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Having not gone deep into this problem, I’m a bit confused. It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not

Having not gone deep into this problem, I’m a bit confused. It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter. Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”? Is it not possible that our experiences, our recognition of color, our smell of moth balls, our hearing of clarinets are, in fact, just aggregate functions of those parts that make us up? Am I missing some greater argument here? Is this just humanity’s need to feel special on navel-gazing display, or is there a stronger crux here lost in the haze of the article?

mxkopy 2y ago
The hard problem of consciousness is the same as the problem of describing to someone a color they’ve never seen before (i.e. the problem of qualia). Personally I think the information contained in qualia is finite and therefore physical but who knows
- aklein 2y ago
  TBH, I don’t really understand why this is a problem. An explanation is not an experience; it cannot provide to the human brain the same information. Suppose you neurologically induced an experience of seeing that new color without “really” seeing it - surely this would be sufficient to communicate qualia? (And if not, surely it’s just a matter of adjusting the inducement to some degree).
  - chaps 2y ago
    This sort of philosophical question becomes more important when you think of second-order-and-beyond. Think of, in this case, that color is just a manifestation of experience. But that manifestation of experience applies to, for example, the beautiful smells that a rose throws out into the world. To a degree, the redness has an affectation on the world, which is separate to each person. my theory is that these things are just questions of resolutions of varying latencies.
  - epiccoleman 2y ago
    Isn't "an explanation is not an experience" basically the problem? Like, if you could perfectly describe all the physical conditions to induce the experience of a color, there would still be something missing from that description which you can't get without consciousness in the loop. You can't communicate or describe it without the actual experience part. Most (all?) of our "science" doesn't require any sort of notion of consciousness to work, we can describe the motion of a projectile or an orbit in a way that doesn't depend on having an "experiencer." But there's this weird category of stuff for which that isn't true. (At least, for now).
    - yibg 2y ago
      Doesn't that just point to the fact that our ability to describe is limited and lossy? In the color example, we're trying to convey information about the effects of one of the senses without using that sense. It could very well be that without using that particular sense, the brain just isn't stimulated the same way.
    - plorkyeran 2y ago
      Would there still be something missing if you could “perfectly describe all the physical conditions to induce the experience of a color”? I don’t see any reason to assume that’s self-evidently true, and it’s not something that we have the ability to test. Obviously if you start from the assumption that qualia exists then you will conclude that it must exist.
  - mxkopy 2y ago
    We haven’t experimentally verified that such neurological inducement is possible. I bet we’ll be able to do so, but until then the question remains.
fsckboy 2y ago
>It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter. Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”? you've definitely hit upon the problem, but you have it exactly backward. The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical. Consciousness affects physical things (you think, plan, and put out your hand and move something). How does this happen? Saying "it's all physical laws" is handwaving away quite a bit of nonphysical phenomena, relying on "the science of the gaps". it may very well turn out that orgasm feels like it does because that's a property of physics, but you can't just assert these sorts of things, you have to prove them. my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.
- rini17 2y ago
  Even if it's all computation, it might be worth it to distinguish sentient and not sentient computations. I think trying to arrive to it by examining particles is a detour at best.
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    if sentient computation exists as a subset of a computational structure (our universe) it must be said that the computational structure is sentient.
    - rini17 2y ago
      That's like saying all movement must have originated from some Prime Mover. Why is there need for such forced assumptions.
- adrianN 2y ago
  We don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows you to determine whether an electron is conscious or not. Until we have that it’s quite pointless to discuss whether this phenomenon is magic or not imo. Furthermore, I don't think it's trivial to distinguish between magic and physics.
andoando 2y ago
Is consciousness not special? It certainly isn't obvious to me my experience of the world isn't present in all matter. And how is it obvious that is a fundamental product of matter? It seems to me youre just taking the opposite as an axiom without any basis. My personal belief is the two viewpoints are not so contradictory. Consciousness can be a fundamental part of all matter (not simply an emergent phenomena or product of matter). This is no more magic to me than admitting matter has "energy" or does things randomly.
- chaboud 2y ago
  If your consciousness is a product of matter, it isn’t special, and, sure, consciousness as we label it could arise in forms of other matter. That doesn’t mean that it’s present in all matter, in the same way that we don’t ascribe consciousness to a virus. Consciousness is a label. It’s a noun that is used (among many long winded arguments, apparently) to mean a range of things, but relaxation of that label doesn’t extend to universal consciousness of matter without rendering that concept pointless.
canjobear 2y ago
The nonphysicality of consciousness isn't taken as axiomatic, there are arguments for it. Consider the argument from knowledge, summarized in TFA: > A related argument known as the “knowledge argument” was famously put forward by Frank Jackson. Imagine Mary, a scientist of the future who, for whatever reason, has spent her entire life in a black and white room, never having experiences of colors. She has, nevertheless, through her studies come to learn all the physical facts there are to know about the physics and physiology of color perception. For example, she knows down to the last detail what is going on in the surface of a red apple, and in the eyes and nervous system, when someone sees the apple. Suppose she leaves the room and finally comes to learn for herself what it is like to see red. In other words, she comes for the first time to have the qualia associated with the conscious experience of seeing a red apple. Surely she has learned something new. But since, by hypothesis, she already knew all the physical facts there were to know about the situation, her new knowledge of the qualia in question must be knowledge of something over and above the physical facts. In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything. The version of this that I learned first was "what is it like to be a bat?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F Another one that I can recall offhand, from Descartes: Physical things have extension in space. One way to test whether something has extension in space is whether you can cut it in half. But your consciousness can't be cut in half, you can't even conceive of what this would mean. So it's not physical. Make of the arguments what you may. I wrote term papers against both of the above in undergrad. But it's definitely something people have thought carefully about, not just an ideological assertion that consciousness Must Be Different.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything. No, you don't. You just have to accept that the facts about physical phenomenon that can be learned through language are different than the physical experience of physical phenomena themselves, and that learning the latter is distinct from learning the former. The latter, however, is obviously physical. And, even if it wasn't wrong in that way, that would be an argument for the nonphysicality of some subset of the subjects of knowledge, not an argument for the nonphysicality of consciousness.

mxkopy 2y ago

The hard problem of consciousness is the same as the problem of describing to someone a color they’ve never seen before (i.e. the problem of qualia). Personally I think the information contained in qualia is finite and therefore physical but who knows

aklein 2y ago
TBH, I don’t really understand why this is a problem. An explanation is not an experience; it cannot provide to the human brain the same information. Suppose you neurologically induced an experience of seeing that new color without “really” seeing it - surely this would be sufficient to communicate qualia? (And if not, surely it’s just a matter of adjusting the inducement to some degree).
- chaps 2y ago
  This sort of philosophical question becomes more important when you think of second-order-and-beyond. Think of, in this case, that color is just a manifestation of experience. But that manifestation of experience applies to, for example, the beautiful smells that a rose throws out into the world. To a degree, the redness has an affectation on the world, which is separate to each person. my theory is that these things are just questions of resolutions of varying latencies.
- epiccoleman 2y ago
  Isn't "an explanation is not an experience" basically the problem? Like, if you could perfectly describe all the physical conditions to induce the experience of a color, there would still be something missing from that description which you can't get without consciousness in the loop. You can't communicate or describe it without the actual experience part. Most (all?) of our "science" doesn't require any sort of notion of consciousness to work, we can describe the motion of a projectile or an orbit in a way that doesn't depend on having an "experiencer." But there's this weird category of stuff for which that isn't true. (At least, for now).
  - yibg 2y ago
    Doesn't that just point to the fact that our ability to describe is limited and lossy? In the color example, we're trying to convey information about the effects of one of the senses without using that sense. It could very well be that without using that particular sense, the brain just isn't stimulated the same way.
  - plorkyeran 2y ago
    Would there still be something missing if you could “perfectly describe all the physical conditions to induce the experience of a color”? I don’t see any reason to assume that’s self-evidently true, and it’s not something that we have the ability to test. Obviously if you start from the assumption that qualia exists then you will conclude that it must exist.
- mxkopy 2y ago
  We haven’t experimentally verified that such neurological inducement is possible. I bet we’ll be able to do so, but until then the question remains.

fsckboy 2y ago

>It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter. Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”? you've definitely hit upon the problem, but you have it exactly backward. The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical. Consciousness affects physical things (you think, plan, and put out your hand and move something). How does this happen? Saying "it's all physical laws" is handwaving away quite a bit of nonphysical phenomena, relying on "the science of the gaps". it may very well turn out that orgasm feels like it does because that's a property of physics, but you can't just assert these sorts of things, you have to prove them. my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.

rini17 2y ago
Even if it's all computation, it might be worth it to distinguish sentient and not sentient computations. I think trying to arrive to it by examining particles is a detour at best.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  if sentient computation exists as a subset of a computational structure (our universe) it must be said that the computational structure is sentient.
  - rini17 2y ago
    That's like saying all movement must have originated from some Prime Mover. Why is there need for such forced assumptions.
adrianN 2y ago
We don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows you to determine whether an electron is conscious or not. Until we have that it’s quite pointless to discuss whether this phenomenon is magic or not imo. Furthermore, I don't think it's trivial to distinguish between magic and physics.

andoando 2y ago

Is consciousness not special? It certainly isn't obvious to me my experience of the world isn't present in all matter. And how is it obvious that is a fundamental product of matter? It seems to me youre just taking the opposite as an axiom without any basis. My personal belief is the two viewpoints are not so contradictory. Consciousness can be a fundamental part of all matter (not simply an emergent phenomena or product of matter). This is no more magic to me than admitting matter has "energy" or does things randomly.

chaboud 2y ago
If your consciousness is a product of matter, it isn’t special, and, sure, consciousness as we label it could arise in forms of other matter. That doesn’t mean that it’s present in all matter, in the same way that we don’t ascribe consciousness to a virus. Consciousness is a label. It’s a noun that is used (among many long winded arguments, apparently) to mean a range of things, but relaxation of that label doesn’t extend to universal consciousness of matter without rendering that concept pointless.

canjobear 2y ago

The nonphysicality of consciousness isn't taken as axiomatic, there are arguments for it. Consider the argument from knowledge, summarized in TFA: > A related argument known as the “knowledge argument” was famously put forward by Frank Jackson. Imagine Mary, a scientist of the future who, for whatever reason, has spent her entire life in a black and white room, never having experiences of colors. She has, nevertheless, through her studies come to learn all the physical facts there are to know about the physics and physiology of color perception. For example, she knows down to the last detail what is going on in the surface of a red apple, and in the eyes and nervous system, when someone sees the apple. Suppose she leaves the room and finally comes to learn for herself what it is like to see red. In other words, she comes for the first time to have the qualia associated with the conscious experience of seeing a red apple. Surely she has learned something new. But since, by hypothesis, she already knew all the physical facts there were to know about the situation, her new knowledge of the qualia in question must be knowledge of something over and above the physical facts. In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything. The version of this that I learned first was "what is it like to be a bat?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F Another one that I can recall offhand, from Descartes: Physical things have extension in space. One way to test whether something has extension in space is whether you can cut it in half. But your consciousness can't be cut in half, you can't even conceive of what this would mean. So it's not physical. Make of the arguments what you may. I wrote term papers against both of the above in undergrad. But it's definitely something people have thought carefully about, not just an ideological assertion that consciousness Must Be Different.

dragonwriter 2y ago
> In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything. No, you don't. You just have to accept that the facts about physical phenomenon that can be learned through language are different than the physical experience of physical phenomena themselves, and that learning the latter is distinct from learning the former. The latter, however, is obviously physical. And, even if it wasn't wrong in that way, that would be an argument for the nonphysicality of some subset of the subjects of knowledge, not an argument for the nonphysicality of consciousness.