of a materialist, which is why I have thought of this problem beforehand.)

zozbot234 5y ago
Entanglement is part of material reality - the "classical" world where there is no entanglement is a simplified approximation. The fact that it might feel less "material" to us is an irrelevant feature of improperly-applied intuition. It's no different than someting like e.g. the wave nature of light. In fact, complex entangled states made of many interrelated "qubits" or degrees of freedom are one of the most promising candidates for the physical correlate of similarly-complex phenomenological experience. Complex-enough quantum computers might just feel stuff, as a matter of basic reality.
- abernard1 5y ago
  > Entanglement is part of material reality Yes, but what is material reality? The current understanding of entanglement in QM is indistinguishable from math. And then we need to ask: are the equations real? Seriously, are they? Or are they just an approximate description of something we don't understand that well? Because if entanglement is part of material reality as defined by the good ol' gauge theorists and the equations, then we really do live in a math equation, and it's not clear how or why that math equation runs the way it does. Or what it runs on for that matter. Or if it exists at all and our senses are just hallucinating this. This is fundamentally different from the understanding of philosophical, physical materialism.
  - simonh 5y ago
    For me, material reality is tied to the notion that the world is consistent and conducive to analytical reasoning, that it functions like a machine. It has components which relate to each other in consistent ways that we can model and understand. The fact that these components are best described by field equations rather than newtonian mechanics is incidental. The main alternative viewpoint to materialism, dualism, posits some further 'external' influence that acts on the world to account for phenomena we poorly understand like consciousness, and for some people psychic or religious phenomena. I think that's just fuzzy thinking, and I don't even really know what they mean. How can something not 'of the world' interact with the world? Surely 'the world' is everything that can act on or influence each other, right? I'm not sure how else to define it.

misja111 5y ago

Your comment reminds me of religious people, whose argument that God exists is similar: that you will realize that He exists as soon as you believe in Him. And that you can't possibly understand it otherwise. Consciousness is a hard problem until you realize that most of it is an illusion. Which is the very reason that it is so hard to understand: there's nothing to understand, because it's not real.

blueflow 5y ago
Believing in God is a good coping mechanism if you cant deal with the fact that things, both good and bad, happen for no reason all the time. Knowing "why" gives comfort in the vast chaos that is reality.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Plenty of people believe in God(s) yet don't think that things are controlled or predestined.
whaaswijk 5y ago
Serious question: how can consciousness be an illusion? I’m not even sure what that would mean. One could argue that many things are illusory (e.g. the external world). But it’s quite hard to dismiss the notion of actual experience occurring in the world. Our experiences could lead us to false conclusions, sure, but we cannot deny their existence.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Either it's inane wordplay or it's obviously nonsense for most definitions of conscious. An illusion must be perceived, so in that sense the proposition is self-refuting. Also, you have empirical evidence against it: you know when you're conscious and that sometimes you aren't (and that it's a spectrum.) Thirdly, you can behaviorally define conscious. Fourthly, if I'm not mistaken, you can measure its presence neurologically. To say that all of this is an illusion is stupidity or being very obtuse for attention (like clickbait.)
- 5y ago

simonh 5y ago

Fellow materialist here. For me materialism, and more specifically a strong degree of determinism, is the only coherent solution to the problem of responsibility and agency. After all, if my decisions do not flow from my state, including my experience, memories, preferences, etc, how can we say they are meaningfully mine? I fully accept a degree of randomness in the process, quantum mechanics is a thing, but randomness is just noise. No determinism, no agency.

pessimizer 5y ago

Count me as a P-Zombie. I think the reason that consciousness is a hard problem is that it's largely used as a word referring to nothing in particular, and as such can be argued about endlessly. The real problem is locality. Why am I located in me instead of in you? Why is it so much easier for me to see out of my eyes than it is for me to see out of yours? What's the connection between my perspective and my body? The idea that self-awareness/consciousness ("I am me") is the big problem is weird. I have no problem locating that in the material world. If I program a computer to poll all of its peripherals, report on its RAM and processors, and adjust how it runs its programs based on that, that's as much self-awareness as I have, if not more.

guerrilla 5y ago
> What's the connection between my perspective and my body? Your body is doing the experiencing. It is what's perceiving. Your mind is just your body's UI for the world and your body is the user.
- zubspace 5y ago
  The interesting bit is not the sensory input. We mostly know how the sensors work and how they are triggered. The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing? It's like we're sitting with a VR headset in our brain, playing that game we call life. But, where exactly are we and how is that headset connected to our sensors?
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    > The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing? Again, your body. Think about it. Your body is experiencing what your brain has generated out of your sensory input. You don't need a homunculus, you are a body. You are your body and there's nothing else to you.
    - pessimizer 5y ago

carapace 5y ago

> people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem I've come to the same conclusion. Meaning no disrespect or insult to them, it seems to me that it must be the case that some folks just haven't noticed themselves. P.D. Ouspensky talks about learning to "remember myself" in "In Search of the Miraculous" and describes how it was for him to practice changing from thinking one is self-aware to actually becoming self-aware moment-to-moment. There's a passage... > Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep. I suspect people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem must be still "asleep" in this sense, effectively P-Zombies, although the potential is there to become self-aware beings. - - - - > as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. Okay, fair enough, but then you have the infinite regress problem. How do you explain material itself materialistically?

ncmncm 5y ago
> "some folks just haven't noticed themselves" Some folks don't enjoy tying themselves in knots. You are absolutely welcome to spend your precious seconds of limited life on it, but it doesn't make you superior, however much you would like to think it does. It's just a choice, like between working and playing.
- carapace 5y ago
  I didn't say anything about "superior". Is being a "P-Zombie" inferior to being self-aware? By what metric could such a comparison be made? Is the water inferior to the wave? Also, "tying themselves in knots" != "noticed themselves", if anything it's the opposite: all knots untie.
  - ncmncm 5y ago

matt-attack 5y ago

What’s really interesting is that the materialistic view is sufficient to describe everything else in the world including all other humans. But the one thing it fails to explain is yourself and your own subjective experience. I frankly have zero evidence that anyone else but me is experiencing consciousness. And there’s nothing you can utter that can change that.

jsnodlin 5y ago

It’s not particularly hard to see consciousness and our emotions purely a result of concoctions released into our brains.

davidhs 5y ago

I was a physicalist (and in some sense still am). In a nutshell your self and everything you experience and can experience is simulated. I live inside a simulation. The simulation is running on a physical brain, part of a physical human which is part of a physical universe. This can also be probed with science. If we know how the brain wires itself, what it is computing and representing then I think we'll find these patterns in the brain. This is how I best understand these things. I can also go into more detail how I came to think about this this way and how I got to this point.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

You might not be very far off- apparently many people do not have an inner voice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue#Absence_of_an_internal_monologue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue#Absence_of_... I now worry about some form of future cyborg racism where those without the gift are considered untouched by god or subhuman

calebm 5y ago

A program running in a computer would have a difficult time distinguishing itself from the computer hardware on which it runs. And it would have no direct perception of the programmer.

jstanley 5y ago
A program running in a computer doesn't perceive anything at all. Why we do is the hard problem.

bondarchuk 5y ago

Very funny, of course, but one can easily reply that those who do believe consciousness is a hard problem are just deluding themselves. Especially when (as is usually the case) a clear definition of the concept "hard problem" is not even given.

psyc 5y ago
I hardly think Chalmers (and others) forgot to define what the problem is. It's more likely you haven't read and/or understood them.
- bondarchuk 5y ago
  The definition given in Chalmers (1995, facing up to...) following Nagel, i.e. using the linguistic construction "what it is like", is incomprehensible and ill-defined. I believe this is the origin of the term "hard problem". Some other arguments for the existence of a hard problem build on the dogma that "philosophical zombies" are conceivable (which we can deny by saying they aren't). Others depend on inverted qualia thought experiments, which we can deflate by denying that inverted qualia are possible at all (or by denying that "qualia" is a coherent and well-defined concept). If there's an unambiguous and clear explanation of the concept of "hard problem of consciousness", or a clear argument for the existence of such a problem not built on shaky assumptions, I'd love to hear it. By the way, there is a whole line of debate on the sense or nonsense of the ever-present "what it is like" phrasing: >‘What it is like’ talk (‘WIL-talk’) — the use of phrases such as ‘what it is like’ — is ubiquitous in discussions of phenomenal consciousness. It is used to define, make claims about, and to offer arguments concerning consciousness. But what this talk means is unclear, as is how it means what it does: how, by putting these words in this order, we communicate something about consciousness. Without a good account of WIL-talk, we cannot be sure this talk sheds light, rather than casts shadows, on our investigations of consciousness. (Jonathan Farrell - ‘What it is Like’ Talk is not Technical Talk)

GeorgeKangas 5y ago

If you start with material mechanisms, you'll never get subjective experience (SE) as a conclusion. Start instead with SE, and then any sort of material universe can be the contents of it.