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Insisting subjective experience isn’t real is like pissing on someone’s leg and telling them it’s raining. Seriously, if you read the book, you realize his mai

Insisting subjective experience isn’t real is like pissing on someone’s leg and telling them it’s raining. Seriously, if you read the book, you realize his main angle of attack is (intentionally?) substituting a different definition of consciousness. The position he is arguing against is the existence of qualia/subjective experience, but the book is mostly about showing that we overestimate our capacity for higher order cognitive synthesis of sensory input. In new editions/epilogue/? (it’s been a while), he finally does address the hard problem (though doesn’t admit that his whole book misses the point), and just makes a few dismissive points.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
When you say "substituting a different definition of consciousness", exactly what definition of consciousness was there in the first place such that one could usurp that throne? What exactly is "subjective experience" and "qualia". For a moment lets go with the banal wikipedia example: "The 'redness' of red is a commonly used example of a quale" (followed by a graphic that is entirely just red pixels). When I take a picture with my phone, does the phone not experience "redness"? If so then consciousness and machine consciousness are trivial and we are done. If not then the "quale" of redness must involve some sort of processing which happens along the path from the eye to wherever-the-train-of-thought-lives. So suppose I write an app such that when I point my phone at something it either prints the words "that's red" or "that's not red". Is my phone experiencing the quale of red yet? How sophisticated must the processing get before my phone has subjective experience? Thus we arrive at my real gripe and why I'm inclined to agree with Dennet. The entirety of the conversation around "subjective experience" and "qualia" seems to be a word game designed to rig the definition of consciousness so that machines can't have it. We could get all the way to a Turing-test-passing AI having this very conversation with you, and some people would still reject my consciousness and call me "a p-zombie without real qualia or subjective experience". It comes off as being in denial about materialism out of an egotistical need to believe ones consciousness is somehow better than computation, and that ones atoms are somehow more special than the atoms in my phone. Give a definition of qualia/subjective experience which isn't just "cognitive synthesis of sensory input" and also isn't contorted such that only humans could have it.
- legalcorrection 5y ago
  That's part of the trouble with subjective experience. It's not fully reducible to objective explanation. If it was, it would not be subjective experience. But it is such a central part of the human experience—it is experience itself—that when you nonetheless do your best to evoke it with language, reasonable people without philosophical agendas (e.g. the defense of a materialism, or relatedly, the absence of true mystery in the world) all know what you're talking about. I would be surprised if anyone who is not studied in the area would dispute the existence of phenomenal consciousness upon a quick explanation of what they are alleged to be. I imagine they would think there's something wrong with someone who did dispute it. Only an intelligent person well-studied in the area, understanding the implications of the problem, could manage to convince themselves of something so utterly ridiculous.
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    My inherent philosophical objection is that "reality is shared consensus", or more accurately "reality is the set of things which forces there to be a shared consensus about them". The more people who corroborate the things I observe to be real, the less likely it is that I am delusional and imagining them all in my head (unless everyone I've ever met has been part of my delusion, but that's an excessively obtuse view). Reality isn't the shared consensus per se, but shared consensus is a multi-meter we use to measure reality. We can never directly observe "this battery has 9 volts", only that our instrument reads "9 volts". At some point we have no choice but to drop the abstraction and accept the measurement of reality as reality itself. The reality of the battery is whatever the multimeter reads. Maybe every single multimeter is wrong and by sheer coincidence and this battery is actually 10 volts. Maybe the multimeter is right but every single persons eyes have a glitch causing them to read 9 volts in this one particular instance. But neither of those "true realities" is distinguishable from the one where its actually 9 volts. So when we come around to "subjective experience", this thing which by construction no one but you can observe your instance of it, by definition its not real. Your personal "subjective experience" is not and cannot be part of the shared consensus. No one but you can honestly agree that your subjective experience is there. Even if they think they have their own subjective experience, they can't know if you're a p-zombie or not. Sure many seemingly reasonable people all seem to agree they know what you're talking about when you say "subjective experience", but each and every one of them might have a completely different idea of what that means. I can't possibly agree that I "know what you're talking about" when you mention subjective experience, as any time I ask someone to define subjective experience it eventually circles back to requiring me to acknowledge my own subjective experience first. It's infuriatingly circular! To define subjective experience you have to already know what subjective experience is. If I drink the cool aid and acquiesce that yes I have subjective experience, we could continue the conversation in perpetuity without ever confirming that we are in fact talking about the same thing. So my objection to the notion of subjective experience, aside from being a popular coat rack for tedious agendas, is that its inherently undefinable and untestable. Therefore the "hard problem of consciousness" isn't hard in the "you just have to work harder" sense. Its literally impossible because at its root the problem is worse than undefined, its undefinable. When you try to present a solution to it you'll find...a lack of consensus about your solution. Reality is shared consensus.

IIAOPSW 5y ago

When you say "substituting a different definition of consciousness", exactly what definition of consciousness was there in the first place such that one could usurp that throne? What exactly is "subjective experience" and "qualia". For a moment lets go with the banal wikipedia example: "The 'redness' of red is a commonly used example of a quale" (followed by a graphic that is entirely just red pixels). When I take a picture with my phone, does the phone not experience "redness"? If so then consciousness and machine consciousness are trivial and we are done. If not then the "quale" of redness must involve some sort of processing which happens along the path from the eye to wherever-the-train-of-thought-lives. So suppose I write an app such that when I point my phone at something it either prints the words "that's red" or "that's not red". Is my phone experiencing the quale of red yet? How sophisticated must the processing get before my phone has subjective experience? Thus we arrive at my real gripe and why I'm inclined to agree with Dennet. The entirety of the conversation around "subjective experience" and "qualia" seems to be a word game designed to rig the definition of consciousness so that machines can't have it. We could get all the way to a Turing-test-passing AI having this very conversation with you, and some people would still reject my consciousness and call me "a p-zombie without real qualia or subjective experience". It comes off as being in denial about materialism out of an egotistical need to believe ones consciousness is somehow better than computation, and that ones atoms are somehow more special than the atoms in my phone. Give a definition of qualia/subjective experience which isn't just "cognitive synthesis of sensory input" and also isn't contorted such that only humans could have it.

legalcorrection 5y ago
That's part of the trouble with subjective experience. It's not fully reducible to objective explanation. If it was, it would not be subjective experience. But it is such a central part of the human experience—it is experience itself—that when you nonetheless do your best to evoke it with language, reasonable people without philosophical agendas (e.g. the defense of a materialism, or relatedly, the absence of true mystery in the world) all know what you're talking about. I would be surprised if anyone who is not studied in the area would dispute the existence of phenomenal consciousness upon a quick explanation of what they are alleged to be. I imagine they would think there's something wrong with someone who did dispute it. Only an intelligent person well-studied in the area, understanding the implications of the problem, could manage to convince themselves of something so utterly ridiculous.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  My inherent philosophical objection is that "reality is shared consensus", or more accurately "reality is the set of things which forces there to be a shared consensus about them". The more people who corroborate the things I observe to be real, the less likely it is that I am delusional and imagining them all in my head (unless everyone I've ever met has been part of my delusion, but that's an excessively obtuse view). Reality isn't the shared consensus per se, but shared consensus is a multi-meter we use to measure reality. We can never directly observe "this battery has 9 volts", only that our instrument reads "9 volts". At some point we have no choice but to drop the abstraction and accept the measurement of reality as reality itself. The reality of the battery is whatever the multimeter reads. Maybe every single multimeter is wrong and by sheer coincidence and this battery is actually 10 volts. Maybe the multimeter is right but every single persons eyes have a glitch causing them to read 9 volts in this one particular instance. But neither of those "true realities" is distinguishable from the one where its actually 9 volts. So when we come around to "subjective experience", this thing which by construction no one but you can observe your instance of it, by definition its not real. Your personal "subjective experience" is not and cannot be part of the shared consensus. No one but you can honestly agree that your subjective experience is there. Even if they think they have their own subjective experience, they can't know if you're a p-zombie or not. Sure many seemingly reasonable people all seem to agree they know what you're talking about when you say "subjective experience", but each and every one of them might have a completely different idea of what that means. I can't possibly agree that I "know what you're talking about" when you mention subjective experience, as any time I ask someone to define subjective experience it eventually circles back to requiring me to acknowledge my own subjective experience first. It's infuriatingly circular! To define subjective experience you have to already know what subjective experience is. If I drink the cool aid and acquiesce that yes I have subjective experience, we could continue the conversation in perpetuity without ever confirming that we are in fact talking about the same thing. So my objection to the notion of subjective experience, aside from being a popular coat rack for tedious agendas, is that its inherently undefinable and untestable. Therefore the "hard problem of consciousness" isn't hard in the "you just have to work harder" sense. Its literally impossible because at its root the problem is worse than undefined, its undefinable. When you try to present a solution to it you'll find...a lack of consensus about your solution. Reality is shared consensus.