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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 Co

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.

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.