3 ms·
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 succinct
by 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 agoNo, 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 agoThis 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.
- GPerson 1mo agoThe explanation I have against solipsism is that I believe that physical things of similar kind have similar behavior, and brains are extremely similar to one another. This is compatible with my belief in substrate non-independence. > it comes from a circular definition Right my original post tried to preempt this common view. My view is that there cannot be a definition of consciousness that isn’t effectively like asking the other person to observe it.
- qarl 1mo ago> brains are extremely similar to one another But according to solipsism you can't be sure my brain actually exists at all, right? And for what it's worth - no - I do not believe neurons are so different than transistors. Sure, it could be possible - but really? That feels like a reach for a theory that wants to find a certain conclusion. They're both made of the same protons and electrons, right? They obey the same laws of chemistry and physics. You think consciousness is really in the carbon and not in the silicon? Do you have any justification for that belief? Is it the atomic weight? How could that possibly be? > My view is that there cannot be a definition of consciousness that isn’t effectively like asking the other person to observe it. Right. But that's circular, isn't it? Consciousness is what I feel like consciousness is.
- 1mo ago