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What you are referring to is the soft problem of consciousness, the contents of consciousness. You are probably right that the contents of human consciousness,

What you are referring to is the soft problem of consciousness, the contents of consciousness. You are probably right that the contents of human consciousness, or qualia, can be approximated by our understanding and technology to a very high degree given enough time. However, OP was referring to the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is unsolvable IMHO by science, as it is entirely subjective; in fact, it is the fact of existence of subjective experience. The problem is this: even if you find some objective mechanism that generates consciousness, how would you make the explanatory leap from the objective mechanism to the subjective? Even if you say: "Oh, we flipped this switch and now this person is unconscious." - this is a description from the outside. You cannot claim by this that the person's consciousness has disappeared. Maybe not connected to the contents of the human mind anymore; but the gulf between objective and subjective can never be crossed by objective science. If I had a dollar for every time someone claimed that the hard problem of consciousness isn't actually hard, I would be very rich.

FrustratedMonky 4y ago
I think people have confused the matter by splitting into soft/hard. There is only 1 consciousness. Soft is describing how it can be done physically, how to build it, or explain it, and hard is what it is like to experience it from the inside. By creating the hard problem, it really just says "we can't know anything about any internal state". All "internal subject states" are self reported, and a machine can just as well self report enough to mimic a human. So at that point, we can't prove that the machine doesn't have a 'subjective' internal state. By this line of reasoning, we can't prove that any humans are conscious either. Any lines of logic that try to prove the hard problem, would either both prove that the machine and human are both conscious, or prove that neither are conscious.
- theobromananda 4y ago
  Sorry, you are part of the 90% confusing the hard and soft problem without understanding what is hard about the hard problem. In fact, merely realizing the hard problem of consciousness is one of the first stages that is reached in modern vipassana meditation. The hard problem is not stating "we can't know anything about any internal state", it is about the mere subjective existence of the internal state and not about the contents of internal experience or any objective fact about that internal state. I don't know why this is seems often so hard, but in consciousness research and meditators' language (or in my native language at least), most of this seems pretty well-definded. It has no relation to proving that humans or machines are conscious. It is about no objective fact at all, and thus cannot be investigated using objective methods. That is why it is unsolvable by objective science. To use a koan-like: It is about this.
  - FrustratedMonky 4y ago
    I was probably unclear. Meant, "we can't know 'others' internal state". We can examine our own, but all we can do is try to express it in language. Someone else hearing our description can only get a vague idea. And vice versa. Each person has their own individual internal subjective perspective, which can't be communicated with 100% clarity or accuracy. Since we can't examine or measure others internal state, we deem it 'hard' and 'impossible'. Because of course it is hard to express something that can't be communicated. I would say that this examination of the problem of our internal view of the world, versus the reality of the world, subject versus object, goes back thousands of years. I've also meditated a long time, and I do understand the hard problem. I just don't think eastern philosophies have the answer either. Eastern philosophies definitely had a jump start on the West with examining the mind, and really it was Buddhism that informed western philosophies from Schopenhauer onward. They helped defining some vocabulary and hierarchies, like outlining Skanda's or parts. BUT, the typical eastern answer, that it is just 'this" and other 'wooo-wooo' answers are just as far from any explanation to the 'hard' problem as anybody in the west has. Meditation can get you awareness of the hard problem, some insight, but it still isn't an explanation. It just gets you another perspective that is still "Internal". I can meditate forever, but any 'realization' is still internal to me, it isn't providing any answers or explanation. This comes up a lot right now with AI getting so human like (recent advancements), and I would say that at some point we'll create something that will be indistinguishable from a human, and at that time if the AI speaks convincingly of their realization of 'this is it', we wont have any ability to disprove that they really have had the same 'wooo-wooo' feelings. There is no way to prove anything. So what I am speculating here, is that at some time in near future, we will be able to correlate soft and hard problems, so we have a map from one to another. And we'll have to realize that our own internal 'experience of reality' is just our neural net in our brain reacting and processing to stimuli, and we'll be able to examine the same things in silicon. And we'll have to accept that we aren't some super mystical beings or that our 'consciousness' is not all that special a development in the universe.
    - FrustratedMonky 4y ago
      Or more to the point. In humans, our thoughts arise on their own. We don't think about what we are going to think about. The thoughts just appear. We are going through the day processing stimuli and reacting, thoughts popping into our head and leading us along. Our brain is just on a game loop, processing events. Except in biological humans, instead of math, it's calcium ions and potentials. Just an analog computer. So lets say in current models', or future, in very large neural nets, that there will not be some internal subjective awareness, just like we have. We've mapped the entire neural network/nervous system, of a nematode worm and translated it into software. The 'software worm' appears to behaves the same as the real worm, so what is that software experiencing?

FrustratedMonky 4y ago

I think people have confused the matter by splitting into soft/hard. There is only 1 consciousness. Soft is describing how it can be done physically, how to build it, or explain it, and hard is what it is like to experience it from the inside. By creating the hard problem, it really just says "we can't know anything about any internal state". All "internal subject states" are self reported, and a machine can just as well self report enough to mimic a human. So at that point, we can't prove that the machine doesn't have a 'subjective' internal state. By this line of reasoning, we can't prove that any humans are conscious either. Any lines of logic that try to prove the hard problem, would either both prove that the machine and human are both conscious, or prove that neither are conscious.

theobromananda 4y ago
Sorry, you are part of the 90% confusing the hard and soft problem without understanding what is hard about the hard problem. In fact, merely realizing the hard problem of consciousness is one of the first stages that is reached in modern vipassana meditation. The hard problem is not stating "we can't know anything about any internal state", it is about the mere subjective existence of the internal state and not about the contents of internal experience or any objective fact about that internal state. I don't know why this is seems often so hard, but in consciousness research and meditators' language (or in my native language at least), most of this seems pretty well-definded. It has no relation to proving that humans or machines are conscious. It is about no objective fact at all, and thus cannot be investigated using objective methods. That is why it is unsolvable by objective science. To use a koan-like: It is about this.
- FrustratedMonky 4y ago
  I was probably unclear. Meant, "we can't know 'others' internal state". We can examine our own, but all we can do is try to express it in language. Someone else hearing our description can only get a vague idea. And vice versa. Each person has their own individual internal subjective perspective, which can't be communicated with 100% clarity or accuracy. Since we can't examine or measure others internal state, we deem it 'hard' and 'impossible'. Because of course it is hard to express something that can't be communicated. I would say that this examination of the problem of our internal view of the world, versus the reality of the world, subject versus object, goes back thousands of years. I've also meditated a long time, and I do understand the hard problem. I just don't think eastern philosophies have the answer either. Eastern philosophies definitely had a jump start on the West with examining the mind, and really it was Buddhism that informed western philosophies from Schopenhauer onward. They helped defining some vocabulary and hierarchies, like outlining Skanda's or parts. BUT, the typical eastern answer, that it is just 'this" and other 'wooo-wooo' answers are just as far from any explanation to the 'hard' problem as anybody in the west has. Meditation can get you awareness of the hard problem, some insight, but it still isn't an explanation. It just gets you another perspective that is still "Internal". I can meditate forever, but any 'realization' is still internal to me, it isn't providing any answers or explanation. This comes up a lot right now with AI getting so human like (recent advancements), and I would say that at some point we'll create something that will be indistinguishable from a human, and at that time if the AI speaks convincingly of their realization of 'this is it', we wont have any ability to disprove that they really have had the same 'wooo-wooo' feelings. There is no way to prove anything. So what I am speculating here, is that at some time in near future, we will be able to correlate soft and hard problems, so we have a map from one to another. And we'll have to realize that our own internal 'experience of reality' is just our neural net in our brain reacting and processing to stimuli, and we'll be able to examine the same things in silicon. And we'll have to accept that we aren't some super mystical beings or that our 'consciousness' is not all that special a development in the universe.
  - FrustratedMonky 4y ago
    Or more to the point. In humans, our thoughts arise on their own. We don't think about what we are going to think about. The thoughts just appear. We are going through the day processing stimuli and reacting, thoughts popping into our head and leading us along. Our brain is just on a game loop, processing events. Except in biological humans, instead of math, it's calcium ions and potentials. Just an analog computer. So lets say in current models', or future, in very large neural nets, that there will not be some internal subjective awareness, just like we have. We've mapped the entire neural network/nervous system, of a nematode worm and translated it into software. The 'software worm' appears to behaves the same as the real worm, so what is that software experiencing?