6 ms·

Can we agree your reply is rude given than I have made a fair effort to explain my view to you already? This is not a simple topic and one should not expect the

by GPerson 1mo ago

Can we agree your reply is rude given than I have made a fair effort to explain my view to you already? This is not a simple topic and one should not expect the whole thing to come down to a tweet; neither is an accurate understanding of evolution I’ll add. Which part can I express better? Do you know what I am referring to by phenomenal consciousness?

qarl 1mo ago
I apologize if I've caused offense - I knew it would be contentious but I thought it was more important that you understood my perspective from the outset. I have looked up "phenomenal consciousness" and I understand it to be roughly the qualia of being conscious. I do not understand then what you meant by "reduce to a substrate independent description". I hope you can understand why I was so dismissive - your large block of text became unintelligible to me only 5% of the way in.
- GPerson 1mo ago
  I’m not more offended than by the army of people here informing me that my IQ is low, so no worries. I don’t have the skill to express these ideas more succinctly, and I apologize for this. I’ve tangled a lot, so I can try to express some parts in more organized manner if you’ll bear with me. (1) An important topic in consciousness studies is Chalmers’ hard problem; the original essay is very readable and I recommend it. He sets it aside from the “easy” problems of explaining how various human functions correspond to neural mechanisms, since he supposes these are clearly achievable by science with time. Many find this name contentious or the framing misguided. The hard problem is to explain how and why phenomenal consciousness exists, i.e., that there is an experience that goes along with some of those neural mechanisms. This is perplexing because if the functional aspects can all be explained mechanically, there is no a priori reason there must be an experience. (2) Substrate independence is the quality of the essential features of a process to depend only on their information content, not on the underlying medium expressing the information. For instance, the working of an operating system is substrate independent in the sense that it can run on different hardware. It is a commonly held belief that consciousness is like this, and I suspected this was your view. My own belief is that fundamental physical processes are substrate dependent. Each assumption has different explanatory power and issues. I fear this is not succinct but my urge is to continue.
  - qarl 1mo ago
    > I fear this is not succinct but my urge is to continue. Regardless, I understood all of it, and I thank you for sticking it out with me. Re (1) - yes, I am familiar. To cut to the chase - I agree that P-Zombies can never be strictly ruled out, but I find this issue to be akin to solipsism. Re (2) - yes, that does describe me: neurons are no more conscious-making than transistors. But again, I agree this can never be proven strictly.
    - GPerson 1mo ago
      No, thank you for engaging. The most naive versions of substrate independence have a hard time contending with Putnam’s thought experiment showing rocks are conscious (Chalmers has a webpage discussing this also); the idea is that a sequence of machine states can be made to correspond 1-1 to a sequence of rock states. There are stronger versions which start making assumptions about causal and organizational structure, which is probably your view. This suggests at least that consciousness depends not only on information expression, but the manner in which the information expression happens. This doesn’t preclude your position, but it starts to sound like the substrate might matter because certain causal and organizational architectures may be only expressible in our reality in certain ways. I could talk your ear off though.
      - qarl 1mo ago
        This rocks thing sounds like an argument I heard Searle make one time - that the vibrating molecules in a wall can be thought of as sentient because you can map them to intelligent output (where, of course, the intelligence is actually hidden in the mapping.) I don't know how to resolve these things - but my suspicion is these issues get resolved like the question of solipsism: we take a practical explanation because it's so useful. Because, at the end of the day, you're going to be hard-pressed to prove consciousness when it comes from a circular definition. I look to vitalism for inspiration. I am hard pressed to find inexplicable behavior in evolved chemistry. It remains chemistry. Probably.
        1mo ago

by GPerson 1mo ago

qarl 1mo ago

I apologize if I've caused offense - I knew it would be contentious but I thought it was more important that you understood my perspective from the outset. I have looked up "phenomenal consciousness" and I understand it to be roughly the qualia of being conscious. I do not understand then what you meant by "reduce to a substrate independent description". I hope you can understand why I was so dismissive - your large block of text became unintelligible to me only 5% of the way in.

GPerson 1mo ago
I’m not more offended than by the army of people here informing me that my IQ is low, so no worries. I don’t have the skill to express these ideas more succinctly, and I apologize for this. I’ve tangled a lot, so I can try to express some parts in more organized manner if you’ll bear with me. (1) An important topic in consciousness studies is Chalmers’ hard problem; the original essay is very readable and I recommend it. He sets it aside from the “easy” problems of explaining how various human functions correspond to neural mechanisms, since he supposes these are clearly achievable by science with time. Many find this name contentious or the framing misguided. The hard problem is to explain how and why phenomenal consciousness exists, i.e., that there is an experience that goes along with some of those neural mechanisms. This is perplexing because if the functional aspects can all be explained mechanically, there is no a priori reason there must be an experience. (2) Substrate independence is the quality of the essential features of a process to depend only on their information content, not on the underlying medium expressing the information. For instance, the working of an operating system is substrate independent in the sense that it can run on different hardware. It is a commonly held belief that consciousness is like this, and I suspected this was your view. My own belief is that fundamental physical processes are substrate dependent. Each assumption has different explanatory power and issues. I fear this is not succinct but my urge is to continue.
- qarl 1mo ago
  > I fear this is not succinct but my urge is to continue. Regardless, I understood all of it, and I thank you for sticking it out with me. Re (1) - yes, I am familiar. To cut to the chase - I agree that P-Zombies can never be strictly ruled out, but I find this issue to be akin to solipsism. Re (2) - yes, that does describe me: neurons are no more conscious-making than transistors. But again, I agree this can never be proven strictly.
  - GPerson 1mo ago
    No, thank you for engaging. The most naive versions of substrate independence have a hard time contending with Putnam’s thought experiment showing rocks are conscious (Chalmers has a webpage discussing this also); the idea is that a sequence of machine states can be made to correspond 1-1 to a sequence of rock states. There are stronger versions which start making assumptions about causal and organizational structure, which is probably your view. This suggests at least that consciousness depends not only on information expression, but the manner in which the information expression happens. This doesn’t preclude your position, but it starts to sound like the substrate might matter because certain causal and organizational architectures may be only expressible in our reality in certain ways. I could talk your ear off though.
    - qarl 1mo ago
      This rocks thing sounds like an argument I heard Searle make one time - that the vibrating molecules in a wall can be thought of as sentient because you can map them to intelligent output (where, of course, the intelligence is actually hidden in the mapping.) I don't know how to resolve these things - but my suspicion is these issues get resolved like the question of solipsism: we take a practical explanation because it's so useful. Because, at the end of the day, you're going to be hard-pressed to prove consciousness when it comes from a circular definition. I look to vitalism for inspiration. I am hard pressed to find inexplicable behavior in evolved chemistry. It remains chemistry. Probably.
      - 1mo ago