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What exactly is the “mystery” of consciousness? This article is a long read, but it doesn't really formulate the question.

snikeris 12y ago
From the article: It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?
- thirdtruck 12y ago
  Thank you for bringing in the snippet. To analyse its contents, I'll ask this: what's to say that a computer doesn't experience some very primitive form of consciousness? If we unplugged everything except the power cord, but left a complicated simulation running, it would still have something like "a rich inner life." Its peripherals and sensors give it a sense of a body and, with abstract drivers, a degree of conceptual separation from said hardware. Doubly so in the case of virtual machines. After all, we can't "truly" experience the same thing that a computer might from the inside, so who are we to doubt "computer consciousness?" If the proponents of "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" can't give a quantified explanation of how to distinguish a theoretical computer consciousness from a human one, that raises the question of whether the problem actually exists. For my part, I don't believe in consciousness as a concrete thing, only a label we use to group together quite a few disparate systems and phenomenon. It's the same way that I don't believe in "Ruby" as a concrete thing, but only in the unit tests, the sample code, the docs, and the thoughts in Matz's head that we subconsciously conflate.
- rbrogan 12y ago
  Is there anything for which you cannot ask a similar question of the form: Why does xyz exist? Why are things not just [this simpler thing]? For those types of questions, I imagine one would answer: because if it were not so then things would be nonsense. If this question is asked of consciousness without saying what consciousness is doing such that if you took it away then you would have nonsense, then I do not see how anyone can answer it. The way the question is framed up, consciousness accomplishes nothing as far as survival goes. "evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t" Zombie seems to be defined as: phenomena that you think has consciousness but does not. If consciousness has been defined as some phenomena where you have an intuitive understanding of what is being communicated by that word "consciousness" but also it (consciousness) does not do anything, then how can anyone explain why consciousness should be? Anything you can think of as a function of consciousness, can then be hand-waved as able to be accomplished by zombies.
jerf 12y ago
Here's a more concrete and less "woo woo" (although only less, not necessarily "woo woo" free): Suppose for the moment that consciousness exists on some sort of scale (i.e., I'm not presuming binary have/have not, and I'm not really presuming total ordering of "quality" either). Humans have "more" and a dog has "less" and a fly has "hardly any". We are not too far out into the water, here, really. There is some sort of meaningful something that humans have lots of, dogs have less of, and flies have hardly any, even from a strictly physical perspective. Now, suppose we assume that the end of the article is correct and "consciousness" is really just a form of integrated information processing, and their device for measuring the interconnected nature of a given brain is measuring something meaningful. (And let me take a moment to observe that when I say "assume", I'm serious. I'm not asking for agreement, I'm saying, work with me and assume for the sake of a discussion.) Now, we are still not too far out into the waters here. We have a device that is measuring something real, and fairly non-mysterious. It would not be hard to create an equivalent for a computer system by considering the system as a set of graph nodes, then probing the connectivity of the system. We're still standing on fairly concrete ground. Now, consider that in the near future we will be able to build computer systems that by any basic connectivity metric (average number of neighbors, various stats of connectivity shape, etc.) would match even human brains, but can be demonstrably doing something very simple like just copying data from here to there, something that is clearly not "conscious" behavior. Characterize the difference between my hypothetical computer system that matches the human brain on $RELEVANT_CONNECTIVITY_METRIC and the actual human brain. In theory, as you refine the connectivity metric you should also be describing to me how to build a human-equivalent brain, too, or at least telling me exactly how I'm falling short. Note this is a sort of mathematical argument, where I'm asking you to bring your own $CONNECTIVITY_METRIC to the party. It seems pretty clear that it can't be as simple as whether or not it is or is not of a certain size and happens to follow a power law in the connectivity graph, because it's really easy to produce a program that would have that level of connectivity and still not be conscious. (A naively-written non-trivial program naturally has a power-law distribution to it.) This phrases the problem in a fairly practical way ("how do I build a human-class AI?"), demonstrates the difficulty of answering it even given a powerful and potentially incorrect assumption, and is phrased virtually entirely in physical terms such that a sufficiently concrete and accurate answer would very likely lead to the ability to build AI. And we have no clue about that $CONNECTIVITY_METRIC. All we've got is some people asserting that the answer lies in this direction and others asserting it doesn't and very little hard data to help us answer that question. And I'd also observe that I'm not even worried about the answer, this generalizes trivially to the "set" of conscious behaviors, and also your choice of whatever test you like to apply for consciousness up to and including "I'll know it when I see it", since right now we can't answer any of these variants.

snikeris 12y ago

From the article: It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?

thirdtruck 12y ago
Thank you for bringing in the snippet. To analyse its contents, I'll ask this: what's to say that a computer doesn't experience some very primitive form of consciousness? If we unplugged everything except the power cord, but left a complicated simulation running, it would still have something like "a rich inner life." Its peripherals and sensors give it a sense of a body and, with abstract drivers, a degree of conceptual separation from said hardware. Doubly so in the case of virtual machines. After all, we can't "truly" experience the same thing that a computer might from the inside, so who are we to doubt "computer consciousness?" If the proponents of "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" can't give a quantified explanation of how to distinguish a theoretical computer consciousness from a human one, that raises the question of whether the problem actually exists. For my part, I don't believe in consciousness as a concrete thing, only a label we use to group together quite a few disparate systems and phenomenon. It's the same way that I don't believe in "Ruby" as a concrete thing, but only in the unit tests, the sample code, the docs, and the thoughts in Matz's head that we subconsciously conflate.
rbrogan 12y ago
Is there anything for which you cannot ask a similar question of the form: Why does xyz exist? Why are things not just [this simpler thing]? For those types of questions, I imagine one would answer: because if it were not so then things would be nonsense. If this question is asked of consciousness without saying what consciousness is doing such that if you took it away then you would have nonsense, then I do not see how anyone can answer it. The way the question is framed up, consciousness accomplishes nothing as far as survival goes. "evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t" Zombie seems to be defined as: phenomena that you think has consciousness but does not. If consciousness has been defined as some phenomena where you have an intuitive understanding of what is being communicated by that word "consciousness" but also it (consciousness) does not do anything, then how can anyone explain why consciousness should be? Anything you can think of as a function of consciousness, can then be hand-waved as able to be accomplished by zombies.

jerf 12y ago

Here's a more concrete and less "woo woo" (although only less, not necessarily "woo woo" free): Suppose for the moment that consciousness exists on some sort of scale (i.e., I'm not presuming binary have/have not, and I'm not really presuming total ordering of "quality" either). Humans have "more" and a dog has "less" and a fly has "hardly any". We are not too far out into the water, here, really. There is some sort of meaningful something that humans have lots of, dogs have less of, and flies have hardly any, even from a strictly physical perspective. Now, suppose we assume that the end of the article is correct and "consciousness" is really just a form of integrated information processing, and their device for measuring the interconnected nature of a given brain is measuring something meaningful. (And let me take a moment to observe that when I say "assume", I'm serious. I'm not asking for agreement, I'm saying, work with me and assume for the sake of a discussion.) Now, we are still not too far out into the waters here. We have a device that is measuring something real, and fairly non-mysterious. It would not be hard to create an equivalent for a computer system by considering the system as a set of graph nodes, then probing the connectivity of the system. We're still standing on fairly concrete ground. Now, consider that in the near future we will be able to build computer systems that by any basic connectivity metric (average number of neighbors, various stats of connectivity shape, etc.) would match even human brains, but can be demonstrably doing something very simple like just copying data from here to there, something that is clearly not "conscious" behavior. Characterize the difference between my hypothetical computer system that matches the human brain on $RELEVANT_CONNECTIVITY_METRIC and the actual human brain. In theory, as you refine the connectivity metric you should also be describing to me how to build a human-equivalent brain, too, or at least telling me exactly how I'm falling short. Note this is a sort of mathematical argument, where I'm asking you to bring your own $CONNECTIVITY_METRIC to the party. It seems pretty clear that it can't be as simple as whether or not it is or is not of a certain size and happens to follow a power law in the connectivity graph, because it's really easy to produce a program that would have that level of connectivity and still not be conscious. (A naively-written non-trivial program naturally has a power-law distribution to it.) This phrases the problem in a fairly practical way ("how do I build a human-class AI?"), demonstrates the difficulty of answering it even given a powerful and potentially incorrect assumption, and is phrased virtually entirely in physical terms such that a sufficiently concrete and accurate answer would very likely lead to the ability to build AI. And we have no clue about that $CONNECTIVITY_METRIC. All we've got is some people asserting that the answer lies in this direction and others asserting it doesn't and very little hard data to help us answer that question. And I'd also observe that I'm not even worried about the answer, this generalizes trivially to the "set" of conscious behaviors, and also your choice of whatever test you like to apply for consciousness up to and including "I'll know it when I see it", since right now we can't answer any of these variants.