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This issue with Aaronson's response is that it comes from the perspective of first accepting Chalmers' "Hard Problem of consciousness". The "Hard Problem of con

by wzdd 3y ago

This issue with Aaronson's response is that it comes from the perspective of first accepting Chalmers' "Hard Problem of consciousness". The "Hard Problem of consciousness", despite the name, is actually a statement of position. Briefly, it states that: a) We have experiences, like being hungry, tasting a strawberry, seeing blue, etc. b) It's possible to imagine a being which located food when hungry, ate when necessary, used colours to navigate the world, etc, but did not have these conscious experiences. To put it another way, what we've learnt so far about how the brain works gives us great insight into how we would eat, navigate, etc, but does not give us any insight into either how or why we would have conscious experiences. c) Therefore conscious experiences are not explicable by physical brain processes. This is a belief arising from an appeal to intuition and does not present a testable or falsifiable proposition. Integrated Information Theory (which I am not a vigorous proponent of) posits that the experience of consciousness is related to the level of "integration" of a system. However, if you come to this while believing in the "Hard Problem", that cannot possibly be true, because IIT relates consciousness to physical properties of the system such as connectivity, but the "Hard Problem" defines consciousness as something which does not arise from any physical property of the system.

goatlover 3y ago
I don't think you need b) to make the argument work. You just need to point out that a) isn't present in physical theories, except as labels or correlations. The zombie argument is b), which is just one of several thought experiments to illustrate the argument being made, but it's not necessary to make the argument work. Chalmers, Nagel, McGinn and Block have all made arguments that don't rely on b). Nagel states it most clearly in that science is the view from nowhere. The world doesn't feel like, taste like, look like anything on it's own, because those are creature-based sensations which depend on the kind of sensory organs and nervous systems an animal has.
- wzdd 3y ago
  The position still seems to boil down to "Reducing experience to labels or correlations doesn't feel right to me", which actually dovetails nicely with your Nagel quote, since you can't rely on your intuition when attempting to understand a system from the inside.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    The fact that it feels like something at all is enough of a rebuttal to reducing experience to labels or correlations. That's not an intuition, it's just a statement of empirical fact, since empiricism relies on phenomenal observations.
    - wzdd 3y ago
      The fact that it feels like something at all could simply be a description of what it's like for these correlations to arise inside a complex system. It's not a rebuttal, it's just a restatement of the position.
Analemma_ 3y ago
Aaronson's point later in the post that it is possible to construct a function which has an arbitrarily high phi but is nonetheless obviously not conscious-- which wrecks IIT completely, at least in its current formulation-- does not depend on anything to do with the hard problem of consciousness.
- photonthug 3y ago
  > is nonetheless obviously not conscious This argument has played out before so I'll just link to that discussion. quoting from https://www.scottaaronson.com/response-p1.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/response-p1.pdf > There’s two responses to this. The easiest response is to say that φ is merely necessary for C —problem solved. GT’s response would be to challenge your intuition for things being unconscious. Here’s a historical analogy; imagine when the Kelvin temperature scale was introduced. Here Kelvin was saying that just about everything has heat in it. In fact, even the coldest thing you’ve touched actually has substantial heat in it! Think of IIT as attempting to put a Kelvin-scale on our notions of C . I find this “Kelvin scale for C ” analogy makes the panpsychism much more palatable. Then, Scott's response to that: > Suppose, again, that I told you that physicists since Kelvin had gotten the definition of temperature all wrong, and that I had a new, better definition. And, when I built a Scott-thermometer that measures true temperatures, it delivered the shocking result that boiling water is actually colder than ice. You’d probably tell me where to shove my Scott-thermometer. But wait: how do you know that I’m not the Copernicus of heat, and that future generations won’t celebrate my breakthrough while scoffing at your small-mindedness? Ok, pretty dismissive, but this doesn't actually address what the first quote mentions. Maybe phi's necessary but not sufficient for consciousness; that would still be pretty interesting. (I.e. maybe the pesky function does have high phi, but phi is not itself consciousness, because Consciousness(system) = phi(system) + Corrective_factor). Or suppose we add an axiom like "feedback loops that affect future trajectory" to exclude such a pesky static function definition, or better still suppose IIT moves towards something that generally accounts for more subtle dynamics as well as structure. I can't help but think of the relationship between euclidean/noneuclidean geometry here, especially when "obviousness" comes up in these discussions. It seems productive to play with adding/discarding axioms and looking for richness/consistency. And isn't lots of modern physics about exploring model parameter-space ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/using-the-bootstrap-physicists-uncover-geometry-of-theory-space-20170223/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/using-the-bootstrap-physicist... ) to zero in on "the" model given "a" model? Like 1D-Ising won't phase-transition, maybe current 1D-IIT won't cut it but has some fruitful generalization.
jhedwards 3y ago
I think the answer to a) and b) is actually quite obvious: we are not an automaton that simply eats when the need arises. The experience of hunger decouples our behavior from the need to eat, and we can plan according to the strength of our hunger relative to other needs. We are not an automaton that simply eats a strawberry because it is edible. We are decision making organisms that can adjust the composition of our diet based on the chemical properties of the food. We can presume that there is an evolutionary advantage to being able to taste and therefore select from multiple dietary options. It is clear that the conscious experiences as described are extremely subtle forms of information that allow us to plan and make decisions based on the information they provide us, and not simply blindly react to the world, and I think it is pretty obvious that that is a massive advantage and also more in line with my experience as a conscious being.
- Blahah 3y ago
  Plants, bacteria, and fungi can do equivalent planning and decision making about nutrient intake. What we experience as consciousness is indistinguishable from evolved fecundity preservation in a complex and dynamic environment, based on the conditions you highlight.
omniglottal 3y ago
Looks like a hyperbolic flaw in reasoning. The "Hard Problem", as described, seems more to define consciousness as something which does not arise exclusively from (known) physical properties of the system. In what reality would the phenomenom of consciousness be defined without any underlying physical property? Seems that study would aptly be called "metaphysics".

by wzdd 3y ago

goatlover 3y ago

I don't think you need b) to make the argument work. You just need to point out that a) isn't present in physical theories, except as labels or correlations. The zombie argument is b), which is just one of several thought experiments to illustrate the argument being made, but it's not necessary to make the argument work. Chalmers, Nagel, McGinn and Block have all made arguments that don't rely on b). Nagel states it most clearly in that science is the view from nowhere. The world doesn't feel like, taste like, look like anything on it's own, because those are creature-based sensations which depend on the kind of sensory organs and nervous systems an animal has.

wzdd 3y ago
The position still seems to boil down to "Reducing experience to labels or correlations doesn't feel right to me", which actually dovetails nicely with your Nagel quote, since you can't rely on your intuition when attempting to understand a system from the inside.
- goatlover 3y ago
  The fact that it feels like something at all is enough of a rebuttal to reducing experience to labels or correlations. That's not an intuition, it's just a statement of empirical fact, since empiricism relies on phenomenal observations.
  - wzdd 3y ago
    The fact that it feels like something at all could simply be a description of what it's like for these correlations to arise inside a complex system. It's not a rebuttal, it's just a restatement of the position.

Analemma_ 3y ago

Aaronson's point later in the post that it is possible to construct a function which has an arbitrarily high phi but is nonetheless obviously not conscious-- which wrecks IIT completely, at least in its current formulation-- does not depend on anything to do with the hard problem of consciousness.

photonthug 3y ago
> is nonetheless obviously not conscious This argument has played out before so I'll just link to that discussion. quoting from https://www.scottaaronson.com/response-p1.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/response-p1.pdf > There’s two responses to this. The easiest response is to say that φ is merely necessary for C —problem solved. GT’s response would be to challenge your intuition for things being unconscious. Here’s a historical analogy; imagine when the Kelvin temperature scale was introduced. Here Kelvin was saying that just about everything has heat in it. In fact, even the coldest thing you’ve touched actually has substantial heat in it! Think of IIT as attempting to put a Kelvin-scale on our notions of C . I find this “Kelvin scale for C ” analogy makes the panpsychism much more palatable. Then, Scott's response to that: > Suppose, again, that I told you that physicists since Kelvin had gotten the definition of temperature all wrong, and that I had a new, better definition. And, when I built a Scott-thermometer that measures true temperatures, it delivered the shocking result that boiling water is actually colder than ice. You’d probably tell me where to shove my Scott-thermometer. But wait: how do you know that I’m not the Copernicus of heat, and that future generations won’t celebrate my breakthrough while scoffing at your small-mindedness? Ok, pretty dismissive, but this doesn't actually address what the first quote mentions. Maybe phi's necessary but not sufficient for consciousness; that would still be pretty interesting. (I.e. maybe the pesky function does have high phi, but phi is not itself consciousness, because Consciousness(system) = phi(system) + Corrective_factor). Or suppose we add an axiom like "feedback loops that affect future trajectory" to exclude such a pesky static function definition, or better still suppose IIT moves towards something that generally accounts for more subtle dynamics as well as structure. I can't help but think of the relationship between euclidean/noneuclidean geometry here, especially when "obviousness" comes up in these discussions. It seems productive to play with adding/discarding axioms and looking for richness/consistency. And isn't lots of modern physics about exploring model parameter-space ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/using-the-bootstrap-physicists-uncover-geometry-of-theory-space-20170223/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/using-the-bootstrap-physicist... ) to zero in on "the" model given "a" model? Like 1D-Ising won't phase-transition, maybe current 1D-IIT won't cut it but has some fruitful generalization.

jhedwards 3y ago

I think the answer to a) and b) is actually quite obvious: we are not an automaton that simply eats when the need arises. The experience of hunger decouples our behavior from the need to eat, and we can plan according to the strength of our hunger relative to other needs. We are not an automaton that simply eats a strawberry because it is edible. We are decision making organisms that can adjust the composition of our diet based on the chemical properties of the food. We can presume that there is an evolutionary advantage to being able to taste and therefore select from multiple dietary options. It is clear that the conscious experiences as described are extremely subtle forms of information that allow us to plan and make decisions based on the information they provide us, and not simply blindly react to the world, and I think it is pretty obvious that that is a massive advantage and also more in line with my experience as a conscious being.

Blahah 3y ago
Plants, bacteria, and fungi can do equivalent planning and decision making about nutrient intake. What we experience as consciousness is indistinguishable from evolved fecundity preservation in a complex and dynamic environment, based on the conditions you highlight.

omniglottal 3y ago

Looks like a hyperbolic flaw in reasoning. The "Hard Problem", as described, seems more to define consciousness as something which does not arise exclusively from (known) physical properties of the system. In what reality would the phenomenom of consciousness be defined without any underlying physical property? Seems that study would aptly be called "metaphysics".