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Until we have a definition of consciousness that allows us to determine whether something is conscious or not I don’t really see the point of debating the compa

Until we have a definition of consciousness that allows us to determine whether something is conscious or not I don’t really see the point of debating the compatibility of determinism and consciousness (whatever that word is supposed to mean).

tgv 3y ago
Not just our own consciousness, but the consciousness of everything in the universe. If such a crackpot idea is compatible with hard determinism, then that’s a blow for the latter.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >If such a crackpot idea is compatible with hard determinism, then that’s a blow for the latter. Is it really? I don't think compatibility with a crackpot idea/thing brings a blow to an orthogonal idea. For example, I could believe that Mars is an alien base. This is crackpot, but it doesn't give any blow to countless other ideas it's compatible with, e.g. economic or social theories, gravity, explanations of historical eras, etc.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Panpsychism is a crackpot explanation of consciousness that just happens to be less ridiculous than every other explanation
  - simiones 3y ago
    Why would computational explanations of consciousness be more ridiculous than the non-explanation that is asserting everything is conscious in some way (which is basically what panpsychism means)?
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      At what degree of computation does consciousness emerge? There must be some level of computation at which there’s zero consciousness and then one rung above that there’s a non-zero degree of consciousness. Where could that line possibly be? I personally cannot reasonably even guess at such a boundary, so panpsychism is a much cleaner explanation. These two ideas aren’t really mutually exclusive anyway. I.e. you can believe that consciousness is what it feels like to compute, but then “what is compute” except a particularly structured form of a thing that’s happening everywhere and all the time (particles and energy bouncing around) in more or less structured forms. And if you say “well not all energy/particle interactions are computation, even of an abysmally low degree,” then return to the first question: what types of interactions or what degrees of structure are non-computational where one rung above it they are computational?
      - simiones 3y ago
        The computational explanation would hold that there is some specific computation that can be identified as what we call consciousness. This would be equivalent to how we say that a specific computation is what we call "sorting". It's not a gradualist notion. A computation either is or isn't consciousness. If it is, then an agent which is currently performing that computation is conscious. If an agent is performing a computation that is not consciousness is not conscious. Similarly, certain computations represent a sort. Agents which are performing that computation are sorting. The clearest case is a computer running a sort algorithm, but there are also purely physical processes that perform the same computations, and animals or people that do it - so "agent" here is a very broad term. Agents which are performing a computation that is not a sort are not sorting. Of course, determining which computation is actually consciousness is a very difficult problem, well beyond our current knowledge. As such, it is also obvious that it may turn out that this is not a correct model. But I don't see why this would be considered a ridiculous model of what consciousness means. It is also a model which can, in principle, be falsified, and it could actually help resolve certain difficult real-world problems. For example, if we did have a satisfying definition of which computations represent consciousness, we could then use it to determine at which point a child becomes conscious, or whether a particular animal is conscious or not (assuming we consider that conscious === should not be killed arbitrarily, which is a completely different debate). By contrast, panpsychism doesn't really resolve anything and can't be used to determine the answer to this type of moral question even in principle (if any system is somewhat conscious, then even swiveling my chair means that I am destroying a conscious system; but also creating another one).
        ethanbond 3y ago
        A “computation” is a concept that we have in our heads. Computations only actually occur as an interaction among some substrate of the physical universe. So you’re still saying that if you arrange atoms and energy in the right configuration then we go from zero consciousness to some consciousness. If you can find that configuration I’m certainly open to being convinced. Even your “non-gradualist” explanation does in fact run into gradualist problems, as you mention one of when a child “becomes conscious.” You assert that this theory is falsifiable: how so? You can’t even falsify the notion that there’s only one consciousness at all in the entire universe (yours, the one you’re “doing”). Regarding moral implications, inconvenient moral conclusions are not the same as “no help in arriving at moral conclusions.” You just named one such conclusion that you’d be compelled to arrive at (I wouldn’t, personally), so it’s not really true it doesn’t help determine the answer.
- mellosouls 3y ago
  crackpot idea A respectable philosophical idea with thousands of years behind it, and new impetus the past couple of decades. Always best to have at least a basic understanding of a subject before using such dismissive terms. You can read about it here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
  - tgv 3y ago
    I'd recommend going back to spontaneous generation first. A very respectable, old idea. Or perhaps the existence of a soul? That's even older, and is still heavily defended until this day. If lineage is so important, belief in a soul trumps pan-psychism.
james-bcn 3y ago
> Until we have a definition of consciousness that allows us to determine whether something is conscious or not but that is essentially The Hard Problem.
telmo 3y ago
Consciousness is the thing and the only thing that you have direct experience of. Everything else could be an illusion. You could be a brain in a jar and all of the reality you perceive be a simulation, but you would still be conscious. I know that I am conscious and I cannot doubt it, but at the same time I cannot prove it to you. Furthermore, I strongly suspect and assume that other human beings are conscious, but I cannot verify this scientifically (i.e. measure it somehow). This means that consciousness is a phenomenon that cannot be doubted (in the first person) but possibly eludes the scientific method. This really grates people who have a strong emotional attachment to the dogma that science must be able to account for all of reality. People confuse the metaphysical commitment of materialism with scientific fact, and thus conclude that consciousness must be an emergent phenomenon of neural complexity, and that it is silly to believe that anything else could be conscious. This feels like an hyper-rational, scientific stance, but really it is not. Science works perfectly fine within other metaphysical commitments such as idealism, panpsychism, etc. This is not to say that materialism is not correct, I do not know if it is or not. My point is that many contemporary "scientific types" tend to believe that their certainty about materialism being the correct framework is grounded on science, when it is not. It is often an unexamined and quasi-religious belief.
- ffwd 3y ago
  I understand the argument but I disagree and would phrase it the other way around. We don't have evidence of conscious experience because we don't have evidence for a division between conscious experience and "existence/physical stuff" in the first place. This division is created by our brains and the model we have of the world but in reality the only evidence we have is that something exists. Therefore, what we call subjective experience is evidence for the existence of what we experience, but until we can empirically show that there is a difference between what we experience and what reality is, the only thing we can say is that it exists. Also, that's the problem with the hard problem of consciousness - it assumes a division between the two, and we have no evidence of such a division. And lastly if it's not clear i am not a panpsychist either because that assumes a division on some level again. We don't know what existence itself is and how it functions really, at least not the brains function within existence.
A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
I have given this some thought. I believe that: If something has (a) a robust temporal-spatial sense, a "reference frame" in time and space, (b) physical boundedness, (c) a robust and general predictive function which is capable of abstraction, (d) independent volition, and (e) behavior that is non-deterministic in the weak sense that its actions cannot easily be foreseen by any arbitrarily powerful computer within the universe that it resides in, then: That thing is conscious. It's possible to imagine entities that don't necessarily satisfy all conditions and are nevertheless somehow conscious -- i.e., a sufficiently powerful AI that has no clear physical bounds and a poor (but not entirely absent) spatial reference frame, but which possesses independent volition and can independently simulate concepts -- but if all conditions are clearly met, then an entity is unambiguously conscious.

tgv 3y ago

Not just our own consciousness, but the consciousness of everything in the universe. If such a crackpot idea is compatible with hard determinism, then that’s a blow for the latter.

coldtea 3y ago
>If such a crackpot idea is compatible with hard determinism, then that’s a blow for the latter. Is it really? I don't think compatibility with a crackpot idea/thing brings a blow to an orthogonal idea. For example, I could believe that Mars is an alien base. This is crackpot, but it doesn't give any blow to countless other ideas it's compatible with, e.g. economic or social theories, gravity, explanations of historical eras, etc.
ethanbond 3y ago
Panpsychism is a crackpot explanation of consciousness that just happens to be less ridiculous than every other explanation
- simiones 3y ago
  Why would computational explanations of consciousness be more ridiculous than the non-explanation that is asserting everything is conscious in some way (which is basically what panpsychism means)?
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    At what degree of computation does consciousness emerge? There must be some level of computation at which there’s zero consciousness and then one rung above that there’s a non-zero degree of consciousness. Where could that line possibly be? I personally cannot reasonably even guess at such a boundary, so panpsychism is a much cleaner explanation. These two ideas aren’t really mutually exclusive anyway. I.e. you can believe that consciousness is what it feels like to compute, but then “what is compute” except a particularly structured form of a thing that’s happening everywhere and all the time (particles and energy bouncing around) in more or less structured forms. And if you say “well not all energy/particle interactions are computation, even of an abysmally low degree,” then return to the first question: what types of interactions or what degrees of structure are non-computational where one rung above it they are computational?
    - simiones 3y ago
      The computational explanation would hold that there is some specific computation that can be identified as what we call consciousness. This would be equivalent to how we say that a specific computation is what we call "sorting". It's not a gradualist notion. A computation either is or isn't consciousness. If it is, then an agent which is currently performing that computation is conscious. If an agent is performing a computation that is not consciousness is not conscious. Similarly, certain computations represent a sort. Agents which are performing that computation are sorting. The clearest case is a computer running a sort algorithm, but there are also purely physical processes that perform the same computations, and animals or people that do it - so "agent" here is a very broad term. Agents which are performing a computation that is not a sort are not sorting. Of course, determining which computation is actually consciousness is a very difficult problem, well beyond our current knowledge. As such, it is also obvious that it may turn out that this is not a correct model. But I don't see why this would be considered a ridiculous model of what consciousness means. It is also a model which can, in principle, be falsified, and it could actually help resolve certain difficult real-world problems. For example, if we did have a satisfying definition of which computations represent consciousness, we could then use it to determine at which point a child becomes conscious, or whether a particular animal is conscious or not (assuming we consider that conscious === should not be killed arbitrarily, which is a completely different debate). By contrast, panpsychism doesn't really resolve anything and can't be used to determine the answer to this type of moral question even in principle (if any system is somewhat conscious, then even swiveling my chair means that I am destroying a conscious system; but also creating another one).
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        A “computation” is a concept that we have in our heads. Computations only actually occur as an interaction among some substrate of the physical universe. So you’re still saying that if you arrange atoms and energy in the right configuration then we go from zero consciousness to some consciousness. If you can find that configuration I’m certainly open to being convinced. Even your “non-gradualist” explanation does in fact run into gradualist problems, as you mention one of when a child “becomes conscious.” You assert that this theory is falsifiable: how so? You can’t even falsify the notion that there’s only one consciousness at all in the entire universe (yours, the one you’re “doing”). Regarding moral implications, inconvenient moral conclusions are not the same as “no help in arriving at moral conclusions.” You just named one such conclusion that you’d be compelled to arrive at (I wouldn’t, personally), so it’s not really true it doesn’t help determine the answer.
mellosouls 3y ago
crackpot idea A respectable philosophical idea with thousands of years behind it, and new impetus the past couple of decades. Always best to have at least a basic understanding of a subject before using such dismissive terms. You can read about it here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
- tgv 3y ago
  I'd recommend going back to spontaneous generation first. A very respectable, old idea. Or perhaps the existence of a soul? That's even older, and is still heavily defended until this day. If lineage is so important, belief in a soul trumps pan-psychism.

james-bcn 3y ago

> Until we have a definition of consciousness that allows us to determine whether something is conscious or not but that is essentially The Hard Problem.

telmo 3y ago

Consciousness is the thing and the only thing that you have direct experience of. Everything else could be an illusion. You could be a brain in a jar and all of the reality you perceive be a simulation, but you would still be conscious. I know that I am conscious and I cannot doubt it, but at the same time I cannot prove it to you. Furthermore, I strongly suspect and assume that other human beings are conscious, but I cannot verify this scientifically (i.e. measure it somehow). This means that consciousness is a phenomenon that cannot be doubted (in the first person) but possibly eludes the scientific method. This really grates people who have a strong emotional attachment to the dogma that science must be able to account for all of reality. People confuse the metaphysical commitment of materialism with scientific fact, and thus conclude that consciousness must be an emergent phenomenon of neural complexity, and that it is silly to believe that anything else could be conscious. This feels like an hyper-rational, scientific stance, but really it is not. Science works perfectly fine within other metaphysical commitments such as idealism, panpsychism, etc. This is not to say that materialism is not correct, I do not know if it is or not. My point is that many contemporary "scientific types" tend to believe that their certainty about materialism being the correct framework is grounded on science, when it is not. It is often an unexamined and quasi-religious belief.

ffwd 3y ago
I understand the argument but I disagree and would phrase it the other way around. We don't have evidence of conscious experience because we don't have evidence for a division between conscious experience and "existence/physical stuff" in the first place. This division is created by our brains and the model we have of the world but in reality the only evidence we have is that something exists. Therefore, what we call subjective experience is evidence for the existence of what we experience, but until we can empirically show that there is a difference between what we experience and what reality is, the only thing we can say is that it exists. Also, that's the problem with the hard problem of consciousness - it assumes a division between the two, and we have no evidence of such a division. And lastly if it's not clear i am not a panpsychist either because that assumes a division on some level again. We don't know what existence itself is and how it functions really, at least not the brains function within existence.

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago

I have given this some thought. I believe that: If something has (a) a robust temporal-spatial sense, a "reference frame" in time and space, (b) physical boundedness, (c) a robust and general predictive function which is capable of abstraction, (d) independent volition, and (e) behavior that is non-deterministic in the weak sense that its actions cannot easily be foreseen by any arbitrarily powerful computer within the universe that it resides in, then: That thing is conscious. It's possible to imagine entities that don't necessarily satisfy all conditions and are nevertheless somehow conscious -- i.e., a sufficiently powerful AI that has no clear physical bounds and a poor (but not entirely absent) spatial reference frame, but which possesses independent volition and can independently simulate concepts -- but if all conditions are clearly met, then an entity is unambiguously conscious.