Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that).
We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category.
If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.
Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of.
So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter.
If you accept that we assume we are not in a simulation and the knowledge we have matters, then consciousness is also open to exploration, and it is not only a philosophical thing. There are several hard questions about consciousness that are meaningful in this frame:
- Why do some things appear to be conscious and other not so?
- Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?
- Is consciousness local and embodied, or not?
- Would restoring the physical substrate of consciousness (if possible) lead to the same consciousness, or an identical one? Does this distinction between "same" and "identical" consciousnesses even make sense?
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology.
What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions.
What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sense of power to determine the nature of the world by our mind alone -- but such is life.
The world is not human, not at all like a human, and nothing about it follows from us at all. The world is not made in our image. Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape, and whatever it manages to measure with any clarity, has no impact on the nature of that world.
Yes. Though i think you're committing the gentic fallacy here, which is the core fallacy at the heart of idealism and much 19th C. german philosophy.
The properties of the origin of somethign imply nothing about the properties of the product. That a bread factory is made of metal, does not mean bread is.
That in my statement of things in language I am conscious of what I state, says nothing about the truth (or other such properties) of what I say.
A photographic plate is made of metal, the mountain it photographs, of mud.
I am conscious, but when I say, "reality is all that which is extended in space and time" -- the truth of that proposition has nothing to do with my being consiouss -- it is a loaf of bread, a photograph, a product of a process invovling consiousness but in none of its properties, depends upon it.
Every relevant thing we do requires consciousness -- just as everythign a thermometer does requires, say, its own mercury -- but in measuring coffee's temperature, coffee is in no way mercury. And when we measre the world, by photographing it with consciousness, it is in no way conscious.
The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.
I understand your difficulty. It is hard to imagine the universe disappearing if all consciousness cease to exist the next second.
But is that really hard? Don't everything in your dreams disappear when you wake up?
Let me ask another question. Can you differentiate between a consciousness observing a universe, and a consciousness with a sensation of a whole universe, built in?
And the point of that is our subjective experiences only require consciousness, and not a universe that is independent of it.
>The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.
Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends. Simply put, this does not happen because consciousness occurs in a substrate.
Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.
>Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends.
The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence other than "something a consciousness can detect (directly or indirectly)". So if there is no consciousness, there is no existence.
But I think there could be a difference between death of all conscious beings, and consciousness itself disappearing. Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.
>Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.
Yea, take that. I think the number of possible worlds where a simple life form spontaneously assembled and evolved to a human following the laws of that world, are enormously larger than a world where a full human brain spontaneously assembled all by itself. It is just statistics that we find ourselves in a world of the former kind and not a brain alone in an empty universe..
>The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence
Yea, I don't subscribe to this line of thinking as consciousness had to happen before existence. Kinda messy when you think about it.
>Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.
This, at least how it's written makes consciousness something like the electromagnetic field that exists everywhere. For example if I said "If you want to fly, you need to oscillate the flying field". Most scientists are going to give you a hold up and state it doesn't work that way. They'll tell you that you need an atmosphere and a body capable of generating force to create lift. It's not like a magnet that jiggles a field that exists everywhere in spacetime.
Looking at flying is fun in itself... do fish fly in the water? At what viscosity does flying become swimming. Sorties paradox creates lot of issues in different places, especially the discussion of consciousness.
Concepts like "before", "happen" does not have a meaning in this context? Did the left part of a circle happened before the right part?
In a similar way, consciousness and existence could be part of the same structure that exists outside of time and space. It is not meaningful to say that one part existed before the other. It is not even meaningful to say that this structure had always existed.
I think that gets us closer to the right way of thinking about it. Somehow existence and consciousness are the same "thing", or two opposing aspects of the same "thing", where "thing" stands for something for which we cannot have a word, because it's beyond (or previous to) the distinction between object and subject. I think using the word "being" instead of "existence" makes things a bit more clear. Beings are almost by definition conscious. A stone (or a thermostat) is not a being, but an animal is.
I've been an idealist. I understand all the arguments. The base fallacy at the heart of all this is the one I mentioned.
On the very last point: the conclusion that consciousness is thin, like a photograph, and the world thick -- follows from the most complete explanatory account of how consiousness works. The idea that there is no world, or that the world is a thin transcendental ego -- this abandons the project of offering an account of consiousness at all and ends up in incoherence.
Within consiousness I am presented with: what I cannot change (fixed perceptions), what I can change (eg., imagined perceptions). This duality is immanent to consiousness itself. The imagination can apprenend the fixed, ie., I can imagine scenarios that I could, in principle, see. So there is, immanent to consiousness already, a representational duality: I have both fixed perceptions that I cannot change, I have mutable perceptions (imaginations) that I can -- and my mutable perceptions are representations of my fixed perceptions.
All of the dynamics of the duality of the represented and representation, of the fixed/external and of the mutable/internal -- are already immanent to consiousness.
What remains to be explained is: why? The obvious answer is that the reason i have fixed perceptions is because they are caused by a world that they depict, and the reason I have variable/mutable perceptions is they are caused by me as I represent that world to myself. The duality immanent to consiousness is explained by the duality of the measured and measuring.
Even if you abandoned the world "external" and replace it with "fixed", you gain nothing. Everything which seems objectionable about this duality is already present. If you simply assert it, rather than explain it, your position is weaker because you've nothing to say.
The causal origin of our fixed perceptions is the world, which impacts our sensory organs, interacts with our bodies, and produces a thin perceptual surface to us which causally-directly depicts the world that we are in. These fixed perceptions are constructed by our bodies thru this process of activation, which we can call "measurement with post processing" ie., a kind of digital camera rather than a chemical one.
But in any case, to answer your final question: yes, the difference is that "consiousness" with this duality of the fixed and the variable, and their representational relationship, only makes sense if part of consciousness isnt being determined by consciousness. The need to say what determine it means the "consiousness is complete" option incoherent, if "consciouness" as a term comes to adopt all the properties it needs to explain the fixed perceptions, then you'll find consiousness becomes both the material and the mental -- and all you have done is empty the word of all its meaning
See, you have this observation of subjective experience. One hypothesis for wher this come from, require only consciousness, and the second requires consciousness as well as a whole universe. And the second hypothesis brings up even more questions. Where did this universe come from? Who created it? Why was it created?
The simple answer is that only consciousness really exists and everything is painted on top of that.
that is, reality exists and consciousness is "painted" on top of that?
IMO, anti-materialists are merely uncomfortable with the degree to which they understand neuroscience and related topics (including, btw, capabilities and limits of LLMs). Chalmers, for instance, basically insists that the Hard Problem is Hard simply because he finds it hard.
You cannot ask why consciousness exist. That would be like asking why a circle exist. To elaborate if we consider that our reality is computable from a set of physical laws and a set of random events, then it implies that the consciousness inside that reality is also computable.
The next question is whether the subjective experience those consciousness, or those consciousness themselves can exist without something actually doing the computation.
Does a circle exist before someone draw it? It does, right? and thus, if a world with consciousness is definable, then the subjective experiences inside those consciousness will happen without something actually computing it.
So all such possible worlds exist. By "exist" I don't mean the classical meaning of it. Just that there are subjective experiences going on "inside" them.
I think quantum mechanics also converge on the same idea with the multi-world interpretation of quantum events. At every point when there is a random event, the universe is split and all possibilities is realized in disjoint universes.
And I think this is the same thing as I have described above. Actually multi-world interpretation would be the final nail in the coffin for physicalism. How can material world split infinitely at every infinitely small instance ! But evidence shows that something like that is happening.
So it has to be something like what have been described above.
>How can material world split infinitely at every infinitely small instance !
It does so by continuous motion described by a differential equation. I don't see any problem. If it did something else you would still ask why it does what it does.
It's not a simple answer, because its not an answer to any question. It is "simpler" to assume the thermometer readings exist without any thing to cause them, then they move up and down, and its "simpler" to assert: it is the nature of thermometers to move up and down.
This kind of simplicity isn't simplicity at all, it is to abandon saying anything. It is in the nature of consciousness to inexplicably have all the properties which are needed so as to seem the way it does, sure.
And what is this "consiousness" in the end, which has in its nature, the production of all material reality to serve as a fixed causal basis for perception? to generate perceptions of the brain and bodies of animals; of our death, and of a world which is describabl without any of its own properties? What is the nature of a consciousness which deliveries to us a world that requires none of it?
What is it that when I move the muscles of my eye, and what i see changes? What is it that i require a light in a room to see at all? That i require it to be the case that whatever I perceive, my fixed perceptions must always be as-if the laws of physics were true? What is it to say, "consiousness has the property of seeming as if when I see, I see because light scatters off a surface into my eye, and I can control the image genrated by moving the muscles of my eye?" and yet all of that sentence be false without the word 'seeming' ?
What madness to is it to say that mercury in a thermometer not only acts as-if it is in coffe, but in its nature, acts as if there is an entire world that it is moving through -- and its motion up and down is always according to laws and principles as if such a world existed?
This is no longer consciousness at all. When the nature of mercury in a thermometer is to act as if coffee exists, it is no longer mercury. When "consciousness" is taken to have all the features needed to provide the material world, it is no longer anything in a mind -- but has within it, the whole of the external, fixed, material -- and so it is itself now alike those things. When "consciousness" has finally been modified to produce everything within it, the term means nothing at all.
The entire system of properties and objects which are external to consciousness, narrowly defined, are still external within consciousness broadly defined. And with this broad definition comes all the laws of physics, all the properties of materiality, all of everything which mentions nothing of sensation. And the word "consciousness" has to bare all these properties? And you call this simple?
It is much simpler to answer the question: why does the mercurary in the thermometer move? is it because in its own nature is a simulation of an entire universe? No, its nature is simple. It is that there is such a universe it is inside.
> what is this "consiousness" in the end, which has in its nature, the production of all material reality to serve as a fixed causal basis for perception?
>What madness to is it to say that mercury in a thermometer not only acts as-if it is in coffe, but in its nature, acts as if there is an entire world that it is moving through -- and its motion up and down is always according to laws and principles as if such a world existed?
Yes, that is exactly what is being proposed. Causality is an illusion. But how? Imagine an idea of a "definable world". Imagine that all definable worlds "exist", but imagine consciousness appearing only in "regular" worlds, with uniform laws and behaviors..
>I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Godel's sense) structures exist
That's kinda DoA. Isn't there a proof that uncomputable things exist in mathematics, so if mathematics is true, why hypothesize that they don't exist even if we know that they exist?
>but imagine consciousness appearing only in "regular" worlds, with uniform laws and behaviors..
Why this limitation? Irregular worlds with appearing consciousness are mathematically definable just fine, easily even.
This is not a limitation. The basis of this idea is that there is consciousness in this (our) world. So we know that consciousness can result from our set of physical laws and the set of all random events in this world . That is the only thing we know for sure, and the only place we can start reasoning..
We don't know if it is possible for consciousness to exist in a world where everything is random, or less regular..
It's easy to define: a world the same as our world, but has an additional random phenomenon, humans would still exist. Mathematics is fantasy, you can postulate anything you want there.
> You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.
Both of these can be measured. They are not illusions.
Money is an illusion made up by people and agreed upon for basically the whole of the world economy, but not real. Space between me and the lamp on my desk is very real. The age of the world and the age of the universe is very real.
Just like the sensation of hearing a voice is an illusion created by your brain from the vibrations in the air, the perception of depth is an illusion created from the parallax between your eyes. We seem to have an easy time understanding that sound is an illusion, but have a really hard time considering that space and time are similar illusions...They are just some number (like the number of vibrations) that the brain creates a perception for you.
That you can measure it does not change the fact.
>Money is an illusion
Money is a number. Brain does not create an illusion for money, at least not in the sense we are considering here.
we need to distinguish accounts that are merely self-consistent, and those that are more useful.
the reality-is-illusion meme is self-consistent (panpsychism, simulationism, dream-of-god-ism, whatever). merely being self-consistent isn't good enough.
the alternative (and there is only one) is physicalism and its epistemology, science. the main appeal of this is parsimony, often referred to as Occam's Razor.
Oh it is useful. It answers questions like "why do reality exist". "who created it", "What was before it"...Or may be I should say it does not really answer them but makes the questions irrelevant.
Just like how earth centric hypothesis posed questions like "Why is everything circling the earth and why is earth special", and heliocentric hypothesis made that irrelevant by proving that it is just an illusion caused by observing from the earth.
This isnt a benefit, it's a sign that the semantics you're giving language fail to actually model its meaning.
The position isnt self-consistent, unless you engage in the typical idealist peformance of pretending not to know what these questions mean.
In the end, idealism is defeated by the very implausibility of this performance. The idealist, is implicated in the rich ontology of the real world by the very use of language itself. Presupposed is this ontology, and the ordinary truth of ordinary propositions requires it.
If the question, "what was here before I existed?" is meaningful, then idealism is wrong. And it is meaningful, therefore it is wrong.
Yes, so your semantics of langauge make such questions incomprhensible.
It's like if someone said, "what's the radius of this circle?" and you had defined "circle" and "radius" such that circles could never possess such a property, so the quesiton itslef is incherent, just as, "what's the flavour of this circle?"
But my confidence that the question, "what was here before i existed?" has meaning, is greater than my confidence that it is completely incoherent. It plainly and obviously has meaning. Thus anyone selling a semantics for language which makes this question incomprehensible, despite it being perfectly comprehensible, is selling a defective system.
The issue is even more severe for idealists, because it isnt that question alone which becomes incoherent, but vast swathes of language that implicate even idealism itself. Meaninglessness is a kind of virus, which in the end, makes even idealism itself incoherent (since even to state the very terms it is stated in presuppose an objective background for these terms to refer to).
In any case, teenagers of the 1910s/20s thought it was a great thing to go around telling people ordinary questions with obvious meaninings were, in the end, completely meaningless and we were fooled by them all along. This didnt go well for them, as above, these positions themselves by their own critirea ended up meanignless too.
And in any case, the idea that it is a good thing that propositions whose meanings we readily understand should turn out to be meaningless is now correctly seen as a defect of any system proposed.
The obligations on these grand philosophical system are to answer to the meaningful, to take as a given the wide variety of propositions which are obbviously meaningful. Systems which "answer to nothing", and instead, in an adolescent way, delete knowledge and understanding in order to save themselves, are philosophically bankrupt.
Philosophy explains and answers the meaningful. It is only a technnique of analysis and argument, it has no power to determine what is true; only why, in some very narrow cases, what is true, could be so.
>But my confidence that the question, "what was here before i existed?" has meaning, is greater than my confidence that it is completely incoherent. It plainly and obviously has meaning...
But that question is meaning less given the context. It is like some character in a 3d computer game looking at the simulated world around them, and wondering "What was here before?". They are actually asking what was there before the game started, or before the computer was turned on. There is no "here" before the computer turned on, or before the game started running in the computer and initialized the 3d space inhabited by the character.
If we take the video game example literally, we establish a fictional context for the language in question, so we read all questions as in-game.. the answer to the character's question is: the world the character is in. A skyrim NPC character who asks that question, is (fictionally) correct to say 'skyrim', and so on.
Now, dropping that fictional context, we have to ask: what context is giving the words meaning now? If we take a physical/material context, then the answer is 'nothing' in virtue of there being no such person, no such space, etc. because by 'here' in the material context, we know 'here' refers to a point in space and time that the character does not exist at.
When I ask, "what was here before me?" you have to give me how you're assigning meanings to words. To tell me I'm operating in a fictional context when i say, "the earth" -- is fine, so be it, materialism is a kind of fiction which preserves the ordinary meaning of words.
But for that to be plausible, there has to be a context in which those meanings make sense at all.
Kant, and similar idealists, tried to give them a "categorical context" such that "here" refers to something like an implied geometrical aspect of perception; and "before" an implied temporal aspect; and so on, which constitute the fixed law-liuke background of perception.
So that this background treats materialist meanings as fictional, and idealist meanings as the literal ones -- OK, but that's still a meaningful question -- because "me" in the idealist context doesnt refer to the transcendental ego, it refers to the apparent body in apparent space and time. And the right answer is the fictional one, because in the literal context, there is no "me". In any case, this fictional context in which the question still makes complete sense, we call "materalist".
The onus is on you to make plausible why the insanity of a "fixed law-like perceptual background of the generation of perceptions as-if materialism were true" is the principle literal context vs., it being the fictional one.
everything is explained if the law-like features of fixed perceptiosn are derivative fictions that give rise to a fictional mental space of pretend objects, and their actual apparent structure is just in the world. Nothign is explained if its the reverse, indeed, you now have a very very veyr large number of problems on your hand explaining anything at all.
The only reason we find it plausible to treat an NPC as operating in a fictional context is because we have the material context to langauge to give the words literal meanings, and literaly, we find them false. There really isnt any such idealist context for ordinary langauge.
"What was here before me?" becomes meaningless in a pathological way: we cannot even say what it oculd me, if it were true.
For an NPC, we can say very easily, this is how we know its fictional: we know what it would mean for skyrim to exist, and it does not.
Non-kantian idealists who deny the meaningfulness of these questions arent saying "we know what it would mean for there to be a place before you existed, and its false" -- theyre saying the veyr words youre using never had, nor could even have, any meaning at all. This is plainly false. We know very well what it would mean for the proposition to be true: that space and time exist, that physical objects exist, that you are one, and you are located at some time in some point in space, and prior to that, something else was.
This is very simple, ordinary, obvious, language which is meaningful. Even if its meanignful in a fictional context, ie., it is all literally false, it is still meanignful. This means that this kind of radical anti-meaningfulness idealism is false, because there is a coherent system of meaning in which these propositions could be true, even if they arent.
What remains is to decide whether they are true. And given their truth explains everything, by abduction, we suppose -- as a category -- they are true.
I said nothing about the nature of reality. All that I said is: all my knowledge of the reality (whether it exists independently or me or not) comes from my perception.
There could be an objective reality, or reality could be something created by our consciousness. I don't know. The one thing I do know, however, is what my consciousness perceives. It is in that sense that is is fundamental
Largely I find your points reductionist and insulting to the very sacred experience that is unfolding for you and me. Consciousness is a primary or even a priori phenomenon from which all of your surmisals stem. You have got it backwards. The fact someone once saw an ape, or saw a nebula, or made a measurement of brain waves, these all had to happen within human-experience. The experiencing itself is irreducible. Consciousness as a byproduct or secondary phenomenon as you claim, is to be expected for someone brought up in the modern era where religion and spirituality were so vehemently eschewed that men leaned too far into the other extreme and became physicalist-materialists claiming the lived experience is but a mere symphony of neurological interactions without consequence. This is a disastrous view. This is basically a swift ticket to a hell-realm. The basic posture is all wrong - you must return to the fundamental facts, namely those of your lived experience. What you claim as primary evidence are in fact secondary observations. And then you use the secondary observations to make claims about a primary nature "out there" and "distinct from" human-experiencing. This is simply not the case. This view is logically untenable. One does not study consciousness by looking at pictures and drawings and photos, just like how one does not study what music sounds like by inspecting the buttons of a saxaphone unblown. The fluid nature of the energetic capacity of mind is very difficult to discern - it's not an everyday occurence, sages spend their whole lives pursuing prayer and meditation in order to catch a mere glimpse at the primal nature of experience. Everything else flows from this. Your mind is the root of all things, it is the common denominator in all moments of your experience.
You can read my other comment. You're also committing the genetic fallacy.
Yes, a hand can measure itself. Yes, consciousness as a measurement process of reality can expose to the conscious agent that its own consciousness is a merely a process in the world.
Just as a camera, in photographing a mirror, discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.
The "back to basics" pov you're talkign about is one which actually abandons everything consciousness tells you about the world, because you're afraid of what you've found.
An ape without a mirror thinks, of course, it is god. What an insult to find the face of this god is only that of an ape.
No, the genetic fallacy is not germane here. You are conflating the derivation of knowledge and direct knowing, which are distinct. You conflate the ingredients on the back of the label for the taste of the sweets in the pouch. The taste of sweetness is what I am indicating, not the list of ingredients. Also, you are suggesting that there is an impersonal objective spacetime irrespective of observer which is false. There is a generalized case that works for the figures projected for measuring the distances to solar bodies from other solar bodies. But you are basing your analysis on the hidden assumption that the material reality is first. This is an unchallenged assumption in modern science which leads you astray.
>discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.
It discovers no such thing. It can only measure the signals coming from the sensors. That is its ground truth. If a sensor can produce a signal without having an image fall on it, then that would be what the camera sees.
So in this case, it would perceive the image of a camera in a mirror, but that would not be the reality.
It doesnt perceive the image of a camera, it's sensor is that image. What it means to perceive is for that image to form. This is the second great fallacies of idealism: (1) the genetic fallacy above that the origin/product of a process must share properties and (2) this fallacy of ambiguity on the word 'see'/perceive (between the mental act of drawing attention to an aspect of a perception, and the physiological act of forming that perception).
When I open my eye, light hits it, striking off the object which I am seeing. What it means to see is for that object to cause my perception. I am NOT seeing my perception, that doesn't make any sense -- it's incoherent because it's an infinite regress.
When I open my eyes and see the coffee, my body changes to have the perception of that coffee as part of my structure -- I am the photographic plate. Just as the photographic plate isnt taking a picture of itself, neither is my eye or mind.
To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it. You do not see seeing, you see objects.
>To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it
And the point is that you don't need the "world" aka reality to make that change. It can come from within, for example a faulty sensor creating an image of a cloud that does not exist.
And the implication that follows is that just because you percieve something does not mean that it is "real".
This can be made more clear if you understand that every "real" object is made up of pixe dust aka fields. When you see a particle at some point, say an electron, there is actually nothing there...but the space at that location behaves, for some reason, as if there is an electron there...
And that is another problem with the physical idea. What happens if you continuously split an object? If it is really physical, then it should remain physical no matter how many times it is split. But we see that it is not the case.
Yip, but once you have to explain law-following fixed perceptual fields (ie., that it always seems as if my fixed visual perceptions follow the laws of physics, and so on; that my audial/touch/visual percetions follow geometry exacvtly; that my actions to intervene on the world are causally deterministic; ...) --- then you've a real difficulty.
The mind doesnt have the right kind of properties to explain that. If you modify "consiousness" to include those properties then it's no longer consiousness at all.
Whatever generates law-like fixed perceptions of the objective has to be as if all of material reality exists in its law-like way.
Yes, P(Material Reality Does Not Exist) > 0 BUT whatever confidence you give to that, say p_illusion,
P(Material Reality Exists as it seems to | the fixed background of law-like perceptions) >>>>> p_illusion
You dont escape the need for the objective, the law-like, the fixed, the external.. just because you locate what generates this in "the mind" (redefined to include this). At that point the "mental origin" of this background is material. You arent making any difference to call it mental or physical.
The assumption that you made earlier , that reality is material first and perceptual second , continues unchallenged in your experience. Your certainty is based on the words of others who also don't know. You should really examine this more carefully. Screening of direct-experience through words is an obstacle that must be overcome.
You say "you don't see seeing, you see objects" ... Seeing itself is an irreducible fundamental of the universe in the human perspective, that's the point. If it could be reduced and you could split the act of seeing into components, you could say there's the eye [sense faculty], the focal object, and the visual consciousness. You're conflating the three and saying objects are both the eye and the visual consciousness, which is imprecise and unhelpful. A mirror doesn't show you yourself, it shows you a reflection of your external appearance. To say you can see yourself in a mirror is akin to saying you can see a sun in the shadow of a tree.
> you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter
I'd consider myself a materialist (in the philosophical sense) and this is why (and I agree with the rest of your comment to)
We can not know, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary (e.g. someone metaphorically popping their head in from "outside" and revealing another layer to us), while it is important to understand that we do not know, it is more productive to assume in the absence of evidence, whether it is "real" or subjective or a simulation.
As long as it appears to us to follow consistent rules, we can explore those rules, and explore our apparent material reality.
It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors.
Not into modern philosophy at all, but I do believe, simulated or not, that this is indeed mostly quibbling.
An engineer would ask what a simulation would simulate. This is the core of the meaning behind that word. And if the answer is reality and it hints to the fact you cannot perceive everything and you conscience tries to construct a cohesive understanding from limited perception, than I would dispute the fact. The only one who tries to do that are philosophers. Going back to my objective, not-simulated ignorance now.
Simulations are systems which have various rules built into them which govern (entirely) the behavior of the components of the system (at whatever levels the rules apply).
A given simulation may have rules that are believed or are intended to generate behavior within it which are similar to some other system (e.g. what we experience as "reality"). But it may just as well have an entirely different set of rules intended to create entirely different, even unknown and unpredictable, behaviors.
Any similarity between a given simulation and what we experience as reality is a property of that particular simulation. There is absolutely no reason why a simulation that is utterly different from our reality could not exist (and indeed, almost certainly already does).
Simulation in abstract implies to imitate something. Further abstracted to a system of rules removes the reference and it become equivalent to a lot of concepts. It is true that the meaning evolved, but that is probably just an effect because we try to understand reality. And creating a simulation is the test for that understanding. That in best cases fit perceived reality if developed to that goal.
A simulation does not have to model reality and multiple simulations trivially exist. But I don't see why that would imply anything for reality as well from that.
I apologize. I misread your comment that I was replying to as stating that (to paraphrase) the simulation is always modelling reality. Total misread on my part. Very sorry about that.
Part of the argument is that you can only know what you experience. But, if this is a simulation, "you" could be a program running on a computer and your every experience is just piped directly into your consciousness without any underlying physical reality. You might even not be interacting with other people in the simulation, it could be just you and everything else is simulated without being similar to whatever existence you have.
I don't agree with this argument, but it circulates occasionally.
If you are in a sim, then the sim execution is an expensive process, it produces heat and consumes energy. If you are in reality, a material body, then keeping alive also consumes energy. The debates about consciousness often assume a cost-free regime, a platonic perspective. I think this is wrong. We have much to gain thinking about how a process provides its own energy, or how it balances costs and gains. Maybe we can find answers about consciousness too if we chase down the cost recursion path.
>If you are in a sim, then the sim execution is an expensive process, it produces heat and consumes energy.
If simulation theory (or similar ideas) are real, it's entirely possible that the "real world" running the simulation operates on completely different physical laws than the simulation.
Again, this is unknowable if the creator of the simulation doesn't want you to figure out it's a simulation. Simulation or not, this is our reality, and our consciousness would be a simulation inside that simulation. Instead of a weird wobbly space universe, we'd just have an execution platform universe.
I agree completely, and I think most debates/arguments around simulation theory and similar ideas are largely pointless, though they can at least be fun sometimes.
Correct in the sense if we are able to determine that we are in a simulation. That would at least hold the promise that we could escape the VM and play with a deeper reality, though at that point the best chance is we are in nested VMs and reality is a long way away.
What's unknowable is whether or not there are real stars that correspond with what you seem to observe; not whether or not your observations themselves are the real stars.
Didn’t we already work out they are similar in their spectral output to the Sun, enough to conclude they are the same kind of thing? And observing their movements makes them far away. Do each of us have to do the experiments again to validate that we know what they are?
Something could only appear to be similar to the Sun. We have to trust in observation at some level for all of those experiments to be valid, basically, which means first believing that you're conscious and second believing that you can experience reality and so on from there.
You can never really disprove that some malicious entity is just making you think you're seeing the stars and talking to people, if you want to go back to philosophy about it. There's a bit of assumed faith
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
Who invented the words "consciousness" "reality" "fundamental" that you are now using? you are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality.
Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and society.
The whole discussion here is anchored on individual level, but we are not viable outside society. It's like extracting one cell from one organ and saying it is mysterious why it is like that, while ignoring the organism and the evolution.
If society fails, human die too. If a human makes a fatal mistake, the cells in their body die too. We depend on top level doing its job to keep the lower layers viable.
> You are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality.
Your senses are the only thing on which this statement rests. Your don't know anything like "language", "invented" etc. All you know is what your mind and your senses tell you.
And, yes, engaging with you on this topic, and my argument, is also included in what I refer to as my perception. I have no way to prove that you are even conscious, or that anything like language or invention actually are real, whatever real means.
> Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and society.
Yes exactly. You are sure of nothing except the fact this now exists. The simulation could collapse in the next second. I could awake from this dream.
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
> I know for sure what I am perceiving
This reflects my view. And I’ve always found it mildly amusing that beings I cannot prove to myself are perceiving attempt to convince me that I’m not perceiving, when that’s exactly what I’m maximally sure of. Imagine arguing with an LLM designed to convince you that you’re not real. It would be weird, wouldn’t it?
That depends how it tried and what influences the LLM had on the outside world.
For example if the LLM could drug you, either by convincing you to take drugs, or trick you into doing it, then convincing you that you're not real becomes monumentally easy. Derealization can be a monumentally profound/terrifying experience to your psyche.
> Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?
This sounds similar to the "how do you know you're not dreaming?" question.
When you are in a dream, you really are the only single conciousness of that world. Any other person you interact with inside your dream is not performing any thinking of their own. Instead, dream interactions are just your single consciousness interacting with itself.
I think it is obvious there are multiple consciousness in the universe and not just one. Unless you're in a dream right now ;)
Only if we abandon reason while simultaneously claiming objectivity.
I cannot know objectively whether I am in a simulation or not. I can, however, reason about my experience, the experiences of others (as I perceive them), and the systems that facilitate perception. All of that information is logically coherent, so I can "know" it. My knowledge may not be objectively proven, but it is the most subjectively relevant conclusion.
I never quite understood what we mean by "consciousness" but I find fascinating that most modern philosophers who describe themselves as materialists / non religious can argue in the same sentence that there is something special and extra-natural about the human experience.
It's one or the other: either nature is all there is, and therefore, consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, that we can investigate, and probably eventually replicate, and can't deny to other beings or to machines upfront; OR there is something outside reality that we might as well call God.
I'm strongly in the former camp, but I don't have issues with the latter one. What upsets me is the inconsistency of those who try to support both ideas at the same time. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?
Most philosophers are materialists or computational functionalists, while being monists. This means they aren't dualists, and it means they do not adopt the supernatural explanation. But they are careful not to rule out dualism.
There's this pattern I've observed in discussions about philosophy. First there's a rejection of philosophy as silly and misguided, followed by a rediscovery of the same concepts that philosophers have developed, but under a new ad-hoc and less precise language.
I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life.
These people believe this while at the same time considering dualism so ridiculous as to laugh dualists out of the room. The evident problem being that "mind uploading" is the most dualistic possible position to take. A real monist would easily see that by doing mind uploading you have just created a clone that is a whole separate entity from yourself and it is not yourself.
But you are taking an opinionated view of the resolution to the Ship of Theseus paradox. If you are a computational functionalist, then it really is "you" afterwards (or rather there's now two identical "you" until the original "you" is destroyed). A monist could also point to your hypocrisy of believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
Oft-repeated but not true. Neurons, for the most part, are never replaced. If a neuron dies, it's gone forever. Repeated head traumas (leading to CTE) are known to cause personality changes as the brain has been permanently altered due to neuron losses.
A true monist would realize that any experience of the uploaded being that received a copy of the brain is not felt by the original brain that has been copied. This is a fact and it is elementary to see it as true, as well as supporting the view that the copy is not the same being at all. If your description of computation functionalists is accurate, then they simply are dualists and would do good in admitting this to themselves.
Invoking the Ship of Theseus is a distraction. The Ship of Theseus paradox does not involve a full copy at the atomic level while the original still stands. If it did, the paradox would not even exists. The paradox exists because there is the key element that you do not have in mind copying/uploading: _continuity_.
There is no prove that continuity really matters. In fact who goes to say that your current conscious self is the same as your self from five minutes ago. After all you do not feel what they felt. The only thing that makes you think that the two are related or even the same is your state (memories, emotions). Why would we even think about whether cloning is able to transmit consciousness when we don’t even know if consciousness is transmitted over time?
Edit: Just to clarify my opinion: This means that the relationship between my self from five seconds ago and my current self and the relationship between my self from five seconds ago and a clone of that self that aged the same amount would be equivalent. Both of us would _not_ be the same as my past self
In that case you don't exist, since there is no such thing as "current". Every moment in time is either past or future, assuming time is continuous. The reals are infinitely infinite.
Hey, looks like you're finally starting to catch on to the trick the consciousness plays on you.
consciousness always exists in the past of reality around you. It is a physical process with an execution time. Light takes nanoseconds to get to your eyes. The chemical reactions in your eyes take milliseconds. Then you have that signal getting to your visual cortex. Then your brain takes a while and shoves a bunch of shit it assumes is there from pattern matching taking its own number of milliseconds. Eventually this is passed up to your consciousness to interpret 'long' after it actually happened.
But you can make it even more screwy from that point that totally screw with your perception of time. Even more fun are drugs that keep you conscious but keep you from recording short term memories so it's like that time never existed.
Isn't continuity just an implementation detail? Suppose your brain was replaced a bit at a time with mechanical hardware, the end result is an uploaded mind while maintaining continuity.
I admit that this is a troubling problem with the position that I stated, but I don't think it's a complete takedown.
The easiest rebuttal would be to simply say that continuity is not a mere implementation detail. If you give up continuity, you can make a copy without altering the original, you just have to read it.
But if you need to ensure continuity you have to alter the original. This seems to me a very fundamental part of the process, making it qualitatively different.
Imagine you are destroyed in your sleep by aliens and replaced by an atomically identical duplicate. Would you call this "you"?
If not, what if the aliens recycled the atoms from your original body to make the new body, putting each original atom into the same original spot with the same position and momentum (ignoring quantum and uncertainty principle).
What if they recycled 99% of the atoms from your original body, but swapped 1% of them for different atoms?
What if they only destroyed 5% of your brain and reassembled that destroyed portion, leaving the rest of you untouched? What about 50%?
What if they waited 1 planck moment before reassembling you versus 5 seconds?
Where is your dividing line in this scenario space between "that's really me" versus "that's just a copy and is not really me" ?
The functionalist answer, as I understand it, is fungibility across time and copies when arriving at definitions of words like "you".
The functionalist answer is not that > 1 copy can communicate telepathically or supernaturally share experiences is a dualist sense. They are still causally independent physical entities.
None of these scenarios would result in "me" from a monist perspective. The destruction is a discontinuity point, I died there and then, and then the next planck moment a new being was created with all my memories. But "I" died.
The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.
And, you know, there's really nothing wrong being dualist. I do not mean to denigrate that specific worldview. What is problematic is claiming to be a staunch monist while holding dualist positions.
What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
> The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist.
I think you're misunderstanding that words are social constructs which can point to abstract categories rather than necessarily single concrete objects at a particular moment in time (although words can also do that).
Like if you have multiple tennis balls, each ball is still a tennis ball, despite each ball being different, because "tennis ball" is a social construct and an abstraction that's an indirection to a certain concept. In the worldview I am talking about, the word "you" is an indirection to a mind that is indistinguishable in content and experience from the one you have right now, with the property of fungibility across modalities, time and space.
> What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
Apologies, I read too quickly and skipped over this. See one of my sibling comments. I concede this is problematic for my position and I need to think harder on how to solve it, but I don't think it's unsolvable. The placeholder answer is that there must be a certain level of damage -- the precise % probably doesn't matter as much as exactly which parts you destroy -- that is incompatible with keeping continuity.
For the rest, as a social construct, if we incinerate me to create a clone of me that is identical to the original at the subatomic level I agree that, for everyone else in society, it is me. But my self has still died and whatever replaced it is having its own experiences. And it matters very little what everybody else thinks: if tomorrow an imposter convinces everybody else that they are me, they aren't me for me. Their experiences aren't magically beamed to my brain.
Your tennis ball example is again a textbook dualist position. You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself. But, assuming balls can feel when they are hit by the racket, the ball you used in the previous point and now is lying on the sideline does not feel being hit when the next point starts with another ball.
There's nothing you need to solve because definitions of words are subjective social constructs that are neither correct or incorrect. Definitions are axioms.
You have chosen to define the word "you" to require continuity, under some rubric. By that definition, a copy of you isn't really you. That's correct under your axiom, but it is incorrect under other axioms.
The functionalists I am trying to channel in this conversation have a different subjectively chosen definition of that same word, that is internally coherent assuming functionalism is a true description of the world.
You may wish to argue that their definition/axiom lacks utility, but that's subjective and cannot breach the boundary into a claim about objective correctness (logical deductions) under the axiom.
> You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself.
This sounds like solipsism not dualism vs. monism. In non-solipsistic monism, social constructs can exist outside of a collection of minds, because other minds also exist.
Sorry, perhaps I just don't know what "monism" truly means, I admit my ignorance, but if we just limit ourselves to the mind-body problem, I just meant that a dualist position considers the mind as separate from the body, and monism rejects that.
The functionalist point of view you propose doesn't seem to be to be useful at all in this context. Let's backtrack. The original example I provided you when you asked about whether there can be somebody proposing monism and at the same time holding dualist positions was asking:
"If I do mind uploading, do I die?"
You can be creative in redefining what the word "I" means, which is what you engaged with, but when push comes to shove and I do the actual mind uploading, then the self that experienced my qualia since birth will irreparably stop experiencing qualia (aka: dying) and be replaced by another self. You're free to call that self as if it was me, and be all happy it can do the same things I could do, but that's not gonna change the fact that my previous self (the only "I" that matters to me) died.
Would you step in the Star Trek teleporter knowing that you will die, and think you haven't died just because you have been replaced by a different being that is functionally equivalent to you? I sure as hell will never do it.
I pretty much agree with your position. The thought occurs to me, though, that via this same definition we die every time we go to sleep or are out under anesthesia. Maybe even every moment is a tiny death and rebirth. The real difference between these events and being "teleported" is that you do them without fear (maybe some fear for anesthesia) and without being any worse off for the lack of continuity.
As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas:
- there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
- destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern
And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
> If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
This is exactly what don't know, and is interesting to explore.
> there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time? It seems possible for two separate consciousness to have the same memories and be identical in all respects, and yet still not be the same.
To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.
> So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time?
There’d be two Mes – two instantiations of the Me pattern co-occurring. And that would likely be confusing for both of us!
> To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.
Exactly! If we suspend a Docker image, transfer it to a new compatible host machine, and fire it up, we consider it a resumption of the same process (pattern) in a different instance.
Likewise, say we found a mathematical function that would compute the entire state of that Docker image at that moment, and then wiped the image – such that there was no current physical instantiation of it anywhere, on any machine – and subsequently used the function to regenerate it bit for bit.
A dualist would say there’s something fundamentally different about the human analogue of that; that the Mind has a separate existence Elsewhere – and not just in the mathematical sense of patterns not requiring instantiation to still be patterns, since that would apply to all patterns, Minds or not.
You're making a fundimental mistake here on understanding substrates.
If I take a hard drive an copy it, is it the same hard drive? Well, no, we'd both agree they are two different hard drives, that's pretty easy to see.
But what if we are executing data off the hard drive. Initially it would operate as if it were the same, the data on the hard drive would have zero ability or knowledge that it was copied. As the execution continued in two different places in physical reality the state of the hard drives would change.
Coming back to people, you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level. Cells die, new ones are created, organs spurt out chemicals in varying amounts that alter your mental state, you 'remember' memories and by doing so rewrite them, new information enters from your senses and changes the physical makeup of the structure of our brain via re-enforcement/de-enforcement. Simply put this idea of you is an ethereal moving target. Copying that doesn't change it, each one of them will still think they are the you that has lived up till this point. When looking at both, you'll see their lives diverge, but unless they learn about each other, each you will never know that's the case.
> you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level.
And yet there is a sense of continuity. Are you saying the if your are killed and replaced by an immortal being with your same memories, thought patterns, and body, that'd be an acceptable continuation of you? You'd be ok with that as a form of attaining immortality?
> if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
If you have a son and you kill him, you haven't destroyed the concept of a son. You can always make a new son. If the son had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
Is that the same son? Do you not go to prison for murder?
If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?
> It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.
The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.
A true dualist believes that consciousness survives outside of a medium in this universe.
> If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?
If this is true, that the body dies every planck time and the mind survives it, then it simply means the dualist position is true.
> The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.
I'm sorry, but you're circling back to the first message I wrote. You are giving to information magical properties that it cannot have, because they lead to a contradiction. With the same information you can make multiple copies of me at the same time. But if you make two, the experiences of one do not get magically transmitted to the brain of the other. So those are two distinct selves, even if they are made with the exact same information. This clearly does not work. It's the same issue of mind uploading that I initially argued about.
> the experiences of one do not get magically transmitted to the brain of the other. So those are two distinct selves, even if they are made with the exact same information.
How's that a problem? They would both be distinct selves with a common past.
Ok, but then I fear you're either contradicting yourself, or addressing a point I didn't make.
Let me restate:
1. energy123 says that, if we completely annihilate the body of X and then we re-assemble it one planck time later, X is still the exact same self after the annihilation as they were before.
2. I reply: a monist must hold the position that X died with the annihilation and the recomposed being is a different self, Y, which just so happens to have the same memories as X. If you insist that the new being is still the same self X, you must assume that something that was not in the body survived the complete annihilation of the body and was put back in the body during the re-assembly.
3. You attempted to say that that something was the information needed to recompose the body. But now you're saying that actually we have produced two entirely different beings, A and B, both of whom believe to be X.
I 100% agree with you that this is what happened. But you cannot tell me in the same breath that X is still alive. That is a contradiction.
The ultimate challenge is always the same: assuming the technology to perfectly copy and simulate a brain exists, would you upload your mind and do you expect that it is you that awake inside the machine? If you answer "yes" you must concede you are a dualist. A monist can only answer "no". And, as I gather from this discussion, a functionalist would (i) answer "yes" after redefining what "you" means, (ii) mean "no" because as you just admitted we created two new beings, (iii) upload themselves and then die happy knowing that something else with their memories will live on.
(I realize you actually have not explicitly objected to this specific challenge yet, so maybe we fully agree and that's that)
[We are very much in speculative territory here of course, it is not a given that duplication or upload is possible at all for a human mind]
I would say that both A and B would claim to be X and have the "continuous"[1] experience to be X while agreeing that they are distinct persons. I think that the question of whether A or B, both, or neither is the true X, is not a scientific question, and as a philosophical question, a fairly empty one.
Regarding the challenge, I would expect that the consciousness would be forked: there is a "me" that would awake inside the machine and would be very glad to be alive, while the "me" outside would experience dying. This seems to go against the exclusiveness of the experience of being themselves, but assuming the existence of the magically perfect duplication, both would be valid experiences and again neither could make a claim about being the real me. I don't find this to be a contradiction.
An interesting question would be whether consciousness can be reunited after being forked.
But all of these scenarios have been explored extensively. Are you familiar with the Egan's "Permutation City"?
edit: I was not familiar with the functionalist position, but for the little I read, it seems to me that it is just a variant of the monist position. You could say I'm a functionalist I guess. Also I believe that we are fundamentally in agreement and we might just disagree with definitions of words.
[1] what does "continuous" even mean? Do one have a "continuous" experience of being yourself after a night's sleep? After anesthesia? After a coma?
> I would say that both A and B would claim to be X and have the "continuous"[1] experience to be X while agreeing that they are distinct persons. I think that the question of whether A or B, both, or neither is the true X, is not a scientific question, and as a philosophical question, a fairly empty one.
I agree that it is not a scientific question, but as with virtually all ethical questions not being scientific doesn't mean it's empty. They are, in fact, very fundamental. This specific question might be empty now, but it won't be when people start messing up with brains (e.g. advancements in Neuralink).
In the hypothetical scenario, it is the most important question in the whole world from X's perspective because it involves, you know, them dying. X cannot be either of A or B, because they are indistinguishable (any argument proving A=X also holds for B=X, but A!=B so they are wrong). Saying that X is both A and B requires dualism (A's and B's experiences somehow get beamed to a third consciousness). Only X's death and A and B independence (with the same memories) is compatible with a position that doesn't involve contradictions or souls of some kind.
> Regarding the challenge, I would expect that the consciousness would be forked: there is a "me" that would awake inside the machine and would be very glad to be alive, while the "me" outside would experience dying. This seems to go against the exclusiveness of the experience of being themselves, but assuming the existence of the magically perfect duplication, both would be valid experiences and again neither could make a claim about being the real me. I don't find this to be a contradiction.
Do you not find a contradiction in saying that you cannot make the claim of being the real you just because your brain was copied? Suppose that this copy happens without you falling asleep and without you noticing: have you stopped being you?
> But all of these scenarios have been explored extensively. Are you familiar with the Egan's "Permutation City"?
I read it a while ago. From what I remember, it is based on Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis, which I find being hopelessly confused about the nature of reality. Doesn't the novel assume the consequent (it starts from the assumption that you can do this kind of manipulation with consciousness)? I had similar issues with Accelerando.
> [1] what does "continuous" even mean? Do one have a "continuous" experience of being yourself after a night's sleep? After anesthesia? After a coma?
Sleep and anesthesia? Of course: your brain is still active even if it is not recording memories. Coma it depends: unless you're brain dead, still yes.
The ‘you’ that wakes up tomorrow is a whole separate entity from you right now, unless you want to concede that identity is a path variable and that whether the exact same physical/mental/emotional entity is you or not depends on how those particles got there.
Just because the brain doesn't form memories while you sleep, doesn't mean you have ceased to exist. You have probably forgot many things that have happened to you today: does that mean you didn't exist in those moments you forgot? Am I misunderstanding your point?
Are there people who say that digitizing one's conscious moves their mind? If I upload a file from my computer to to a server, the file still exists on my computer (until deleted). I've never thought that a mind upload would work any differently.
I think that many who talk about consciousness digitization handwave away what happens to their body/brain afterwards, but I don't necessarily think that means they think they'll move into the computer.
I think reasonably faithful clones would be mes. We could live my life, from multiple perspectives, some of them quite separate. It might be necessary to distinguish them with numbers, or claim that one of them has become too different to really count as a me, but those are details and semantic matters.
> copying any possible information to the most minute synapse
That's reducing an individual to, I assume, the sum of its neural network. So like considering everything else happening in the fleshy body matters to what a human is, nor how they relate to the rest of cosmos as such a body.
I think a lot of people interpret philosophers' arguments differently and it isn't always clear what a philosopher themselves truly believes.
For example Searle's Chinese room thought experiment... On the one hand you can easily construe it to imply that he believes there's something fundamentally special about human consciousness that cannot be reproduced by a machine. On the other hand you could interpret his perspective, which I think is more in line with his real perspective, as implyimg that replicating the human mind machine requires truly replicating it physically rather than approximating it and that it's misleading to imply that you can get there with an approximation ... Still I can see how this confuses dualists or could appear in line with their point of view even though it is arguably a nuanced take on the materiallist view
> you can easily construe it to imply that he believes there's something fundamentally special about human consciousness that cannot be reproduced by a machine. On the other hand you could interpret his perspective, which I think is more in line with his real perspective, as implyimg that replicating the human mind machine requires truly replicating it physically
I'm not sure I understand. If we must replicate a human brain physically in order to create something that has consciousness, then how is that not something 'special that cannot be reproduced by a machine'?
Your comment does serve the point I was making. Still there is a perspective that if you could artificially reproduce the human mind top to bottom, a truly perfect reproduction in other words, then you ought to be able to trigger an identical consciousness. In other words yes special type of machine is needed for the machine nevertheless not some special soul.
Of course the counterpoint and maybe the one you're making is that special machine ought to be simply called a soul machine and we could all agree it would be very difficult to reproduce it and it is intrinsically special... but maybe that's for the very specific form of Consciousness we have... but maybe there are other forms
That perspective is 'biological exceptionalism' and requires that there is something specific to biology that allows consciousness while precluding anything not biological. For that to be convincing there must be a mechanism and no one has proposed anything other than a soul for that.
This is where I would say that to defining that mechanism is the hard problem... it's a mischaracterization to call it the easy problem. But it doesn't require a soul
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?
Every guy saying that free will doesn't exist is arguing exactly this. Physical causality considered an obstacle to freedom implies that the conscious entity is somehow outside the physical world.
That's backwards. People saying that there's no free will because determinism is implying that human consciousness is outside the physical world. Actually that's what TFA is about and makes a great job explaining it.
My comment was responding to energy123 questioning there are philosophers that are both materialistic and consider human consciousness is "special". The moment you separate consciousness from all the physical processes that support it (and that's what negating "free" will arguing that it's caused by material forces) you're placing it in a different "plane".
That's hardly an unheard-of position, there are many thinkers that fall for this.
That's strange, hard determinists are eliminativists, and eliminativists don't believe in consciousness, but I never saw them speaking about both at the same time.
In case you don't get it: you don't get to set the discussion terms. You can argue all you want yourself, but my point is already made. If you want a list, search for "hard incopatibilism" or "hard determinism" and you get it.
"might as well call God" is a bizzare conclusion for the latter though because "God" is far from an abstract concept - it's probably one of the most heavily loaded terms in every human culture.
Overloaded, I’d say. There are many different definitions, most incompatible with each other, such that the term is almost meaningless without extensive preceding discussion.
No, there is at least one other option, which is that consciousness [1] is a phenomenon that we can't replicate in non-biological brains [2], but from which the existence of a "God"-like being, as the term is understood by major religions, still doesn't follow.
[1] Or "qualia", to be precise.
[2] For example, the existence of qualia might require certain carbon-based structures which aren't present in silicon-based devices.
There is nothing that we know of in carbon based structures that violates universal causality, even in quantum scales where causality becomes more vague it is replaced by a measurable randomness.
So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening? Writing data on a storage medium? What about a roomba vacuuming a floor?
> Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening?
Yeah, of course.
What I'm addressing is "if we turn 100% of everything about neurons into numbers we can do calculations on those numbers and it's the same as that stuff actually happening with real neurons". Which is entirely wrong. A trajectory calculation isn't different from actually firing a projectile because it's not precise enough but because it's something else entirely.
Can descriptions of brains do consciousness? I don't know why we'd expect that they could. You can describe a fire in all the detail you like, and burn nothing.
Can electronic brains be conscious? I dunno. If I had to guess? Sky's-the-limit ignore-all-physical-and-temporal-constraints? Probably. Within the bounds of what humans will ever achieve? Maybe. I doubt they'd look as little-removed from tabulation machines as ours are, though. Like I definitely don't think you get there solving math problems. That would be surprisingly metaphysical.
A fire is something that happens externally and has observable actions. An internal state is not. Your thoughts may take a physical form but that form cannot be demonstrated. Unless you can show me telekinesis then you have only intuition. Why are you so certain that these intuitions are true?
Possibly metaphysical naturalism is wrong and supernatural things exist! And maybe thoughts (and/or the experience of consciousness) are among those supernatural things. That could be it. In which case sure, maybe solving math problems can create consciousness (why not?).
Do I think supernatural things like thoughts not being represented in physical reality exist? I defer to Russell's Teapot on this one and lean toward "no". If they do, then attempting to reason about anything gets pretty iffy anyway. Who knows what might exist or be true, in that case!
There is nothing that says that if thoughts are not made in brains they must be supernatural. You are making conclusions not based on evidence or argument.
I think you're conflating qualia with free will. These are very different concepts, and the experience of qualia has nothing at all to do with "violating causality".
> So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
As long as we have practically no idea how qualia arise, or even what exactly they are, your claim has no base to stand on.
I've been debating consciousness for many years as a layman, not an expert, but a layman who has read a lot of scholarly books on the subject.
In my experience, the majority of people who take the position that consciousness is something special to humans are nearly always coming from a religious background and viewing it through a religious lens. This makes sense, as if we reduce consciousness to physical reality, then the implications to free will become quite clear and devastating against it being a thing. This essentially destroys a lot of religions which are fundamentally based on humans having free will. Detailing the full chain of thought would take quite a bit of space, but the quick answer is that the ability for free will is hiding from us if it actually exists. Many people reach for quantum mechanics and its source of randomness as room for consciousness to exist that gives us free will, but the problem there is neurologically we operate at a far larger size than quantum effects would be measured. There's also no way to control the outcome of quantum events as it is truly random. So one would need to show how our neurological physiological minds could manipulate quantum space, which of course they can't. At the level our brains operate, we are well into deterministic physics.
While they absolutely deny this, the impression I get is that they are making a god of the gaps argument. Consciousness is something we don't understand yet, and can't even really define well as many people here have pointed out, so to them it doesn't feel like a classic God of the gaps.
For that reason, I find your comment above quite interesting. I personally find philosophy to be a fascinating and useful tool, but it definitely has a tendency to mislead, especially in areas where hard science can inform. Of course there's an entire debate around the philosophy of science itself, but that feels off topic here.
The thing that Rovelli is arguing against (well -- not really arguing -- more, "stubbornly sticking his head in the sand" against) is not really a position that is held by a bunch of religious people trying to create a weird "god-of-the-gaps style argument" as you characterize.
Like, that may have been your experience -- not contradicting you on who you've met and what you've talked with them about etc. ... but what he's talking about is a position argued by a lot of philosophers and including those who have no particular metaphysical commitments.
Rovelli here does a lot worse than Dennett's "quining qualia" paper where he tries to get people to be really specific about "what are these qualia like" and finds that they're so hard to embed in language, to symbolically represent, that maybe he-as-philosopher can discharge his duty to be engaged-with-phenomenalism by just kinda sticking his fingers in his ears and saying "what phenomena?! you haven't clearly defined the phenomena!"
But someone like Searle who has no bones about himself being an atheist and, while he didn't like to describe himself as "materialist" because of the history of that term[1] he would acknowledge that it was close to his basic position. And I want to be clear that he views consciousness as a scientifically solvable problem. He doesn't think we've solved it yet but he thinks the philosophical problems are ultimately tractable and if we solve them and get out of the way you'll get a fine science of consciousness someday. Nevertheless, he's very clear about agreeing with the fact that these qualia are important to the discussion and he would laugh at you for trying to leave them out -- he'd say, now you're trying to make a science of consciousness, by leaving out the consciousness. And of course you don't think there's any science left to be done at that point and "well, it's all deterministic physics, we understand it all, nothing to be done here."
So like if you want to read his take, a book is Freedom and Neurobiology, but for this comment I just want to point out that him simultaneously believing that there are phenomena of experience, and believing that there is no God, are two beliefs that are not uncommon for philosophers to hold together.
1. There's kind of no way to very briefly make the point since you kind of need to be hit in the face with a sledgehammer about it. So Searle views Descartes as erroneously trying to package up the world into two realms -- mind properties or substances on this hand, physical properties or substances on that hand -- and insisting that they can't overlap. And then Descartes' legacy was that you had camps which said 'those mind properties aren't real, only the physical properties' (materialism) and 'those physical properties aren't real, only the mind properties' (idealism) but coming from the same mistaken beginning. Searle would point to the score of a football game and say 'now is that physical because it's represented in terms of lights on the scoreboard, or is it mental because it's represented in terms of the thoughts of the referee, what about all the people on both sides who think the referee made the wrong decision -- something which, remember, by definition the actual referee cannot do; they are the final authority -- and they believe that the score is "really" some other number distinct from the score represented on the lights; and what if none of these people are "right" in the sense that if a perfectly perceptive model referee could have made all of the scoring calls in the game according to the rules on the books, then the score would have actually included an event that everyone watching thought was unambiguously non-scoring but actually it was completely legal and valid. But here I-the-philosopher come into all of this absolute mess and I want to carve out a clear boolean yes/no classification, mental vs physical, material vs ideal, which is it -- the problem, was not that I counted to two distinct possibilities, but that I thought counting those possibilities was a meaningful way to decompose the problem in the first place.
So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness.
To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise.
I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is.
I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place.
And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.
If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?
If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"
From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).
For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.
I find your position quite interesting but I feel like it still suffers the same issues I've seen in other "mind-first" arguments (I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself), such as p-zombies (how do you know other people are conscious as well?) and the origin of it.
I think both positions (physicalism vs mind-first) suffer from the same issue that is to reach the bottom of it all, except physicalism seems to have reached further. In the past we wondered what the world was made of and we observed it, coming to the idea of elements such as Aether, then later developed chemistry then physics, reaching layer below layer of rules that interact to the emergence of the layer above. Lots of rules that we can (apparently) reproduce and verify, cells emerging from molecules interacting emerging from atoms interacting emerging from quantum particles emeging from quantum fields... Maybe emerging from strings or a simulation? We don't know. It seems to me we also don't know how to tell we've finally reached the bottom of it, but what we have sounds pretty solid.
In a mind-first view it seems that this stack is upside-down, with a consciousness giving rise to a brain in a world with its objects which are made of molecules coming to existence upon observation (that is, chemistry would be a top layer after conscience further inspecting it), which are ruled by physics etc. Except this cause-and-consequence relation is not clear to me. Like you said:
> To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge.
How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie? Do I give rise to the world, or do you? Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way? And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us? (not throwing shade btw, I'm just interested in your point of view).
To me physicalism looks like a flame graph with physics at the bottom and minds at the tips of the flames, with less simpler things giving rise to multiple complex things, while mind-first looks like an icicle graph (assuming multiple consciousness) or an upside down triangle (assuming a single consciousness), with physics at the top (all "graphs" putting cause at the bottom and effect on top).
> I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself
Don't worry. You're in good company.
> How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie?
It's impossible for me to say that you are conscious. I only watch my own movie. In that movie, others appear to be watching their own movies. Their movies exist only as content in my movie. I cannot say for certain whether or not there really are conscious experiences like mine occurring. All I can say is that I am being given the impression that there are.
> Do I give rise to the world, or do you?
I do. Or at least, something impresses the world upon me. You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me, and, disappointingly (for me at least), there's no way to confirm it through this movie that I am watching. I am left having to "make up my own mind" about whether or not I choose to believe you are anything but a p-zombie extra, in what is (as far as I can see of the conscious spectrum I am able to perceive), a single screen, single reel movie. But I'm just guessing, hoping, wishing, because that's all I can do from this limited vantage point.
> Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way?
It's a cute idea. Design by committee. Books/predictions of the future seem to have this annoying property of becoming true, lending to this idea. Who knows?
> And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us?
What else am I supposed to do? If you have unimaginable wealth, infinite time and the ability to conjure anything into existence, exactly what are you to do? Perhaps you might dream up what having the opposite of your existence might be, and set about convincing yourself that you are a time-ful, perishable human-being bound by physics and inevitably limited by the finite energy available in the universe, stumped by entropy. Perhaps you even role play as the puppets on the ends of your fingers, while convincing yourself that they're just as real as you are, so you can feel what it's like not to be the majesty of your own lonely empire. What else am I supposed to do, than to go along with it? If we destroy the illusion, we're back to square one - and then what?
Lots of comments here and lots of opinions! the Consciousness conference has been discussing this since 1994, will be in San Diego this October. It is where the actual Hard problem was first proposed by Chalmers, Rovelli was at the conference a few years ago too. https://cs2026.org/ It's a great conference, with lots of interesting people and conversations. Highly recommend
I see, thanks for your reply. I'm still with physicalism so far, but I see your point. It gave me more room for thought.
> You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me.
I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized *YOU* must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon *ME*. Now I'm fine again. Thanks to myself for giving rise to such an interesting p-zombie like you.
> I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized YOU must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon ME.
Exactly. Now that we’re both aligned on having unreconcilable claims to being the one-true-consciousness, we can write competing holy books and argue about promised lands, and all that good jazz.
You see, once we begin playing the game, a whole host of worldly distractions crop up to occupy us. Wait until I show you this game called “having a career”, or “chasing wealth”. Spoiler alert - your body dies at the end, and you get to keep none of it, but it was fun, or at least it was supposed to be.
If I mess with the voltages of a CPU board, it can mess up the software. Do you conclude from that that software is electrical? You should conclude that it runs on an electrical substrate, but not that the software itself is electrical.
> Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away."
From such a perspective, the article's byline, "Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe.
But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains.
Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.
Qualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a different medium in a different way than us leads to confusion.
That’s valid also from the point of view that pain is a key signal to avoid injury. I am not sure it’s the best example of qualia and it could be simulated by self preservation signals (e.g. the touch sensor on a Roomba). The extension of pain (in Hofstadter sense) is probably more appropriate as qualia (e.g. the pain of losing someone you love).
I really should go back to finish reading GEB. I loved the beginning, but for some reason I dropped off somewhere in the first 1/3. I'm not sure I fully get the point, although I have a vague sense I agree with you. :)
What about if the robot's RNG is seeded with a particular number, that we did not write down... And we can destroy it's memory hardware containing the seed, 'killing' it.
Even if the memory hardware is replaced, it won't be the 'same' individual, no? Would an aversion to 'death' be rational in it?
Looking around at evidence, only the ones with somewhat cute eyes can qualify for empathy. Bad luck if someone is a grass or an amoeba, but machines will be just fine.
Philosophers may squint at the suffering-in-itself long and hard, but I doubt they'll affect waking/extinguishing empathy of the masses. Exploring the suffering that fails our empathy (e.g. suffering of a wheat plant harvested) seems a highly abstract task; more abstract than high mathematics.
Pain and suffering. In fact just suffering, right? We don't care about signals resulting from adverse conditions. We care about ideas. So we don't really care about suffering, as such, but about the harm it does to ideas and idea creation. Then consciousness is having an idea about what's going on.
Before that, you need to answer whether a machine can even feel pain or not, not whether it is telling the truth or not. We feel pain because we have a nervous system that reacts to the physical world and it is an indicator that something is wrong. That doesn't translate at all to any machine I know of. If we end up building a nervous system and a basic functioning brain and hook it up to a machine then sure its an interesting question
No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.
You really don't need a concept of a colour or a shape, and it's a fairly typical academic fallacy to assume you do.
That's directly confusing experience with categorisation and labelling of experience.
If you touch a very hot object your nervous system will pull your hand away before your brain registers what's happening. The qualia of pain are pre-conceptual, preverbal, and precranial, and your consciousness only catches up later.
Surely this implies exactly the opposite - you don't register the pain, don't feel it, until after you pull your hand away. It's a reflex action in response to heat. Qualia require a brain to process sensory input.
reflexes have nothing to do with qualia. you can differentiate objects without knowing what is a triangle and what is a square, or that this colour is red. but I think qualia as commonly understood involve concepts in a way that means they are not immediate experience in some kind of cartesian sense. We speak of them as categorised. certainly the way people commonly speak about them they are very carefree about invoking "the qualia of a horse" or some other specific object.
Not fundamental to existence but fundamental to consciousness.
Theoretically the person sitting next to you could be a zombie, no qualia, the lights are off, he's just having a conversation with you with nothing going on behind the scenes. And there's no way to tell, except that it's reasonable to extrapolate that since you feel something, he probably does too.
My argument is that qualia are actually cognitive artefacts bound up with language, not the base elements of "what it is to be" you or me, which is how people often speak of them, so the p-zombie concept is a bit nonsensical to me.
This is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.
Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”.
Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is not special. I /do/ believe that the human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotional and memory is special. My robot cannot write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But now we are talking a matter of degrees, not qualia.
Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.
I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust.
Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”.
If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?
This - as usual - confuses behaviour with consciousness.
Humans bonded with ELIZA, but that didn't mean ELIZA was conscious. ELIZA was an automaton that mimicked certain behaviours that triggered certain emotional responses.
If you scale that up you get an LLM and/or a social media bot farm, both of which are much better at triggering responses than ELIZA was.
It's now trivial to create an automaton that play acts various moods, and if you give it a memory it will mimic relationship-related conversations.
But it doesn't need to be conscious to do that, and the parsimonious Occam's razor explanation of its behaviours is that it's more economic and credible to assume it's still an automaton with no self-awareness.
Otherwise you have to argue that much simpler systems, like PID thermostats, and pretty much every computer system, are conscious because they "experience" qualia that represent a varying state of the world, with memory.
The sneakiness in your example is choosing an example which mimics emotional bonding. Rhetorically that makes it look like a hypothetical robot is acting emotionally, which is one of the covert signals us mammals tend to associate with consciousness.
But the criticism stands. Feigning emotions well enough to fool other mammals isn't at all the same as experiencing them.
To really experience emotions you need a self-image quale which includes an emotional component. And since subjective experiences have no objective element that can be measured, we can never say for sure whether anything or anyone else actually is conscious.
We assume we are, because we experience it, and we assume others are by implication.
But there's a point where that assumption stops being reasonable, and that's where your cat robot exists.
I guess where I am coming from with my cat robot is that I believe behavior begets consciousness. Whatever behavior is happening, that must mean some internal representation of the world is driving it. Robots will never have human emotions but I believe that some robots /already/ have their own goals and internal representations of reality and models of themselves worth considering on their own terms. A roomba must know where it is in space. Just because it doesn’t feel ennui as well is hardly a shortcoming.
Our brains are very complicated models of the world that attempt to mirror reality. That is what it means to be able to navigate physical space and provide for ourselves in nature. Our nature includes an incredibly complex social sphere and we have emotions to help us better navigate it. Animals we domesticate are clued into human emotions, others are not. I bet slugs have less of a sense of “I” but they still have some kind of an experience. I bet a tree has even less. It’s a sliding scale—each organism has just enough awareness for the task at hand.
The fact that we have a large emotional catalogue and a (some could say overly developed) sense of self is a curiosity more than a hard problem. It’s “I am a strange loop”, not “I am an ineffable indescribable inscrutable untouchable loop”.
How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.
at the risk of jumping the shark into full-on “woo woo”: what does it mean to “create ideas”? are ideas created or revealed? if ideas are created where do they come from? if ideas are revealed, then does that necessarily imply a determinism? if the robot devises a novel solution to a technical problem, isn’t that an idea? or is the robot’s solution actually the unavoidable result of the entire history of analytical thought? if the novel solution isn’t the creation of an idea, then what makes an idea an idea? if Michelangelo’s David was sculpted by an automaton, is it less beautiful? If so, why? If not, why not?
no you didn’t kill it, it was never alive. the same way my dishwasher or vacuum aren’t killed when they break and i replace them. even if the robot “remembers”, who cares? when i bin my phone did i kill siri because she sometimes remembered things for me?
Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me.
My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.
What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.
More than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc.
You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited?
On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response.
Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.
What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment.
With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because it’s hard to measure anything; even if you trust what they may be claiming, how do you know how they experience them.
One perspective is that some may not feel emotions because emotions did not successfully manipulate their environment in childhood. So why develop them. If anger worked to manipulate your environment, you may become angry easily later on, in an attempt to replicate the successful manipulation. If grief worked, you will experience grief. If “coldness” worked, you will react coldly. If “empathy” worked to manipulate to your benefit, you will be tuned to try empathy.
“Normal” only shows what typically works in a society, not what is “healthy” or “natural”. We’re all highly adaptive individuals, learning how to survive in whatever environment we grow up in. We all become master manipulators, because that’s how we survive. Some forms of manipulation may be more socially accepted than others, within a given culture, others less so. Sociopathy doesn’t exist outside of a culture’s value system. It is a disorder only once you define what order is. In a society of narcissists, the empath is the sick one.
We really only have our own experience, and the words of others to compare it to.
Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual?
It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.
To give one perspective of many, Marshall Rosenberg spent his life researching emotions and violence, and from his point of view, anything you do can ultimately be traced back to your own goals. In his view, it’s more useful to allow this idea and explore it, without judging it as negative. Survival/benefit of the group can be your very own personal (long term) goal. For example, a typical tradeoff is your (very own) need to belong, since your survival literally depends on it. No need to see it as either-or; to resolve the inner conflict, one can own both sides of the argument.
Making your emotional state transparent to the group can in that sense again benefit yourself (and the group), but to think that is always the case and that everybody will comply (or even be able to) will lead to disappointment (disillusion), out of principle, since you are installing a moral rule that doesn’t match reality. The verbal sharing of your emotions might successfully (and openly) manipulate the group to include your own goals, and/or the actions you take (taking your emotions into account or not) might.
Note how I am using “manipulation” in its original/neutral form, which means “to move”/influence. Typically, we use the word to convey a judgement - some forms of attempted influence we see as good/acceptable, others we see as negative. But that judgement is based on our own values, and somebody else will have different values. We can see this in how our cultures judge lying (and how that judgement changes over time). Is not sharing all you know a lie (of omission)? Is it acceptable to not always share all your thoughts? In many cultures (families), it is deemed offensive to tell certain truths; there is an expectation to lie! Once there is an expectation, it is not considered manipulation. In some hacker communities, sharing your emotions is considered offensive and an unacceptable attempt of manipulation!
A simplistic perspective which you can check for yourself and compare with others: Anger means you experience something you judge as wrong and possible to influence. Sadness means you experience something you judge as wrong but outside of your sphere of influence. Fear is a judgement of danger. The judgement is real; the situation itself may not actually be dangerous (today). It’s a signal, but it’s not based on reality/facts but your own judgement of it. You can tune the signal and thus your experience by investigating and changing your judgments - without sacrificing any of your needs or goals. Emotional reprogramming takes time, but it’s not outside of your control, nor is it driven by some higher truth than your own judgments, based on your prior experiences.
Bingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.
even saying that our senses are "tied" together with/into our memory and emotions is expressing a dualism. that's the challenge and that's the gap to leap.
>So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that)
whether or not matter was continuous and could be divided forever by repeated halving, or if there were "atoms" was a philosophical puzzle more than 2000 years before "we" found the answer. That it was "atoms" was one of the 2000y.o. hypotheses. same with dividing time and distance. It's ridiculous to dispense with good hypotheses.
we know that consciousness exists before any other thing. We don't even know that the so-called physical world actually exists, only that we we consciously think we observe it, but we can wake up believing dreams or psychotic imaginings. How can you enjoy watching The Matrix, and yet walk out so smug about you knowing the answers before they've even been found?
I personally do not believe in the material universe. All of our theories and descriptions and empricism about it proves that it is mathematical only. All that exists can be (and is) explained by math (and perhaps some computer science in the sense that there is state, and math doesn't require state) I call upon rational STEM types to reject the material universe the way you wish to dispense with consciousness. Consciousness, like math, is immaterial, and we have more evidence for immateriality than we do for materiality. When our hypothetical hands touch each other in a handshake, you would even point out that on a quantum level, nothing touches anything.
My pet theory is that I don't think all humans are conscious (in other words, some perfectly cognitively normal-seeming people are just automatons without an inner experience, like plants or LLMs). Mainly motivated by the fact that a lot of people report not having an inner monologue, and other little hints that I've picked up over the years.
The "inner experience" might be totally optional to fitness, like green eyes.
Not really. Solipsism means only you're (certain to be) conscious. It's an epistemological thing.
I'm making a purely biological conjecture motivated by some observations. I believe some humans are definitely conscious (including of course myself, if you take my word), but that some might not be. The conscious experience may just be a phenotypic variant, like having blue eyes, eidetic memory or dyslexia.
Consider also some recent research that shows that our consciousness is only observational and gives us an illusion of control. The actual decision-making is done a split second before we perceive to have done it. That means it might be totally optional.
Consider also that we know some living creatures to definitely not have a mind for example plants, and some creatures deemed highly unlikely to have a mind such as fish and insects. And yet they "operate" just fine. Somewhere in ecology there's a boundary and yet it's not apparent just by observing behavior.
I have a corollary hypothesis which is that only young people are actually conscious. One day you go to bed and your mind never wakes up, but your body keeps on living the automaton till you actually die.
(also if you're wondering, I don't think the boundary is along racial lines)
The relation of consciousness and being in control is interesting. I'm not so sure about the decision-making experiments - maybe they just measured latency in the communication layers?
I think being in control is a rare thing. It's hard to change even the smallest habits - the default result is failure - but sometimes it's possible. The only thing that seems to work reliably is subconscious manipulation of people using propaganda and repetition. That's for me the main reason to believe that at least 90% of people don't have active functional consciousness in their loop.
Decisions of Plants work in different time scales, so they're hard to perceive, but I don't think they work that different - it all boils down to maximising some gain-function using some chemistry for memory.
Your theory about going automaton is interesting. I've seen intelligent persons that communicated very well going "crazy". (I think women do that a lot) - like a looping LLM. And later they came back to normal - but since then I have some doubts about their internal state...
>Consider also some recent research that shows that our consciousness is only observational and gives us an illusion of control.
That's fine. Observation is the function of consciousness, and there's nothing wrong with consciousness being observational, it's expected to be observational, because observation is what consciousness does. Control is done by the decision making process, not by consciousness.
> I have a corollary hypothesis which is that only young people are actually conscious. One day you go to bed and your mind never wakes up, but your body keeps on living the automaton till you actually die.
Thank you for a new existential fear unlocked. Why do you believe this?
One step further is to ask how conscious your mind actually is. There is a lot happening on autopilot - and everybody usually checks out for a few hours at night. Maybe consciousness is a rare temporary thing.
I think evidence suggests that humans aren't conscious most of the time. So it wouldn't surprise me if 95% of the time people are just stochastic parrots. But maybe that number is even close or equal to 100%.
Intellectually a lot of humans perform worse than LLMs and a lot of people (most of them) are completely unable to process abstract concepts and basic logic at all. Can those people truly be called conscious? Is consciousness worth something without the ability to reason?
If I knew precisely which definition of consciousness you are testing against your own experience I would understand your point and I would like to. Can you say what it is that you are sure you are not?
That's like saying that "water" is a philosophical invention and so if you accept that water is a thing then you've put it into a special category.
You can derive consciousness as a somewhat obvious conclusion of empirical study of behaviors, we have multiple fields of study that lay out cognitive function and criteria.
> If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.
How can you say that?
It would be very interesting to know how to build robots that love their work, versus ones that hate their work. Not because it makes a practical difference to us, but because of ethics.
I'm mystified why you think there is anything to accept about consciousness. Or are you purely talking about it being a "thing"? Yes, that's relevant to how Rovelli is treating dualism (as a made-up, unevidenced claim).
I'm always mystified why consciousness is so often claimed to be undefinable.
>Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
There is no such need. If we view the idea of consciousness as a childish delusion and suppose that no one has consciousness at all... that we are animals with behaviors that explain all the actions we take, we can model the world just as effectively as if we are the vessels of marvelous souls that are inexplicable and magical.
Theology was the traditional venue of these absurdist arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But at least they had an excuse, they never pretended that it was science or that the debate was grounded in anything other than religious belief.
Stephen Wolfram is fascinated with his discovery of computation at the heart of the universe. Life itself may be like that, emerging then noticing itself and that it is alive - has the property of life. Then when it's governed by a "soul", or perhaps better said, constrained by it, then our awareness is of what we can't otherwise see, the laws that govern us, inevitably from a 5th dimension, as we stand in the shadow of Plato's cave. When we discover "we are" we are realized and grateful, and our life ends up being worship. Then we witness the greater life around us follow a bedding of creation, a call to become one from the experience we are one. When we become we'll see Jesus' loving eyes that first saw, and called for by showing himself, what we'll then see.
> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.
It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.
The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".
> a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
a) it is wrong to say definitively that it is untrue. there is no acid test for the existence of God nor of spirit.
b) religious and spiritual traditions have wrangled with this very question for at least 3000 years. it is not a 'scientific curiosity'. It is one of the most fundamental questions of human experience.
a) there's an infinite amount of things that can't be proven/disproven and this includes all sorts of human imagination. We should focus on things that we can actually prove or disprove. The source of a god is human imagination, so you can't even prove that any god exists because you just don't know what it is (iow what exactly you're trying to prove).
b) This being a fundamental question proves scientific curiosity. We wouldn't have achieved current technology if not for scientific curiosity.
My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be.
I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test, but I found it satisfactory enough when I heard about the hard problem of consciousness. My main argument for it is not an attack, it's simply Hanlon's razor. If you find a simpler explanation that doesn't demand new understanding, I will listen to it, if you do not, you have to show me the simplest solution is wrong, and I'll go to the second simplest.
By saying it’s simulated you don’t make a simplification. What does it simulate? What are the mechanics of simulation and is it substrate specific or independent? Can a computer simulate these qualia? It’s easy to say something is simple but harder to prove it is any simpler than the alternatives.
This is the kind of religious thinking the GP is talking about. What other frontier of science do people claim will never be solved, except the existence of a god? Why are you so sure it cannot be touched?
No I don't think the GP was talking about that, and that's the problem. The hard problem by definition is a frontier that science will never be able to solve. So I can be sure because that's how it's described in the Chalmers paper introducing the hard problem. The hard problem is Chalmers proof that physicalism could never be true.
Like I said if science can explain something then that by definition is an easy problem.
> The hard problem is Chalmers proof that physicalism could never be true.
This is not fully correct. His position has been "naturalistic dualism", that is, consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality alongside physical properties. In other words, he thinks that physicalism can explain consciousness, but not in the way standard materialists claim. He says that consciousness does not automatically emerge after a certain number of synaptic connections in the brain. There may be another fundamental, physical requirement for it to occur.
I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it.
Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.
It comes up because people are mistakenly conflating consciousness with moral personhood.
People want to be talking about whether AI suffers in a morally meaningful way. In non-human animals this debate is often centered around the question of whether the animal has conscious experience, because there's little doubt that much of the emotional and experiential systems are shared.
The analogy goes wrong with AI, where definitions of "consciousness" would seem to apply in the sense that the model clearly has a category for itself in its world model, feeds back on its output, etc. However the analogy between how it works and anything we would recognise as emotion or suffering is extremely strained.
The solution is to just focus on ths question of what we really mean when we think of morally relevant suffering. It's a much clearer question than "consciousness" and it sidesteps the problem.
Also consider the possibility that the people who argue against the hard problem of consciousness may, in fact, not be conscious. How could they ever understand the nuance of conscious experience and how it is fundamentally different from 'structure and function' if they don't have it? To them there is only the easy problem of consciousness.
And, of course, if they disagree with me about this and want to claim that they are, in fact, conscious, I'm not sure they can do that because... well the hard problem of consciousness.
Do you have a verdict for whether science can ever explain the origin of the universe? I can only doubt it could answer the actual hard problem of consciousness. I find most people, especially on here, to be blindly "science-optimistic"
> The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function
Great, I'm a physicalist so uhhhh I reject this lol. I think you can define cognitive capabilities and phenomenal experience by reducing to structure and function. You're right that it's simple though.
I'm a physicalist as well. A commitment to physicalism doesn't force you to reject the hard problem. The hard problem doesn't entail that phenomenal consciousness is not grounded in physical structure and function. The hard problem is about what is needed to explain consciousness. Science typically involves defining some phenomena precisely in terms of structure and function, then giving a precise story about how some observed behavior captures the structure and function that defines the phenomena under question. For example, we define temperature by the height of mercury in a thermometer, then we mathematically derive the height of mercury given the average speed of molecules in the environment. Thus we successfully reduce temperature to average kinetic energy of molecules.
But the process of reduction starts by precisely defining the phenomena in terms of structure and function. If we are unable to give a precise definition that uncontroversially captures the target phenomena, then we cannot in principle give a scientific explanation of said phenomena. This is where we stand with consciousness. There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness. But this is an explanatory limit only. It doesn't necessitate some non-physical phenomena is involved. What we need are new concepts that can connect the phenomenal to the physical. But conceptual innovation is not something you get from more measurements and more data. This is what makes consciousness a philosophical problem.
I was rejecting your definition of the hard problem as it contains an assertion that a physicalist wouldn't accept.
Yes, reduction would be one very viable strategy. It doesn't require precisely defining the phenomenon in order for me to just say that it reduces based on the fact that reduction has been a successful approach for everything else in cognition.
> There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness.
Yeah this is what I reject. Why do you say that this is in principle a barrier? You're discussing it as an explanatory gap, not in principle.
The claim that you can't describe consciousness in principle is widely accepted by participants on all sides of the debate. Can you tell me what experiencing red is like to you such that someone who is red/green color blind will know what its like? Most people think not. Rather, phenomenal consciousness is something you must experience yourself. It just isn't something that one can learn descriptively. This is a premise of the hard problem and also the Mary's room thought experiment. People who reject the premise usually just reject phenomenal consciousness completely.
Interpreting the hard problem as an epistemological problem looks trivial. There's nothing extraordinary in ignorance. The way you describe it implies we have the hard problem of ultrasound too.
I think it's ontological problem: structural description ontologically misses unobservable ideal substance, so the challenge is to provide a principle that would make ideal substance unnecessary. If you don't think too much, ideal substance ontologically solves consciousness, and it's not obvious how mere structural description can live without it.
I feel like this is directly addressed in the article, right? I think you are coming from the same direction, but Rovelli goes a bit further and says "how can we affirm that there is gonna be a knowledge gap when we just aren't at that level yet?". How can you say that we won't be able to describe, explain and predict your exact internal mental state from a brain scan?
To draw a parallel with physics, about which we as a society (and me as an individual) know a lot more, we are gonna define mathematical objects and laws whose behavior maps well to certain subsystems of the brain that we ourselves have defined. Physics had it easy in this sense: it turned out to be remarkably simple to describe the universe to a great degree of precision. Still, we all recognize that the physics mapping we have to this day isn't perfect; and it's even possible that it will never be perfect. It may be fundamentally impossible to reduce some systems to simpler mathematical objects which we can reason about. It does seem to be generally possible, however, to find a reasonable approximation. This again is what I think Rovelli's point is about: science is the process of finding a good approximation which has predictive power. And what is there in the brain that's fundamentally so different and that we're never gonna be able to explain? Why does everyone keep insisting that consciousness is special?
I do agree that that only when (if) we do get the accurate mathematical description, then we're gonna be able to properly discuss the hard problem. But my hunch is that once we do have all the tools it will just dissipate from scientific discussion, similarly to how the measurement problem in quantum mechanics is slowly undergoing the same transition from "this is a fundamental problem" to "we were just asking an invalid question due to misunderstanding and old ways of thinking". Obviously I have no proof of this beyond intuition, but I more or less agree with every sentence of this article, and that shapes my intuition.
The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove?
> A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well.
And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this?
Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.
Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union.
Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).
> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience
You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways:
1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
2) "We have solved the easy problem of consciousness, we know exactly how the brain works" implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain. This, again, is not an assumption that's supported by anything than wishful thinking.
And, further:
> or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).
"Some math can produce consciousness" does not mean "ALL math HAS to produce consciousness" does not mean "EVERY PART of all math has to BE conscious."
Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.
Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's?
If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no.
And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees.
I'm not sure what to draw from this. But whenever I read something that speculates on the nature of consciousness, I always try to look at it through the lens of the human-to-tube worm scale. Does the argument survive a continuum, or does it depend on human consciousness being fundamentally unique in some way?
I guess you could argue that even though there's a continuum, consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles. Sort of like how technically I feel Alpha Centauri's gravity, but effectively it's zero. So in that case, the argument only has to survive mammals to say corvids.
Did our ancestors that used the very first tools have consciousness? If they did, was the consciousness what helped them make the tools? Or was something else in their brains that helped in the tool making?
IMO consciousness is something that appears when you have enough "brain power" to spare, maybe as some side-effect of some evolutionary trait. I'm no expert and it's a very simplistic explanation, I know, but in general I tend to agree with the general idea exposed by Rovelli in the piece: consciousness is just a manifestation of the real world of which we are part, just one very complicated and that we are not able to understand (yet?).
The verb "chooses" here does a lot of the heavy lifting, and implies a consciusness that chooses.
It's making the answer circular and it means that we are just pre-filtering the possible answers for our preconceptions.
My cat is not "less conscious" because he's choosing to sleep all day.
Any action that can possibly have a simple explaination, it doesn't matter if it can also have a complex explaination, is immaterial.
A cat doing anything that can be explained by simple tropism doesn't prove or disprove anything, it's simply data of no value one way or the other.
The fact that you sleep and so does a cat does not prove that you are just a cat or that the cat is actually postulating about the inner life of other cats but just choosing not to ever write it's thoughts down. It's simply a silly trivial surface thing to even talk about.
I said brain power isn't interesting because it doesn't prove anything. There are things that we absolutely know are not conscious yet have a lot of brain power, ie countless pieces of simple deterministic software that we can explain all the way down to the atoms like a sewing machine.
Yes other animals have demonstrated brain power that exceeds some humans, or even all humans while they are young enough, if you just go by some sort of puzzle-solving abilities. The fact that you can figure out how to unscrew a jar lid, and so can an octopus, doesn't imply anything about the octopus being the same as a human in an octopus body.
Similarly observing something simpler exhibit some of the same outward behaviors you and every other human does also doesn't mean anything. Humans do a lot of very simple things. A human seeks food and comfort and avoids pain and damage. And so does a plant. Electric motors turn shafts, and so do humans. So you have to discount anything that's merely a commonality like that, including other things that seem more complex, and so seem like they are what makes us different. We do also have more simple brain power than most animals, and so it is like a correlation with consciousness, but it is not consciousness itself or automatic proof of it and doesn't automatically or necessarily produce it. It's probably a required ingredient though. IE all beef is meat but not all meat is beef, all consciousness may have brain power but not all brain power has consciousness.
But, repeating an example I used in another comment, if you had no other interface with the world except a remote controlled roomba, you would be able to make yourself known. Not by anything as plain as writing out words on the floor, but by actions. There are an infinite number of ways that you a conscious being could disclose your existense to me who can only see the roomba. You could be anything from caring to menacing by simple actions. Because it's not the capacity to roll across the floor, it's where & when you choose to roll across the floor that ends up speaking and disclosing intent, which discloses the "you" in there.
Watch any horror movie about the robots going wrong, or like twighlight zone episodes where you don't actually see much action but the person wakes up and there is a knife sitting next to them, and the presumption is the creepy doll placed it there while they slept. It's a message that they could have killed them any time they wanted to, and they want you to fear.
No other animal has ever done anything like that, that can only be explained by "I want you to know that I know." or more generally "I want you to have a particular thought.", only things that can be explained much more simply and directly. Some things seem to come close like animals caring for other animals, bringing another animal food etc, but that is really just anthropomorphizing, because we also have all those same animal condition components to our own existense. We also feel hunger, feel a desire to relieve someone else's hunger, protect our young, etc. And animals do have some ability to model what they see. They can observe another animal and model what it wants or fears etc, because the ability to predict other things behavior is very beneficial to survival. And we see that and think it proves more than it does.
If you're a roomba that pushes a cookie across the floor to me, that doesn't prove anything all by itself, but it could be part of it. It's like how a word isn't a novel or a philosophical concept, but the philosophical concept is communicated with words.
The idea is to try to recognize how llms are like a misdirection tricking us into thinking certain things simply because they use text as the thing they manipulate. That makes them seem way more human than they really are, simply because they are slicing and dicing prior recorded human communication, which up until now has been something unique to humans. You don't need any words at all to make yourself known to me as being not just a roomba.
A cat reaching for a cuddle is conscious or not? They recognise individuals and communicate desires well past the bounds of food or other basic needs into affection.
> consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles
Note that at least one species of fish have been shown to very consistently pass the mirror test (they try to clean up a mark on their body they can only see in a mirror, then go back to the mirror to check, and repeat a few times). So, at least if you consider the mirror test to be a sign of consciousness in animals, then you might want to extend this to at least all chordata.
The mirror test is essentially the only pseudo-objective argument we have for believing that non-human animals are conscious - it proves that said animals have a concept of themselves as opposed to the rest of the environment. You are right that it is not necessarily very convincing, but I don't think we have anything much better.
Also, the entire point of p-zombies is that they can, by definition, pass any objective test that we can currently conceive. A p-zombie is, by definition, "something that behaves exactly like a human, but doesn't have any inner consciousness". Of course, just because we can define something at this high level doesn't mean that this thing can actually exist (e.g. we can define the concept "numbers that are bigger than 3 but smaller than 2", despite no such number existing).
You say "our" consciousness, but how do you know you're not the only conscious entity alive? The problem of consciousness is that not only is it plainly absurd sounding, but it's also completely unmeasurable. There is no test or metric you can use to determine whether I, you, or anything else has a consciousness. And I think this more or less immediately precludes logical reasoning about it.
You can't tell the difference between a person and an mp3 player saying the same words, even if the words are about inner life musings.
And you can't tell the difference between a person exhibiting many behavioral actions and something I could rig up with an electric motor and a light sensor to exhibit tropism, seeking things, avoiding other things.
But if you only had a remote controlled roomba to interact with the world, you would be able to make yourself known to me.
I don't mean that you could substitute a voice with writing out words on the floor, I mean your actions, the overall totality no single act, would would expose a driving source of actions that so far nothing else exhibits.
We just anthropomorphize everything because we have so much in common with all the other animals. When a dog or a dolphin does something, we have had experiences that we recognize as being practically identical, and we know what our experience was like. It's protecting it's baby. I protect MY baby! Yes and an electric motor can turn a crank, and you can turn a crank.
Simple outward alignments like that are some kind of logical trap everyone falls for because we don't have any other conceptual vocabulary to even think with.
No, the mere capacity to do something means nothing.
In other comments I've distilled that down to "It can't be about what a thing can do, but about what a thing chooses to do." Which is a bit too distilled by itself but whatever.
The ability to solve a puzzle is just a correlation, probably a required ingredient, not significant itself.
The comment above was more focussed on it's parent about what you can deduce from outside observations. It's not true that there is nothing to go on. It's merely true that you can come up with a lot of examples of observations that don't prove anything.
Hearing something say "I think, therefor I am." doesn't prove that it thinks or is. Seeing something solve a puzzle or care for a baby doesn't prove that it is the same as you who can also solve puzzles and would care for a baby.
And yet, no matter how limited your means of expression were, if you had any means of acting at all, you could and would make yourself known. How I don't know because it's infinite and context sensitive. You would do something that only has meaning to me or other immediate observers because it would somehow refer to other immediate context.
You're nothing but a remote controlled roomba, and just to make the point we'll artificially remove the obvious easy direct possibility of writing letters out on the floor or tapping out morse code by bumping into something, etc. You can only communicate by actions. You don't know morse code and something like that simple doesn't occur to you because not everyone thinks like that or is good at thinking of things like that.
Yet... You see me looking around for something, and you push the cookie I dropped across the floor to where I see it. Then when I reach for it you move in the way because you wish to tell me I'm not supposed to have sugar & carbs, and indeed I do get that message. No single act like that says or proves much by itself, but stuff like that adds up to a pattern that exceeds the same sorts of things any dog routinely does, and none of it requires hardly any brute brainpower. Or maybe it does require brute brain power but it doesn't have to mean an ability to solve impressive puzzles. IE a dog will absolutely model that you are looking for that cookie and will absolutely desire to please you by bringing it to you, but will not joke with you by bringing a particular type of cookie that you both know you don't like. But it could be trained to do all the same outward actions. It has the brainpower to figure out even very complicated rules.
Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's?
> If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no.
> And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees.
> I'm not sure what to draw from this.
At least the answer to this is simple:
'fundamentally different' is not a transitive function
The important point is that "not fundamentally different" is probably a transitive function. If A is not fundamentally different from B, and B is not fundamentally different from C, than A is not fundamentally different from C. Here A is human consciousness, B is gorilla consciousness, and C is baboon consciousness.
For almost all purposes, x + epsilon is not fundamentally different from x.
Still, 1 is fundamentally different from 10^100,
while you can get from 1 to 10^100 by adding epsilon.
Perhaps, one can argue that 0 is fundamentally different from 1. As in 0 + epsilon is fundamentally different from 0, for any non-zero epsilon (e.g. you can't divide by 0, but can for such epsilon).
I think both of us will agree that there is no fundamental difference between the consciousness of baboon and gorilla, and that there is a fundamental difference between the consciousness of a human and a bacteria.
Where we might differ is whether there is a fundamental difference between the consciousness of gorilla and human (some/many? think the humans are unique, and gorilla are not consciouss), and between the consciousness of baboon and a bacteria (maybe some believe 'all life has soul', including bacteria).
Where do you stand? Why do you think 'not fundamentally different' is transitive? Of course, if you apply it twice, the non-transitivity is not obvious. If you apply it 1000x, all the way to bacteria, its non-transitivity becomes obvious. Otherwise, you have to draw a sharp divide somewhere, between 'conscious' and 'non conscious', as in 'these two relatively closely related species are fundamentally different'.
The biggest biological gap I see between bacteria and human is probably between bacteria and eucaryotes, but somehow I doubt you would put the 'fundamentally different, consciousness-wise' there.
Btw., if that is not obvious, from my point of view, baboons are conscious. Not tothe level humans are, but sufficiently enough to make it obvious.
> My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.
A bit like asking "Have you proven that ice cream? Are you sure maths can not prove that ice cream? Do you have empirical evidence?"
Asking for empirical evidence seems beside the point, since the issue is a logical one.
As far as we know math can describe all of physics and sufficiently complex physics could describe our brains, thus math could describe our brains. Does that mean we aren't conscious? Where is the chain broken?
There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step:
How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?
> A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.
Which I took to mean, people who think it's possible for math to result in consciousness is a "type error".
You gave this in response to:
> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
So overall I'm confused what you actually believe and what you think is the "type error" here.
Maybe you meant that emperical proof is not possible. Which seems obvious, which is (I think) entirely the point of asking that rhetorical question: they know no one has had the emperical proof required to suggest consciousness doesn't arrive from math.
In that chain there is no distinction between subjective experience of mental state and evolution of physical state of the brain.
If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.
What most of the p-zombie supporters say is merely equivalent to adding an external observer. It is like saying that a player following a sim in a game, makes sims actions more meaningful, which is kind of true but also completely irrelevant to anything that the sims do.
> If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.
I don't agree any more than I'd agree that knowledge of the strong force being a fundamental aspect of the way the universe functions is the same thing as understanding why there is a strong force (ignoring any version of the anthropic principle of course).
The hard problem asks _why_ consciousness exists, not just the mechanism. You can take the position that p-zombies are not possible and I would with you. That might give me some insight into consciousness to the effect of "consciousness is a requirement for introspection and desired preservation of self which improves the fitness of an organism that develops it" but it doesn't tell me _why_ or _how_ subjective arises.
I don't think the question of whether subjective phenomena are casual has any bearing on whether there's a 'hard problem' and I also don't think the term 'hard problem' is used like that by others.
Whether subjective experience is casual or not is a different, additional question.
The problem of consciousness is hard partly because it is objectively hard to make conscious people— all of whom are experts at the experience of living in their own bodies— agree on what consciousness is.
> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness?
Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind?
> Implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain.
The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness. Is in: what is the shape of the answer, and can a collection of material facts about the world have that shape?
> Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.
This is just a tiresome ad hominem. I want to be a materialist and an eliminativist. I would like this to be simple!
> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?
Consciousness isn't something the information processing has, it is something the information processing does. It's a function, not some magic property that happens on top.
Consciousness is simply your brains ability to figure out what part of all the sensory input it gets can be attributed to the "self", just like other parts might be labeled as cats, dogs, table and chairs, some will be labeled as self.
And I am sure one day somebody will boil that down to some nice math, since fundamentally it's about networks. If the brain wants to move a hand from one spot to another, that's easy if it is its own hand, a couple of nerve impulses and it will happen. If that hand belongs to somebody else, moving it is a whole different ballgame. That fundamental different in connectedness should be expressible.
>The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.
It's special pleading. What empirical knowledge you could acquire that would let you understand a tesseract? There are many things that are difficult to understand.
Can we start by defining consciousness as something that could be quantified physically, rather than a nebulous concept? With a common shared ground, we could at least define why we are all sure that individual neurons are unconscious.
To anticipate a possible question about my definition: I don’t have a strict one. I’m almost completely with Rovelli on this one. I think the day we find a proper definition of the concept we’ll have done the first step is solving the (one and only) “easy” problem of consciousness. But I’m open to hearing your own definition since I feel like I just can’t grasp your concerns. I must be missing something.
> The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.
What about this:
- this class of brain circuits are not not firing when the person is (unconscious, in deep sleep,a newborn/animal obviously just directly responding to outside stimuli), while obviously active when a person performs conscious activity
- this class of brain circuits does not exists at very primitive species and is progressively more developed the higher the evolution chain you go
Eliminativism fails to 'save the phenomena.' It is one thing for a new theory to discard the theoretical entities of an old framework--in other words, to eliminate the explanans. It is quite another thing entirely to eliminate the explanandum, the very phenomenon we set out to explain.
> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?
I have no idea. If that's what the hard problem of consciousness boils down to - we don't know why some complex math produces consciousness and other complex math doesn't - then it boils down to "we haven't found the means to sufficiently analyze the math that does produce it." Which would turn it into... a math problem?
My suspicion is that it has something to do with evolutionary pressure. Consciousness is something that evolves when systems that include their own existence within their data model become much more likely to continue existing versus those that don't. Statistics does the rest.
> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?
Using Rovelli's example: why some clouds create a thunderstorm and not others? It is just a complex phenomenon that happens only under right conditions.
Let us classify the information processing along two axis:
a) low-level (evolutionarily ancient), direct stimuli-response, vs high-level (involving prefrontal cortex)
b) processing stimuli from the outside world (sound, light) vs internal stimuli (tactile/pain ... all the way to internal stimuli originating in brain - 'thinking about thinking')
Note that both are continuous scale, not binary.
The consciousness would then be the high-level processing of internal signals. Obviously, consciousness also results being on continuous scale.
Why is some software SuperMarioBros and other Microsoft Word? 'cause that's what the specific software is written to produce and the other is written to do produce else. Consciousness is not some magically thing on top of a information processing, it's what that specific bit of information processing produces. It's functional, it does stuff.
It should be kind of obvious due to the fact that we are conscious about our human self, not neurons, not brains, not microtubules or any other random implementation detail. We have zero clue what is going on in our brains, but we do have a high level description. Just as our brain can take some random electrical impulses from our eyes and decide that that's a "cat", it can take all the other input that goes around and conclude that that's a "self". It's perception, the brain trying to figure out what parts of the world it has direct control over.
I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of the universe (or its non-existence), or to picture what it’s like to be dead. Our intuition simply isn’t equipped for these cases, period, and it pushes back hard against them. Consciousness belongs in that same category IMO
Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it. This self-referential loop is likely what we experience as "consciousness" and it becomes central to how we understand and navigate reality.
If we accept this framing, many traditional paradoxes dissolve on their own. The problem stops being "hard" in substance and becomes hard only in terms of imagination.
> And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it.
But why a spreadsheet simulating the brain, and not just a spreadsheet doing normal financial math? In other words: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?
> Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it.
But this is A-consciousness, not P-consciousness. Which gets us back to square one: why does information processing give rise to experience at all?
> I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion.
who is eluded? people absolutely love this answer and give it constantly, not realizing that it's begging the question. in order for their to be an illusion, there needs to be someone to perceive the illusion.
The universe contains subsystems which can be described as eluded in the sense that we can take the intentional stance on these systems and describe their observable behavior as being in a state of illusion of separation.
I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists.
It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our understanding of consciousness becomes clearer.
To use the same example: If there was a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in my brain, which one would be "I"? The original "I", or the spreadsheet?
Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer. There is only one "I" (since I can't be experiencing the world from two sets of eyes, one organic and one spreadsheet-eyes, simultaneously), so I have to choose one of them.
This does not seem like a particularly difficult question to answer to me, and I suspect it's because I'm not particularly precious about what it means to "be me."
The logical answer is that this spreadsheet, supposing identical mechanical processes - inputs, outputs, stored data - and I would both be convinced that they're "me", and they'd both be correct in that they'd both be something that functions, and therefore thinks, acts, and experiences things identically to me. Two different processes on different hardware running the same code. The concept of "ego" is a result of this code. To me, I'd be "me" and the spreadsheet would be "a copy of me". To the spreadsheet, it would be the exact opposite.
Of course, that predisposes that the software isn't hardware-dependent. But even then, I wouldn't discount the possibility of an emulation layer.
It really isn't hard once you accept that we're not special for being able to think about ourselves.
Note that you said "this spreadsheet and I", meaning that there is something particularly precious about the current "I". You don't think that you'd suddenly become the spreadsheet, "detaching" (can't find a better word) from your existing body. You intrinsicly assume that the spreadhseet would remain a third person from "your" perspective, even though it's a perfect replica.
I don't follow? I can copy a file and then consider the two files to be separate copies of the same data?
What should I have said instead? "We"? "Him and it"? Self-modeling is part of my experience. I'm sure it'll be part of the spreadsheet's experience as well, if it functions identically to me.
There is nothing which makes either of them are “you.” The feeling of Self is a useful predictor which a physical subsystem uses to nagivate the world and predict observations. “I” is not a physically real label which attaches the “you”-ness to physical systems, the physical systems simply are, and are inherently first-person in character. The only real you is the global quantum wave function, or whatever the underlying real stuff is doing.
Materialism directly implies no-self and Advaita Vedanta schools of thought.
I think the key point in my theory is that my brain simply hasn't evolved to intuitively conceptualize it. I've asked similar questions before, including what it's like to die and be dead forever, and I can't form an intuitive understanding of it. My brain rejects the premise. But just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it won't happen. I'm pretty sure I will still be dead for trillions of years into the future.
To your question, the answer is similar. If we remove this limitation of intuition, there doesn't seem to be a real paradox. Both you and a spreadsheet-like copy of you would each claim to be the real you, and from an outside observer's perspective, there is no contradiction.
> from an outside observer’s perspective, there is no contradiction
Indeed. As I said, the question is meaningless from an outside observer's perspective. The paper "Against Egalitarianism" by Benj Hellie [1] explains it better than I can:
> I trace this odd commitment to an egalitarian stance concerning the ontological status of personal perspectives—roughly, fundamental reality treats mine and yours as on a par.
>Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer.
I think the question remains meaningful after substitution: why a giraffe is a giraffe and not an elephant? Likewise "both giraffe and elephant are elephants" is not a valid answer.
What makes brain computation special? Nothing. That's my whole point. Does the sewer system in NYC have consciousness? It's impossible to answer, because there's no single accepted definition of consciousness. If something isn't clearly defined, it becomes very hard to meaningfully assess whether it applies or not.
But if we built a Turing complete, sewer-like system that simulated every neuron in a human brain, it will claim that it is real and conscious for sure. There's no paradox at physical level, intuitively conceptualizing it is the "hard" part.
> Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved
The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.
The hard problem only really needs consideration if we get to a point as you describe, where we fully understand everything happening in the brain and cannot assign consciousness to any part of it, even though we can turn it off and on again (e.g., with anesthesia).
> The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation.
Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve.
But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.
> But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.
I think that is a question more about the people to whom you are explaining the solution to the hard problem of consciousness. The natural tendency (as with 'what is AI?') is to say 'ah, but that is the easy part, the hard part is <some other thing that they feel you have not explained properly>'.
This problem, while interesting in its own right, is entirely irrelevant to consciousness. Especially because, regardless of how it's achieved, it's actually very clearly known that we do have temporal processes in our body - our tell-tale hearts being quite an iconic example.
> Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.
Not really, it only suggests that the brain function is involved in some way. If the brain is an “antenna” anesthesia could prevent it from functioning and that would be a totally consistent theory.
Agreed that you can still rescue dualism in that case, but I still think it's literally "strong evidence". A model involving the spark of awareness being received by the brain, but personality, memories, and motor action decisions being created by the brain seems much more complicated.
1. This requires explaining why only some kinds of information processing are privileged to be conscious, which seems rather arbitrary.
2. There's the question of levels of abstraction. Which information processor is conscious? The physical CPU, the zeroth VM, the first VM, the second VM, etc.
3. And there's the question of interpretation. What is computation? A CPU is "just" electrons moving about. Who says the motion of these 10^12 electrons represents arithmetic, or string concatenation, or anything else? The idea of abstract information processing above the bare causality of particles and fields is in itself a kind of dualism (or n-alism, because Turing completeness lets you emulate machines inside machines).
Saying everything is conscious is also dualism. it's saying that every kind of computation (or perhaps every physical substrate) has another dimension of properties that aren't physical/structural and don't interact with the physical/structural world. So it's not an explanatory boon but rather an extravagance.
The 'where is the consciousness' question is interesting but not really a hard problem. The issue can be solved by being clear about what purpose does consciousness serve then locate where that need is realized. Consciousness is about information integration and broad access as a substrate of decision making. Recursive integration identifies the where. But thinking in terms of nested VMs is sort of missing the point. The point is to trace the flow of information and find the points of broad integration. This may involve multiple substrates. Identifying a single thing as being conscious is a mistake. The consciousness is the most narrowly specified causal dynamic that grounds the information integration.
Funny enough Chalmers thinks a computation can be conscious. I believe he thinks that there are like special laws of computation that give rise to consciousness and that makes it dualism.
Makes no sense to me, to me if a simulation of physics gives rise to consciousness that’s pure physicalism
I think you are misunderstanding illusionism and the hard problem.
Illusionism does say that there is a conscious experience. So illusionism is convincing to many people who have conscious experiences.
The alien would be able to look at the computation and describe the conscious experience it has.
You could put human consciousness on an excel spreadsheet and it’ll still be conscious. Even Chalmers accepts a simulation would be conscious. So no that’s not a. Argument for p-zombies. Even people that use the pz argument don’t think that pz could actually exist.
But your conclusion is right, the simulation example does suggest that the consciousness in the hard problem doesn’t exist. Which just leaves the consciousness you experience explainable by easy problems. Which is the illusionist position.
Edit: and the hard problem isn’t just why there is consciousness. But why consciousness is impossible under physicalism. So in your post you are just actually referring to the easy problem of consciousness when suggesting it exists.
I suspect more things are conscious than we tend to assume. I would assume some level of intelligence requires a review/assessment process, something to evaluate what happened, what is good or bad, what should we have done instead, how can we do it better next time. This self-assessment becomes our experience of consciousness. Of course it feels incredible, unreal, like those feelings overwhelm us, because we are this function, and optimizing for those feelings is our function.
How do you know that they are not? Any subjective experience they have does not have to overlap with yours. (same with your skull, skeleton, or any other subset of your body).
(for me, having slowly become more aware of the distributed nature of my brain, I'm not even really sure there's only one consciousness in my mind!)
I’ll bite, I think your individual neurons are “just as” conscious as your whole body/environment system. They can’t advocate for themselves in words, but they have their own goals and interactions and decisions and needs.
Your aliens don’t know what it’s like to be you. But if these aliens decide to use your blueprints to print out a human, and the human says “ouch”, is it still the hard problem? This is what I don’t get.
Of course the music is different than just reading the score. A description of a process is not the process itself. We cannot know what it is like “to be” a bat but we also don’t know what it is like “to be” a spleen cell. Or the European futures market. Or a colony of ants, or the United States. These processes are complicated and intelligent, though not generally thought of having qualia. But I think it is only our hubris that differentiates the experience of an individual organism from that of our subsystems or supersystems.
“Either or” is too extreme. Both can be true at the same time even if at different levels of abstraction eg a table and atoms it consists of may exist at the same time. Depending on the task different levels of abstraction may be useful. It is ridiculous to claim that a table doesn’t exist just because we can prove it is made of atoms (or strings excitation—doesn’t matter here)
On the other hand, "consciousness" concept might be as much useful for modeling thinking as “the four elements” for describing anatomy (not useful at all)—and we create better models eventually.
'why aren't my neurons individually conscious?' why can you assume a slide rule is but a neuron isn't? your consciousness doesnt stop at your 'skull', it extends to your fingers and "interfaces" with the world in various ways, which is effectively a weaker, slower connection. neurons in your brain are also not equally distributed to how much they affect your immediate consciousness, but they all play a part in it
Rovelli writes, "I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”"
Carlos Rovelli has failed to understand the arguments for dualism, and is proudly sure that they must be nonsense.
If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.
IMO, the problem is actually one of epistemological framing. If I ask what "I" know, assuming that my internal experiences are the basis of my knowledge, then I can't accept materialism. But if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers, together we find only natural material, and no evidence for dualism.
(It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's best for me is to defect. What's best for us is to cooperate.)
> If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.
Huh, evolution vs. creationism, many arguments happened over many years, yet one side was simply nonsensical.
> if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers
That is how science is done; if you reject that approach a priori, no wonder your conclusions become unreliable.
I don't think creationism is nonsensical, it's just wrong. But the concept overall is not nonsensical - in principle, if the universe were very different, a god could have molded humans out of clay and breathed life into them or whatever other fairy tale is preferred; it's not a logically inconsistent, so it's not nonsensical. Even something like Lamarckism is not nonsensical.
If you want to see an obviously nonsensical world view, you need to look at something like the Time Cube "theory". Rovelli is essentially claiming that dualism is more in this area - which I agree with the GP is quite unlikely for such a long discussed and influential philosophical idea.
>We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.
Map the process by which you learn that you have experience. Then determine if this process works correctly. Alien needs to learn to code; they have difficulty, because they try to learn integrals without arithmetic and algebra. Before you can solve a complex problem, you should first train on easy problems.
The really hard problem is that your gut, having a neural network as complex as your brain, is also probably conscious. And all it's ever known and will ever know is the feeling of pushing food through it and tasting different types of food. Now that's a horror story.
Conversely, it may be that it's only labels in language that are unifying disparate parts into a single "neural system" concept. Ultimately the world is either individual particles and fields, or it is all Oneness, Brahman, and anything else is just arbitrary unification/division; but we can't know which is which.
It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time.
Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of proof on the compatibilists where it belongs.
From a non-dual perspective either nobody is a p-zombie or everybody is a p-zombie. I think the trajectory of LLMs will be that consciousness sensations are abundant and low value, and that will give all the non-dual territory over to the illusionists (who now have a tangible example to point to.) Emergence won't be disproven but it'll be about as interesting as a penny stock. Everyone else is going to go to ground as a dualist and argue for some entirely new unreachable aspect of human exceptionalism, but they'll have ceded qualia as they did for souls. If I had to guess, they'll focus on embodied cognition because building high-fidelity bodies still seems really hard.
The author takes a blurry position between non-dualist naturalists like John Searle and eliminativists like Dennett and the Churchlands and doesn't seem to engage with them at all, much less probing into the issues with those views that might motivate people like Chalmers and Nagel.
It crescendos with a hand-wave:
> The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary[.]
A number of views about consciousness are compatible with statements like that (like the ones above and many others), each with their own philosophical tradeoffs and bullets to bite. The author seems generally unaware of them yet somehow confident that they've solved the matter.
This article is pretty slim on details, but I agree with the general argument that dualism is unnecessary to explain phenomenal consciousness. The word "consciousness" has a lot of baggage, which causes us to mislabel cognition as consciousness. [1] This is why I really like using terms like "qualia" or _phenomenal_ consciousness to make explicit what we're talking about.
I still don't like this new trend of dismissing the hard problem altogether. We really don't have an explanation of phenomenal consciousness—it might even require novel physics to explain! [2]
I'd also like to point out that, though this might seem like a semantic argument, it has meaningful consequences for how we approach science and ethics. [3] For example, if we are physicalists and accept that phenomenal consciousness is a property of the world, what does this tell us about other unobservable properties of the world science may be missing? (Recall that we only know about phenomenal consciousness through our own experience of it; we cannot observe it in others)
It felt very strange to me that the author construes belief in the hard problem as some sort of spiritual baggage from unempirical religious view. He seems to want to pit the "new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries" _against_ the idea of phenomenal consciousness, which is just absurd to me. As far as I understand, it is far more rooted in German idealism and its Cartesian roots than in any sort of religious spirit.
I'm almost convinced that those who deny the metaphysical (or, if you insist, the plausibly merely physical) force of qualia are philosophical zombies trying to persuade us against the existence of the most obviously true piece of knowledge we have! Or, more generously, they are so steeped in the premises of modern empirical science that they treat their fundamental phenomenal experience as so untrustworthy as to be disregarded, despite its actual necessity in employing those very premises.
Poor, disregarded qualia! Oh that the scientists could see how much they owe to you.
I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again.
Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the conscious experience God and went further into how we all share this sliver of godhood.
Does anyone who knows philosophical "camps" know the terms for what I'm trying to remember? I guess I've leaned "materialist" for most of my life, but what other common philosophies (as in the academic discipline) are there?
This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties.
There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.
What I reject most about idealism is that it is free. Life is hard and expensive, but soul is free. How come? Is our soul understood like a spherical cow?
I don't think I've shared my thoughts on here, but this sounds a lot like my thought process: what if you start with nothing but consciousness, then find a path to a physical universe?
Consciousness is inherently about awareness, so at some point the consciousness would be aware of itself. Now it has the concepts of before/after, and from that opposites, incrementing, subtracting, 1 dimensional space etc. Eventually through this process you could "spawn up" other consciousnesses each expanding their individual bubbles of experience and understanding, eventually getting complex enough to create an entire universe with physical matter that can be experienced by other consciousnesses.
The problem with this line of thought is that consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged. A piece of falling masonry can be enough to shear off large parts or all of it. If consciousness was fundamentally distinct, this wouldn't be the case, would it?
There is a "The Matrix" (the movie) argument where we posit these:
1. Whatever you believe is true is true (this is how the consciousness builds worlds before there is any physical existence)
2. Our consciousness built the physical world and runs it like a simulation.
3. The reason our minds and consciousness are highly correlated to the physical situation is to make the simulation feel real. It's a specifically designed feature that to a large extent synchronizes the "host" and the simulated objects so that despite being outside of the simulation, the "host" feels like they are inside the simulation.
4. The corollary to 3 (and 1) is that if you are damaged or die in the simulation, that effect is mirrored outside the simulation too (to some extent).
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(Never thought my adventures in metaphysics would be useful in a HN discussion thread!)
There is no problem here. [I may have shared this thought experiment before here using a different handle.]
Let us assume there exists in our planet an undiscovered island that has developed independent of other human societies. This is not an island of primitives. The inhabitants pride themselves on their scientific and empirical approach to knowledge acquisition, however they are not quite on par with the rest of the planet in terms of scientific knowledge and technology. Specifically for our purposes, they have not yet discovered Electro-Magnetism.
Now assume somehow (via a shipwreck, or whatever) these islanders come into possession of advanced transmitter/receiver communication devices, and we'll assume they are in working condition and have some sort of power source (magical internal or solar or whatever - they can be turned on).
As the scientists on this island fiddle with these boxes, they notice that certain configuration of the device interface will cause it to 'emit voices, songs, and music'. Various knobs seem to change the voice, etc. Further experimentation and they discover that speaking to the device under certain configuration seems to establish a sort of 'communication' with the box. After these blackbox approaches, they start taking apart these mechanisms (while they are turned on). Now let's just pretend the internal radio communication components are perfectly modular (in terms of functionality) and can be removed and put back as required.
They systematically begin removing various components and noting which uncanny features of these mystrious devices cease to function. One board removed and they no longer get certain band. Another board removed and the box doesn't talk back (think CB). They meticulously map out all these component to function mappings. The results are indisputable: These boxes are some sort of 'thinking machines'. The 'brains' of the machanisms is isolated to the radio elements of the devices. The 'proof' of this is that the boxes cease to speak or respond to communication when these elements are removed.
> consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged
I don't think the GP's objection is fatal either (for reasons mentioned in another reply), but let me try to poke holes in your argument.
If I understand your analogy correctly, you're saying the brain here acts as an intermediary between the real consciousness and the physical world, and not really the underlying thing that generates consciousness.
But this seems to contradict actual experience -- if somebody's head is hit very hard, they kind of get knocked dizzy for a moment. Their consciousness halts, until their brain recovers. If your analogy truly holds, then subjectively it should feel more like disconnecting from World of Warcraft. "The real consciousness" fiddles their fingers idly while waiting for reconnection, and once they reconnect they'd have a recollection (on the non-physical, consciousness side) of what happened during the physical blackout.
I don't think the insistence on the requirement of 'hard disconnect' is reasonable. Per the brain as transceiver analogy, you are jiggling a part and may get 'static' while you are doing it. Stop the jiggling and static stops. Jiggle too hard and the part disconnects from its socket (knock them out /g) and you'll have the desired disconnect from the "World of Warcraft".
p.s. Realized I didn't address your "subjectively". This is true, since the radio analogy was to address the analog of neuroscientists examining people with damaged brains. You want to know what the 'radio' feels :)
So this is in fact an interesting aspect you bring in. The answer to this is: this seems to conflate 'ego' and 'self'. This is a different problem: Is the self the same as the ego? My own view on this is that is the ego is not the true self.
I must admit I've never been hit so hard that I am 100% knocked out, so I can't really speak as to the subjective experience of being knocked out (from the non-physical consciousness perspective, not the brain)... but surely it isn't like disconnecting from World of Warcraft?
That said, if the injury is serious enough I suppose it might trigger some Near Death Experience where people have reported seeing things purportedly on the other side.
So I guess that answers my original concern.
(I think you might have confused my question though, or perhaps I've confused you. No worries, my questions are answered anyway.)
This is a facile thought experiment, and I'm surprised it's weakness hasn't already occurred to you.
But as it hasn't, let's change your island to an island of supremely skilled butchers. Your islanders are apparently capable of reassembling the mystery radios to restore function, so let's allow my island's butchers the skill of dismembering flesh atomically - and reassembling it exactly. Perhaps via quantum knives and very strong prescription lenses.
Their own religion has long prohibited them from peering into their tribe's flesh - and their tribe is all there is on that remotest of islands. But the day a missionary washes up on shore they see an opportunity. They can finally take a proper look. They begin with his head - by far the most interesting part of him, with the delighted and friendly if slightly smug smile and neverending chatter.
Once dismantled and laid out in trillions of tiny pieces in a large hall - a bit like a crashed plane - they decide to reassemble his head in different configurations - to test how the behaviour would change with each layout. There's an unusual fruit on the island which allows them almost superhuman focus and speed - so that billions of reconfigurations can be completed over an afternoon.
BUT WHAT DO YOU KNOW...? Every single reconfiguration results in a totally inert missionary! No more drunk on the milk of paradise look, and no more "Hallelujah!"s. Just a lump of meat. Perplexed - they decide there must have been something truly unique about the missionary's head's original layout and composition - so reassemble him in the way they found him. But when they have done this - calamity! - he doesn't come on any more. They check their work 18 times - but not a single atom is dislocated. And so the wise islanders come to the only conclusion possible, and hurry to note it in their scientific literature:
"Radios aren't animals. And anyone pretending otherwise is a ginormous silly billy."
> "Radios aren't animals. And anyone pretending otherwise is a ginormous silly billy."
The results presented to the scientific community of the island was that the "mechanisms" are "thinking machines". They clearly did not think the boxes to be 'living creatures'.
There are a lot of similar ideas in various ancient/traditional spiritual/esoteric teachings. "Consciousness first" is actually the more typical assumption among the traditions that have something we'd label as a philosophy.
One thing is certain: we are talking about consciousness. This means that the world does not work like this: there is physics, and above it there is consciousness which is merely monitoring the physics. This cannot be true (or is unlikely), since we are discussing consciousness and therefore the physical act of talking is driven by something that knows that consciousness exists. There must be a link back from consciousness to physics. A simpler way is to assume that physics IS consciousness. Physics as a science is a kind of introspective activity.
The link is called causation, and it is not simpler to assume its absence. It seems simpler only because no one ever works through the full consequences, because the project of doing so always fails very quickly or terminates in an inexplicable bag called "god" (or the trasncendental ego) or similar which serves to do all the work of things which cannot be explained.
This kind of simplicity is a very deceitful on, because it offers to seem to explain everything with nothing, and having phrased nothing in pleasant-sounding ways, concludes that this simplicity is a virtue.
It does offer beauty and relief to the fact that the observable universe is something like 10^80 the volume of a humain being. At that incomprehensible scale, I think poetry and spirituality is a rather nice placeholder while loads of brilliant minds work on our understanding of physics
> There must be a link back from consciousness to physics.
Yes, and it is trivial to prove. One second lapse of attention and you could get bitten by a snake, or run over by a car. If the top level (consciousness) fails, the neurons die too. Cells depend on this centralized decision point to exist. There is no way to have humans without consciousness because ... they would not be able even to put the thing into the other thing to make more of us without it ... excuse the language, but the argument is solid.
Another "camp" is panpsychism, which is often seen as a polar opposite of materialism. David Chalmers and Philip Goff are the two most prominent people pushing it.
They espouse consciousness or subjective experience is fundamental and contained in all matter.
There's a long history of anti-dualism in Kabbalist traditions, Christian Mysticism and Gnosticism.
For example, the Gospel of Thomas sayings #3, #77 and #113.
Advaita Vedanta or Alan Watts style looking - essentially the idea that there are no separate things or events, sort of like Whitehead's process philosophy. Trippy stuff and a little bit out there, but consistent with some other ways of looking at things. What is real by Adam Becker goes into some underpinnings here too.
I feel like Hoffman's core idea really tries to pull string theory into our understanding of reality. If reality has 10, 11, or 26 dimensions and we can only perceive 4 of them then there are dimensions where other things could exist.
I like his interface theory and the idea that our perception is an evolutionary fitness for purpose, but his conscious agents is straight out pseudo-religious/panpsychism.
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".
Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.
Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.
This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.
Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.
> Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me:
A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at sunset it's like a major D chord surrounded by the sound of babies laughing. When you see it on the battlefield it's like a minor D chord wrestling against the noise of wind and rain.
These are very good analogies (and possibly experiences for those who are natural synesthetes), but even then, that won't make the who doesn't have the corresponding perceptual modality person experience that exact sensation.
> A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
why does a major chord sounds pleasant? and why does a minor chord sounds "sad"? Why does the locrian mode sound so unsettling? is it due to our anatomy or purely cultural?
Well, right, it's contextual. We each have a series of inputs that add up to these contexts. This doesn't mean it can't be explained, it just means there needs to be context.
If you give the blind man a sensor that converts color data to something he can input, and then provide inputs giving the feeling you want to portray associated with that color, you have explained it.
If you feel red is angry, all you need to do is play 400 to 484 THz into his instrument and yell at him angrily enough times for him to associate it. It doesn't seem too subjective to me.
Color perception has nothing to do with light wavelength. Color is a subjective perceptual space.
If you zap your occipital cortex with electromagnetic pulses, you'll experience color flashes (phosphenes).
If a blind person who can read baille does the same, they'll experience tingling sensations in their fingers [1].
People can have visual experiences through somesthesic stimuli (you can give muddy waters divers sonar-based sight by stimulating their skin with an electrode array).
AFAIK, it is not however know whether someone who was blind at birth and whose brain didn't learn to see could have such experiences.
Show me what is subjective about it then. What makes one illusion created out of flesh more real than another?
How are any of these experiences subjective if you can already relate their nature so easily and universally? You are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.
Are you saying that you are a literal philosophical zombie?
Do you understand the difference between feeling the pain in your toes when you shoot in a door frame and what you experience when you see someone else do the same.
See also colorblindness as a common example, or tetrachromacy, which is posited in some individuals with at least two X chromosomes, and the norm in several species of birds.
Their color space has four dimensions.
People who lose parts of their brains can lose the ability to conceptualize the ability encoded by the region they lost.
No, I am saying the concept of a p-zombie relies on a flawed premise. I am asking you to explain what is fundamentally "subjective" about these experiences.
How are colorblindness and extended color perception any different from full blindness which we already addressed? These are issues of scale of perception, there is nothing subjective about them. You either process the data or not.
Can you experience sympathetic pain without having already experienced pain? I don't see any subjectivity there.
If there are multiple people that experience no pain, how are they subjectively different in their experience of no pain? Really, the more I look at it, arguing subjectivity from the null experience seems a particularly bad hill to die on. If a broken hardware bus generates a subjective experience of its own absence, then an unplugged microphone has a "subjective experience of silence."
Ultimately, I still think you are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.
Qualia is the term people often use to mean "what it's like". The hard problem is "why is there qualia". This of course assumes that qualia exists as a coherent thing, which some philosophers dispute.
The author demonstrates a common misunderstanding about medieval philosophy. The medieval Scholastic tradition does not maintain that the body and the soul were "distinct entities", or that matter was "vile". In fact that kind of thinking was the position of gnostic groups that Christian thinkers were resolutely opposed to. Read St Augustine's "Confessions" if you don't believe me.
Scholastic philosophers taught that body and soul were two components of the SAME entity, the human being, and that both were good because they were created by God. One good essence with two components, in other words. And while they claimed that the soul component was immaterial, that absolutely did NOT mean that the soul was not part of the natural world. To claim this is to seriously misunderstand their view of the physical world. To them, matter was only one component of creation.
The strict mind/body dualism was not introduced by medieval Scholastics, but rather by the advent of modernity in Descartes, and developed further by Kant and other enlightenment philosophers. In other words, this is very far from being a medieval problem - on the contrary, it a problem created by modern philosophy.
As for the author's equation between subjective experience and qualities of things, or his equation of processes in the brain with the mind itself, this just ignores the facts. Qualities we observe in nature are obviously distinct from the feelings they produce in us in many cases (beauty, sublimity, injustice, etc. produce distinct feelings like reverence, humility, anger), and if the mind were equivalent to brain processes, then certain powers of the mind that we obviously have would be impossible (such as our ability to reflect on those very same brain processes in ourselves).
Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources.
His Baroque Cycle series also touches on this in several places. One funny side plot involves a freed African slave (Dappa) who speaks dozens of different languages and is highly intelligent and an aristocratic person who maintains that of course this former slave (who is obviously a lot smarter than this aristocrat) is just a trained monkey that naturally is not conscious even though he is quite clever with language. The same books also have a lot of side plots involving Leibniz and various attempts to build thinking/computing machines.
The Dappa plot is probably the closest to a lot of debates there will be around AGI with people likely to insist for all sorts of reasons rooted in philosophy, religion, etc. that even though the AGI walks, talks, etc. like a duck, it can't be a duck. At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
Is there a distinction in your mind between consciousness and intelligence? Is it possible, for example, for a machine to solve complex problems but not be conscious? Or vice versa, can an animal or a person be very unintelligent yet still conscious?
A philosophical zombie [1] is essentially a mobile, autonomous human body devoid of consciousness. Critically, still giving all of the external cues that it has in fact consciousness. It is supposed to prove that physicalism doesn't work. "The sense of consciousness" is used like a "soul, with extra steps".
In my humble opinion, which I have no way to prove or disprove, consciousness ("as a soul with extra steps") does not exist, and we are all philosophical zombies. Consciousness "as an amalgamation of complex biological signals and neural interactions that has evolved through millions of years as a successful survival strategy" does exist, and that is all that is needed.
>For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would.
in the Wikipedia article because I don't get on well with the sharp poking. On the basis of Occam's razor I assume all other humans and higher animals are similar. It would be odd if evolution had made me different from all the others.
What I am denying is that there's anything metaphysical about the whole process.
The opponents of physicalism like Chalmers start from the axiom that consciousness is, in fact, separated from the physical world. Then they use the zombie to "demonstrate" (using circular logic, in my opinion) that physicalism is not possible.
I do believe that your (our) feelings, emotions, and our sense of self all emanate from the physical world. So in that sense "we are all the zombies that Chalmers talks about".
"but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would"
So the pain would be registered, and reacted to.
The only difference is in how the world "feel" is interpreted.
For Chalmers, the difference between a "zombie" and a "regular human", according to Chalmers, is that for the "zombie" is just "meat reacting to things". The "human" on the other hand is "meat somehow connected to something outside of the meat called consciousness that is the only thing that really feels".
I (and the author of the article) disagree. Consciousness can be "just meat". No need to add an "external thing".
Serves me well for answering a comment before reading the article. This is basically what the author says, even pointing to the Philosophical zombie and all. Shame on me.
The question is mainly interesting in the context of our own behavior and interactions. Because would we treat our food differently if we decided e.g. pigs were intelligent and conscious? I had some salami on my pizza yesterday. But I also believe pigs are intelligent and conscious. And they are close relatives of us genetically. Some people choose to not eat meat for this reason.
I'm of the school of thought that we are all biological computers with emergent properties like intelligence, consciousness, etc. that we might eventually succeed in replicating. Maybe at a more modest level at first. From a practical point of view, I'm more interested in intelligent agents than conscious ones. I mainly need them to do useful things for me. Too much consciousness is a double edged sword. Because then I would have to consider how my agent feels about all this. But can you really have one without the other? I don't have a good answer to this.
People have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything around them. Definitely their pets, plants, and in some cases even inanimate objects. Which doesn't help the debate because it's already happening with LLM tools. Even though they are probably still on the definitely not conscious side of the fence even when they demonstrate mildly intelligent reasoning occasionally.
At some point, people will have a hard time telling the difference with AGI. Is it all smoke and mirrors at that point or are they dealing with an intelligent/conscious thing? That's no doubt going to entertain philosophers for centuries to come. But from a practical point of view, does it really matter at that point? If we can't reliably tell the difference, is there still a difference?
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
You've already drawn your line in the sand (i.e. they are conscious). In that case, you can't also claim that we should continue producing them by the millions at the flick of a switch.
The AI-is-conscious crowd will have to choose - either they are conscious, in which case they should not be birthed, or they are not conscious in which case we can use them as tools. You can't have both and still be logically consistent.
I think you mean morally consistent. though even then humans don't have any real qualms about that. Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
> Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
Sure, but we don't create as many as we can, then kill them at the end of the day when the work is done.
If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc).
If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them, then the "owner" of them gets an obligation (you can't do whatever you want to a dog, for example).
> Sure, but we don't create as many as we can, then kill them at the end of the day when the work is done.
So it's a matter of scale then? We breed pigs, for example, and kill them a mere fraction into their overall lifespan. So it's ok as long as we don't kill them faster?
> If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc).
I don't see why this follows? Humans also exist for a period and then blink out of existence. Why does the timeframe matter? Our end was inevitable at the moment of our creation.
> If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them
You're conflating conscious with personhood. Clearly in a future where you can create a conscious entity instantly and terminate it just as quickly these entities are unlikely to qualify for personhood.
The clinching thing for me is how the AGI is supposed to work. If it's the same as our theory of how we work, then fine, it's one of us. It wouldn't even have to work very well.
I always like to remind myself that AI is trained on material fed to it, created and written (somewhere along the line) entirely by humans - as they perceive & interpret the universe around them.
> Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch.
This is a great example for a discussion about The Hard Problem. Here is the description from the book of the inner experience of this scanned brain as it gets booted up:
> What came next could not, of course, be described without using words. But that was deceptive in a way since he no longer had words. Nor did he have memories, or coherent thoughts, or any other way to describe or think about the qualia he was experiencing. And those qualia were of miserably low quality. To the extent he was seeing, he was seeing incoherent patterns of fluctuating light. For people of a certain age, the closest descriptor for this was “static”: the sheets, waves, and bands of noise that had covered the screens of malfunctioning television sets. Static, in a sense, wasn’t real. It was simply what you got out of a system when it was unable to lock on to any strong signal—“Strong” meaning actually conveying useful, or at least understandable, information. Modern computer screens were smart enough to just shut down, or put up an error message, when the signal was lost. Old analog sets had no choice but to display something. The electron beam was forever scanning, a mindless beacon, and if you fed it nothing else it would produce a visual map of whatever was contingently banging around in its circuitry: some garbled mix of electrical noise from Mom’s vacuum cleaner, Dad’s shaver, solar flares, stray transmissions caroming off the ionosphere, and whatever happened when little feedback loops on the circuit board got out of hand. Likewise, to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.
The Hard Problem asks: who is experiencing this qualia and why is there an experiencer at all? Stephenson writes how this simulated brain is experiencing static as it condenses into meaningful patterns, but he implicitly starts with someone experiencing this static qualia. If this is the very beginning of the simulated brain booting up, where did this experiencer come from?
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
Because you're conflating intelligence with consciousness. There is no test for consciousness. In fact, you can't even prove that other human beings are conscious, you only know that you yourself are because it's self evident to you (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am). The whole point of the hard problem is that you can imagine something exactly like a human being that passes every test of being a human being (e.g. an AI) but still not be sure that it has any inner experience.
This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflammatory environment, making one feel detached from their own body, feeling like they control a videogame character instead. Yet that still doesn't tell where does the "self" come from.
Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason.
This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.
The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.
There are of course other reasons too, with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
Finally, everyone is conscious and has an opinion, but only a tiny fraction are actually knowledgeable about the brain and have spent any large amount of time thinking about things like evolution and brain development .. they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it!
If you break down all the different things that people are referring to when they talk about "consciousness", and define them individually with as little wiggle room as the english language and underlying taxonomy of concepts allows, then I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all, but of course those with an agenda who want there to be a mystery will still argue about every part of it including the definitions that remove all the wiggle room.
The nature of consciousness has long been a contentious subject, and one of interest, but it seems that the rise of AI has intensified the discussion with the new question being whether AI is or could be conscious. I do think this can be answered in a principled way (=yes), but in the end you can only PROVE that something, or someone else, is conscious if you accept a functional/testable definition of it in the first place.
One can build scientific theories without rigorously defining terms: a stipulative definition is enough.
Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.'
Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion that formulating a precise definition is the primary goal of inquiry. In reality, a robust scientific theory is a structured set of hypotheses; when combined with auxiliary theories, it derives a specific set of testable consequences.
Even within this framework, one must remain vigilant against ad hoc explanations. An ad hoc explanation fails to provide genuine systemic insight because it is engineered solely to fit the target phenomenon; it eliminates the explanatory gap by simply re-stating or absorbing the explanandum without offering any independent predictive or falsifiable power.
But with "consciousness" we don't have even a stipulative definition, more like 40 different competing definitions (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT) which are in many cases only loosely related, and generally are talking about very different things. When the situation is this bad, I am skeptical you can make scientific progress.
Stipulative definition is all about fixing the reference. Or if we want to use the talk of meaning, it is abou the extension/denotation. If 100 people fix the reference of the word 'consciousness' to 100 different things, it just means that these people are engaging in philosophical discussions without having any object level theories (theories from neuroscience, etc).
If 10 different scientists who work at the object level, using the same word but with a different reference, then we have 10 different theories about different phenomena. This is what we need today: more research, not philosophical discussions.
I'd say that comes down to a matter of degree, and as a quibble it's certainly not a scientific theory if it's not worded sufficiently precisely to be testable and falsifiable. With Darwin it was really about where did all the variety of animals come from, and with speciation/variation being a process rather than an event, it really doesn't make much difference how one defines "species" (can't interbreed is a useful starting point). Of course Darwin was also just speculating about some mechanism of hereditability existing, so at the time this was more of a thought experiment than theory.
The trouble with discussion of "consciousness" is the sheer degree of ill-definedness - it is such a hand wavy and multi-facted concept, that it's not possible to even begin any meaningful discussion without defining a better vocabulary and breaking the concept down into pieces. Are you talking about subjective experience, mental awareness, free-will, altered state of consciousness, or what, or more likely simultaneously some mish-mash of all of the above and more!
> The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.
You're right, but that rigorous definition is a significant part of the problem. We have a very difficult time rigorously defining and then debating certain attributes about consciousness or related concepts precisely because the definition and exploration of the definition is what is being debated.
This makes it a very fascinating topic.
For my own pet theory I think consciousness as we like to understand it is an emergent and evolutionary social construct for cooperation amongst humans, and different people may have different levels of conscious thoughts, similar to how mammals are conscious in a different way amongst other species. It's a spectrum. There are, in fact, philosophical zombies.
> with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
You're forgetting that attempting to have a "rational" discussion is itself a bias inherited from the many centuries of intellectual development that occurred between the middle ages and now - the parts that the article conveniently skips over entirely.
The "debate" here doesn't function to generate an answer, but to narrow down the scope of the question into the very constrained domain. When ppl debate "consciousness" they are re-affirming their opinion that humans are inherently rational agents (hence "scire" -> "to know"), rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul".
> rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul"
You're just substituting one ill-defined, and overloaded, word ("consciousness") with a bunch of others ("live", "feel", etc), and asserting that to you they mean something different.
It's impossible to have a discussion on this basis, and I'm sure to many people "soul" is exactly what they mean by "consciousness", or at least part of it. It's no less reasonable that an AI has a soul as that it is conscious - it depends on exactly what you define those words to mean.
People have made due with conceptual fuzziness, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that discussion is impossible without absolute conceptual clarity. All you are saying is that using these terms does not allow you to have a specific kind of discussion - which, a lot of the time, is one that reduces humans to mathematical objects that perform computations.
Yet, if that is your goal and the definition of "soul" or "consciousness" are entirely arbitrary decisions that you don't care about - then it's worth remembering the adage "you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you".
Yes, but as noted elsewhere in this thread it's a matter of degree. Consciousness is such an ill-defined and overloaded word that it's hard to say it really means anything - it's more of an all-encompassing term for a bunch of largely subjective phenomena.
I don't disagree - for a long while I believed that the study of "consciousness" was the result of a linguistic mixup and best dealt w/ via Wittgenstein.
However, if you move past surface appearances, you can think about what kind of cultural "work" is being done spending effort on this mixup. What's happening is that, in the noosphere, the cloud of concepts around "consciousness" is battling it out with the cloud of concepts around "soul" over which cloud of concepts best describes what it means to be human, with big implications on what it means to be good person. Now we're dealing with a mix of Aquinas and Latour.
I'm not a professional neuroscientist for sure, but I've certainly spent decades thinking about things like intelligence and evolution, perception, qualia, have read dozens of papers on subjects like cortical microarchitecure, etc, and would like to think I'm well enough informed to be able to discuss things like intelligence and consciousness.
I don’t really care about whether you are “qualified” by your criteria, because I don’t hold your view that there is some specific level of education that allows one to hold and express an opinion. My point was more to point out some potential hypocrisy.
No one is obligated to humor or debate amateurs because no one is obligated to humor or debate anyone[1]. But being an amateur does not mean that the person couldn’t hold a valid or meaningful viewpoint. Dismissing someone’s opinion specifically because they are an amateur is just a special case of appeal to authority. If their opinions are fundamentally flawed, then those can be addressed head on without resorting to insisting that they don’t have the right qualifications to participate in the discussion.
[1] The “faster than light” neutrinos come to mind, too. Scientists involved in the experiments explicitly said they didn’t have time to entertain amateur theories, a valid statement.
Being an amateur has no bearing on how knowledgeable someone is about a subject, but for an opinion to be useful (or just interesting) it needs to be backed up with some grounded rationale, otherwise it is just that - an opinion.
Trouble is you don’t how much time anyone else has spent studying. How can you tell who else has “spent decades thinking about things like intelligence and evolution, perception, qualia, have read dozens of papers on subjects like cortical microarchitecure”? You can’t but you still dismiss others as unqualified.
> it needs to be backed up with some grounded rationale
This was my point. Address the claim and not the qualifications.
There is no gatekeeper to internet discussions, so nobody is stopping you from joining in.
If you feel qualified to add something useful to the discussion, or just to throw your unqualified opinion in for that matter (whichever the case may be), then go ahead. I'm certainly not stopping you.
As may be expected the conversation is already a garbage fire.
My best contribution to that sort of debate is experience with general anesthesia. I recall being in a disconnected state wondering idly if I had died of complications without any fear as I could not feel my heartbeat or embodied emotions. That implies a heavily embodied component to consciousness. It is all body so not quite dualism but it does provide some limited observational evidence of distinct components. Combine that with what I have heard about the mechanism of anesthesia working by disabling nerve transmission that suggests that a disembodied but supported brain which does not have neural access to sensory feedbacks would be rather stoic to emotionless.
That's nice. Do you have a go to for conversations with less mindful people or people without a training in meditation/mindfulness? For example, for people who have no experience and yet speak from a frame of strong identity and identification to their thoughts as though they are them, I like to ask "Who's the one who witnesses the thoughts?" and it kind of ties a brain-knot in their head.
Funny enough most people who don't want to meditate or practice mindfulness, also get dissuaded from the dissonance this brings up, and like the old me, just move on to more comfortable conversation.
From an internal perspective, thoughts are both the witness and the witnessed.
The problem only comes when trying to apply our language which is firmly rooted in this artificial dualism.
"It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try."
It's 'one' of the few places? That behaviorism seems to be define almost all modern discourse from politics to health care including about 95% of Hacker News posts as far as I can tell...
Certainty would definitely appear to be premature when we don’t understand the physical characteristics or causes of consciousness. Hell, we don’t quite yet understand a cell in good mechanical detail, much less the full body/mind of a primate. Don’t know is a reasonable posture, but of course the investigators get enthused with hypothesis generation and testing. That is their job and their karma is to over generalize each useful model.
I still think we're looking for a shadow by shining a torch at it personally; we have a rather chauvinistic view on what consciousness 'ought' to look like and this fundamentally shapes what we're looking for. We assume that consciousness has to resemble human consciousness, something we can't even measure very well in people let alone extrapolate into other kinds of being.
For the sake of argument, let's take a particularly long-lived species and say oak trees have some form of awareness. An oak tree's perception of time would be completely out of line with ours, from its perspective it'd be this writhing, visibly expanding thing that can't even register individual humans since we're there for such a short period of its existence. If it were aware on some level, we wouldn't be able to tell either way because we can only really conceive of human-like minds; even though an 'oak tree mind' would look nothing like ours because it would be driven by entirely different evolutionary conditions. I don't think it's possible for us to be entirely objective when it comes to naturalistic theories of consciousness, we cannot avoid being biased by our 'version' of what we're studying.
Mold is reactive in some senses but an equal mass of brain cells probably can be said to produce more abstract computation about self and other matters.
It may not ultimately be very useful to define consciousness so broadly as to include the tree whilst being willing to include mind's unalike our own.
It seems to me that it must necessarily include abstract computation inclusive of the self and volition separate from simple processes taking place in individual cells.
While it may be accurate to describe our own selves as the sum of our individual cells operations it is also possible to look at it top down as accurately.
I'm not sure that the tree grew towards the light or the mold towards moisture is as meaningful a concept as the monkey climbed the tree to eat the fruit and I don't think the distinction is the similarities to self.
I don't believe that the tree had within itself an organized center with a computed symbol for light or growth.
I also don't think it contains any ability to change the fixed computation represented by the system of it's cells or to arrive at different speculative computation of past or future.
I think what many people are doing is looking for something that is fundamentally a higher dimensional object (dim>4) which casts a 4D spacetime shadow (our bodies) by shining a torch on _that_ shadow. Still doesn't allow for any satisfying direct observation.
This kind of dimensional analysis is part of the focus of my current research program.
I suppose, it's a self fulfilling prophecy: supernaturalists aren't concerned with predictive power, they pursue intuition power, if a theory confirms a preconceived hypothesis, then it's a quality theory.
I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.
Anil Seth calls the "hard problem" at best a distraction, or hand-waving to avoid answering what he calls the real problem: linking what we experience to the physical brain mechanisms.
In his theory, consciousness is a "controlled hallucination" about what is outside of us. Our senses serve to reinforce or correct the predictions our brains are making. (we have a serious latency issue)
You'll find he's saying a lot of the same things you just wrote.
Sadly he passed away. I enjoyed listening to him on Michael Shermer and Sean Carroll's podcasts back in the day.
What you may like are the debates on the 2014 Greenland Cruise. Dennett, Chalmers, Goff, Churchland, Prinz and other luminaries debating the "hard problem". The "roast" sessions where they dive into each others work is priceless and highly worth listening to.
There is a very good explanation here - not what brains do, but what brains MUST do. Can we walk left and right at the same time? Can we drink coffee before brewing it? No. There is a bottleneck, a serial action bottleneck on the body. So the parallel brain activity must serialize on the output channel. It has to, or face ruin. If action is serialized in time by physical necessity, then information processing must also unify before action in order to support it. We must act as one -> we must cognize as one -> or perish. There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
I doubt your conclusion that unified action needs unified mentation. One may take unified action without achieving unity of the contents of the brain. Acting with instantaneous regret if you will, flying by the seat of your pants, etc. The brain seems to be able to let competing subsystems alternate getting expressed in action.
Not all brain activity is unified, I just claim it must unify on the output side - behavior and language.
But this is not a brain or organism only problem. Even a cell must unify in crucial moments such as division and chemotaxis. A cell either divides or not, no mid point. To persist it must unify at some moments in its activity, yet it is a distributed system of many parts.
The core principle here is - what is the unit of selection? the cell survives or not as a whole, the organism also survives or not as a whole, not organ by organ. Selection chooses the mechanisms that are viable.
Idk, I'm pretty good at continuing a conversation while handling the busywork of navigating a cafe. Or even riding my bicycle... The brain is a massively parallel bag of meat. We get some real advantages from focus, but the brain does just fine juggling its many inputs and outputs.
Can you state in plain terms what this actually means?
> There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
This is of course not true. I’ve watched people trip over their own feet because the simultaneously tried to go both left and right. I’ve done it myself.
And this says nothing about consciousness. Most actions are not conscious.
There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing
What? Why not?
It's physically possible in terms of limb motion. It's very difficult for most people to actually do, sure; but impossible?
or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way
There's the idea that a lot of the brain's "conscious decisions" are actually post-hoc rationalisations of unconscious decisions. If so, there's no reason those decisions have to be unified. Maybe the consciousness of the decision and its outcomes must be unified; maybe that's somehow connected to what consciousness really is. Or maybe not!
And for that reason, we'll never discover the soul. It will perpetually be that "something" that we are missing in our understanding of things. Assume for a minute that we have the basic picture correct, that there is no non-physical soul: your belief would have us searching for the rest of time! Isn't it best to suspend the question?
There probably isn't any simple causative explanation (as in the example you provide). The brain is the most complex structure we know of and "self" arises from that deep complexity; this is an answer that I'm content with, as anything more in-depth / closer to the "metal" would quickly exceed my ability to understand it.
Maybe - let's assume that we could simulate a human brain to a high level of fidelity starting from a known good state and emulate its input and output. Do you think we could poke at it enough and ask the simulated person about their experience enough to discover the mechanisms behind what we experience as a soul? It's logistically and computationally insanely complex to pull off, but if we could build such a system, I don't see why we couldn't eventually figure it out in another thousand years' time (assuming we don't destroy ourselves or do something that sets back the evolution of technology massively between now and then).
“We experience it, therefore it exists” proves less than it seems. It proves there is an experience to explain. It does not prove that consciousness is what it appears to be from the inside. A mirage is still seen, but the thing it seems to show is not really there. Consciousness might be real in that same limited sense, while our folk model of it could be deeply wrong.
This is a really good point and something that I think is important to clarify at the very start of the discussion. In that way, I'm less interested in explaining consciousness than explaining experience.
When I read this article, I felt like the author was only making his points by convoluting the two. By the end, I felt like, for an expert on the subject, I don't think he actually groks the fundamental point.
I think the article has an interesting argument here. We also "experience" the sun going up and down in the sky. But actually this is an illusion of our vantage point on a spinning rock.
We don't experience the sun going up and down, we experience its direction changing relative to the horizontal plane, and it is not an illusion: it matches planetary motion. The mistake arises when interpreting the raw experience. Sensations don't lie.
Another example: Metal feels colder than plastic, but the sensation is right again: you are loosing more heat when touching metal.
But the sensation in a sense is a lie. Cold strictly speaking isn't real. And for much of human existence we spoke of it as if it was a substance due exactly to this specific sensatation.
But the debate isn't whether consciousness exists. It's largely whether it's the product of normal neurons doing their thing or something more. Also the details of how it works of course.
Chalmers’ claim is that the fact that it really exists and the fact that we can talk about it are unrelated and basically a coincidence, which I think is completely absurd… If you really believe in qualia IMO you have to bite the bullet and say that there must be physics that we don’t yet understand.
We're approaching the definition of magic here aren't we. And I think this is what really divides this discussion. There is one set of people who insist that things must be explainable. And if something is explainable, it yields to science and is no longer magic.
On the other side, you have people who insist that there are things which do not yield to science. So whether they admit it or not, they insist upon the existence of magic.
In fact, the definition of magic might as well be, that which does not yield to explanation. The only question once you believe in magic is, what alternative epistemology do you accept? Scripture? Tradition? Divine revelation?
Not at all. Saying that science does not yet explain some observed phenomenon is precisely how one starts to make scientific progress. Saying that qualia don’t exist because they are “magical” is like someone telling you lightning doesn’t exist before the understanding of electromagnetism.
> On the other side, you have people who insist that there are things which do not yield to science. So whether they admit it or not, they insist upon the existence of magic.
This is a really valuable framing for this sort of conversation.
Your arguments reminds me of logical loop. A implies B, B implies A. It doesn't mean that A and B are true. You have to be conscious to experience and to be conscious means to to experience. Maybe we are not conscious after all and do not experience? Maybe it is just a lie we are telling ourselves?
This is why the comparison to people’s reactions to Darwin/evolution is just wrong - people had thought experimented things that looked like evolution, but when we were able to measure it we could start linking it to the real physical world. AFAIK consciousness is the only thing that we know for certain is real, but have no way of measuring it. People are still conscious when they lose sense of self, and blacking out or surgical sedatives might be related to memory more than losing consciousness, these affect qualities of consciousness but aren’t consciousness itself. This article reads like “I f’ing love science” level thinking, saying people are ignorant for thinking consciousness is not just a physical process, but zero understanding of scientific process.
the proof of our lack of understanding is the countless things we can measure but cannot explain.
Good on point response in my opinion. A lot of people want to close doors because those doors being open makes them uncomfortable. This is a mistake. If you want to be rigorous about what is then you need to be equally rigorous about what is not.
You are asking for evidence of absence, and that is the entire point. We don't understand brains, therefore this one specific theoretical feature (consciousness) must exist. Why should we stubbornly endorse a tautology for which there is no evidence?
Experience is subjective. That's why we need science in the first place.
Chalmers: “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.”
"A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"
No, I mean that the logical possibility itself is neither obvious nor intuitive. If you physically copied me atom by atom, every instinct in me says that the result has conscious experience. I'd need some serious convincing otherwise.
This argument sounds nice at a surface level, but seems deeply incoherent and wrong in a way I haven’t yet put my finger on precisely. How can you say this:
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.
followed by this:
> The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
followed by this:
> Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.
So it isn’t describable by physics but it is only physics? And there are no closures or gaps? Ok sure in one sense we can say everything is connected, but this article seems to me to demonstrate effectively that without these divisions, pursuing understanding of it is essentially intractable.
He seems to be describing the dissolution of some construct in his worldview that I am having a difficult time relating to. Anyone have a different take?
I think there is a gap, but it's not what they think it is - it is the gap between description and execution. Chalmers wants a description level explanation for the properties of execution, which is not possible. He wants to get for free what is an irreducible recursion between cost and action. The gap is not ontological, it is epistemic.
It just means we can't know without paying the price, walking the path of the process, step by step. No jumping ahead. We can't even predict a 3 body system far ahead. We can't tell the properties of a code without executing it. We can't compress most processes, their execution is the shortest description. Chalmers wants 3p to eat for free at the table of 1p.
Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.
I didnt say that I solved the problem, merely that I, myself, know that I am concious.
If we go falsifiability, again, I can equally say how do I know your concious, or even that how do I know youre alive and breathing beyond the moments that I myself am observing you?
> Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable.
This is an metaphysical discussion, so falsifiability is kind of irrelevant. All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable - including materialism and physicalism just as much as dualism or monism or theism.
> All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable
This is not true, there are many metaphysical positions that are falsifiable.
For example, "anything shaped like an apple is an apple" is a metaphysical position. It defines what it means to be apple-ish. You could hold that metaphysical position and also "apples are always made of plant material" as another position you hold at the same time.
Then you could falsify the metaphysical position by presenting a stone carved into the shape of an apple. You could choose to deny reality and change your physical definition (what the definition of the word "apple" is), but if you think logically the evidence constructively falsifies the original metaphysical position.
I think what you might have been trying to say is that people tend to adopt metaphysical positions which are non-falsifiable. Yes, they do, but that doesn't mean no metaphysical arguments can be resolved through logic and experiment.
True, I should have been more careful with my wording. My point was actually that unfalsifiable metaphysical statements are not invalid in the same way that unfalsifiable physical/scientific statements are.
So yes, some metaphysical statements are falsifiable, and some have in fact been falsified over time. And, very importantly, many of the biggest metaphysical questions have no known falsifiable answers (at least none that are not already known to be false, of course).
It would only be unfalsifiable if the connection was one-way, i.e. our souls receive input from the world but have no effect on the world. We would effectively be passengers in a meat puppet, and any influence we have on that puppet is purely imaginary. Certainly possible, but not usually how it's conceived, and then you have the question of how the meat puppets got the idea of consciousness and souls in the first place.
If souls can influence the world, as is the common belief for souls, then in principle that influence or its absence can be detected.
Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul:
Many of these already gave up on dualism: they already rejected the idea that mind and body are separate (e.g. panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a feature of reality, that all matter possesses "experience" of some kind).
I believe nature is all there is. If we could replicate a human brain several times, and make each 'human brain' receive the exact same input data (sounds, sights, smells e.t.c.) from the moment they 'exist' until the end of their lifetime, I truly think that each of these brains will make precisely the same decisions (and each of these 'brains' would think they were conscious and in control of their lives).
In my eyes, consciousness is simply a natural phenomenon that can be explained but we just lack the understanding at this moment. Time and time again we have made this mistake of assuming there is something supernatural about the things we cannot comprehend and only a few centuries later it is completely understood scientifically. I think consciousness will be a similar case but will take more time.
I think supernatural things don't exist by definition. If ghosts would exist, they would be just natural.
The real question is whether there is a two way link between consciousness and the physical world. Obviously the physical world is observed by consciousness, so that direction checks out. What about the other direction? Is the physical world at all influenced by consciousness? The mindfulness folks seem to argue: no. They argue that consciousness is like a person watching a movie, where the movie is experience. The person is so immersed that it thinks, it controls the movie, but in reality it's a fully passive observer. But this can't be true! Otherwise, the discussion of consciousness could never have come up in human history. A population of "philosophical zombies" could never initiate this discussion. So somehow consciousness must cause physical neurons to activate. The movie knows about the person watching!
Nature vs. nurture is also a popular debate. This scenario you described, even with nature being all there is, doesn't imply all our actions and thoughts are shaped by our environment.
You’re saying it’s all 100% deterministic. But at the quantum level, things are probabilistic. The hundred brains with the same input data might make different decisions like how each ball dropped in the Galton board chooses a different route.
But I agree with your overall premise. It can be all understood scientifically. There is nothing supernatural about things we cannot comprehend.
Philosophers have had these rifts(an similar lines of arguments) forever.
From Plato vs Aristotle (300 to 400 BC) (idea of forms vs nicomachean),
In India Adi Shankara (around 700 CE) vs Madhavacharya (1200 CE) (dualism vs non-dualism) - there is a common thread to all of these arguments.
But eventually, for me it comes down to a statement J Krishnamurti made (& it makes the most sense to me): "The self is a problem that thought cannot solve"
These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".
Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
> But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating.
My reaction here: it seems to me that the p-zombie by construction doesn't have a "me" to be convinced, so "physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well." doesn't make sense.
Therefore the demonstration that the argument is self-defeating fell appart, and I stopped finding the article insightful.
I think what is needed, and what will happen, is to pull apart concepts like intelligence, consciousness, and language use, and create narrower and more rigorous definitions of what those are.
My go-to analogy is the concept of heat and warmth, which was the subject of philosophical speculation and inquiry for centuries. But ultimately it was not useful or predictive until it was redefined very narrowly by scientists as a specific measurable attribute of a collection of molecules. Arguably this redefinition itself was an important component of the establishment of “science” as a discipline distinct from philosophy.
This let scientists work with heat rigorously, even though non-scientists still have a largely colloquial vocabulary about it, e.g. “this coat is warmer than my last one.” On matters like consciousness, we’re all still smashed together into colloquial land, arguing about definitions when we think we are arguing about concepts.
I do think the current advancements in AI may help us develop the new vocabulary we need to quantitatively reason about intelligence and language, and in doing so, help better define / constrain what the we mean by consciousness. We think of LLMs now as a tool we can use to do work, but another view is that they are a sensor that directly correlates physical inputs to intelligent outputs. Sort of like how burning can be used to measure the energy contained in various materials, in addition to keeping us warm.
There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.
> the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics.
There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.
If qualia is just an emergent property, it should follow that ethics exists just as a means to achieve a practical end like order or societal stability. What would be the answer to "in an isolated universe, would torturing a being capable of experiencing qualia be good, bad or neither?". I can't accept it would be neither. Pain is negative and that's obvious to me even though I'm a masochist. Suffering is negative if you want to get more precise.
I don't know what qualia is, but it IS something. Some people don't seem to get any arguments and debates about it, at all. Others do. I doubt the people that don't get it are zombies but it's weird that someone can't even comprehend what the issue is about. When I say "red" or "pain", they talk about neurons and whatnot. Of course that's true, but don't they feel the redness and the pain subjectively in a way that makes them question how that feeling relates to the atoms, neurons and other levels of abstraction could be used to describe the physical reality?
And I think, having read a bunch of philosophy years ago that solved nothing, dualism or not is not the right question right now, in our level of understanding. It's not even the right answer because what's "physical" is not well defined either. If we can explain qualia, why would that explanation not count as a "physical" one? If there's some logic to it, it's as physical as anything else.
Lots of ill-defined questions and assumptions. I think we should accept qualia is not understood and won't be for some time. We should realize we can suffer and so can beings similar to us. Where do we draw the line - we'll have to base that on what we know about biology. To me it's obvious many animals are capable of suffering. I think that's a good place to start with our ethics. Suffering is shit, let's reduce it as much as possible.
Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop.
I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with the very simple like this and recursively building more complex predictors. When they predict correctly, happy feedback reinforces the connections that are firing, when they are wrong, they weaken. Just a really simple feedback algorithm that is super robust.
So the brain is building this world model, and it's essentially gradually compressing a description of the environment into a structure made of neurons. And this is the ultimate survival tactic: model the environment explicitly in your head, then adapt your behaviour to fit it. The better you are adapating to future states (dodging that tree as you run) the better survival chance you have.
At some point (complete speculation) we then begin to do something quite strange: we develop a world model _of ourselves_. We get to a level of sophistication where we begin to predict the future states of our own brains. This might emerge naturally as a way to compress existing learnt behaviour. For example, we re-learn to follow lines in a smarter way, particularly as other parts of the brain learn useful things that we can re-use in our line following. This treats our existing model as a cost function, and we learn a model of the model. But it eventually starts to model the higher-level models the brain has, higher up the abstraction stack.
And somehow, the modelling of our brain function creates a chaotic feedback loop that leads to the sensation of consciousness. It's super handwavey, I know, but somehow this recursion feeds awareness. It's like the abilty to see yourself thinking. Consider meditating and the way words appear in consciousness... you get to a point where you can observe what you're going to say before you say them, and I conjecture that is the modelling of the model that's going on.
And this is useful for survival, as you can optimise the way you think, compressing your circuits further, but also has this weird side-effect of creating awareness.
It also explains why consciousness takes time to develop - because you need to develop a model of yourself, but before that you need a model of the world.
Considering the brain functioning as prediction machine, we are constantly correcting the error between sensory perception and our inner reality. This is classic (closed) control loop[1] with self-correcting characteristics updated by adaptation through learning and experience.
At first the process is subconscious, then chaos enters as our conscious awareness develops, morphing the control loop into second or third order states of "correcting corrections" as we perform inner tasks such as ruminating, or external tasks such as group discussion and logical planning.
The perfect prediction machine would be a simulation running an entire up-to-date universe model, but between our limited physical resources and available energy in reality, our evolved aim is efficiency, by creating a state of awareness and reactive patterns with minimal information (lowest entropy). We do this by making assumptions, testing the world, then processing the response and updating our control loop. The tradeoff is lack of precision, as a model without complete information has guaranteed errors.
Children who form a more realistic core worldview through guidance, opportunities and experience are best set up to create solid foundations which are more adaptable to future unexpected situations. Whether this is learning emotional response in social settings or math, the ability to integrate future conscious experience depends on early neuronal structures formed by subconscious expectations of the world. If measurement error is too great from expectations and our current loop/wavelength, our options are to discard this information or learn from it by reflecting on sources of inevitable prediction error through reasoning.
This theory maps very well onto (at least some parts of) modern neuroscience; how emotions are made is taking this model, that the brains MO is predicting how the body will need to be tuned in the near future, as a way to explain how emotions arise and are perceived. “How Emotions are Made” by LisaFeldman Barrett.
This is essentially where the field is going, started with predictive processing by Friston with his free energy principle, combined into Hofstadter’s “I am
a strange loop” and then the continuing thrust with applying the FEP as well as Rosenthal’s higher order theories and Graziano’s attention schema theory.
I'll add a comment that hopefully won't get buried. The hard problem that Rovelli is talking was, I think, the first time someone said something in the field of consciousness that people could (at the time) agree on. Not many people were openly discussing in the 90's in academic settings.
It was proposed by Chalmers as a young undergrad at the Science of Consciousness conference. I have been attending for awhile and really enjoy it. There are so many opinions and thoughts on this post, if you are really into thinking about consciousness, this year the conference will be in San Diego. It's a long day of lectures, followed by evenings of great conversations. https://cs2026.org/
I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?
I think people focus a lot on the dangers of erasing consciousness as a moral entity, but it strikes me that something which is so loosely defined and for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable carries its own dangers too. Especially given so many of us are happy to kill and eat many creatures that pass many proposed tests of consciousness.
It's probably sensible to use more strongly defined terms like humanity, self-awareness, cognitive capability, empathy and so on. And to treat them somewhat separately rather than trying to bundle it all together.
But people want there to be something special about us which can be defined as something separate from us, in a neutral, universalist sounding way which also happens to be relatively exclusive - I think because there's this desire to make the concept of a soul have an equivalent in scientific realism for the purposes of discussing philosophy in a secular way.
It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
If we accept subjective feeling as definitive proof that something exists, that opens a Pandora’s box of entities. People have deeply held subjective beliefs about things like God, afterlife experiences, out-of-body experiences, and many others. It seems unfair to me to dismiss this kind of subjective evidence in these cases, while accepting it without question for experience of consciousness.
It’s a subjective experience argument. As a conscious person, if someone tells me they don’t believe in consciousness, then I’m inclined to believe they have a reason for saying that. They must not be experiencing consciousness the same way I am.
Interestingly, a non-trivial number of people have no internal monologue (https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...). It would be reasonable to assume the experiential side of consciousness is on a spectrum, with extreme edge cases on both ends. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some people are barely experiencing it, and some not at all. It would certainly explain to me (someone who experiences it quite intensely) why some would claim it doesn’t exist. Because for them, it might not.
"Earth is flat" is an objective statement. "I experience consciousness" is subjective, similarly to "I am experiencing pain". If someone tells me "pain doesn't exist" while I know it exists (because I have experienced it), I can be certain that that person is wrong. Even though I can't prove it to him.
I've been thinking the same (that people who claim it doesn't exist don't have it) but it had never occurred to me that it might be on a spectrum. It actually makes perfect sense.
No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.
It's a fair point, though. If one rejects a subjective experience without any doubt, the most plausible explanation is that they don't have that subjective experience.
If I tell you that I see numbers as colours, and you say "that's not possible", I would assume that you don't have synesthesia [1]. I wouldn't doubt the fact that I have it [2].
Similarly, if some people argue that consciousness is not something like I describe, I would naturally assume that they don't experience it the same way as I do.
It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.
It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.
At least mammals do show recognizable signs of pain and suffering. That is good enough for me; I don't know for sure other people can suffer, but I assume they do based on their behavior I see.
Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own:
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”
This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".
> We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?
We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.
> Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious
Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.
The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.
(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).
> We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.
I wish I'd phrased it better, my point was more that early vision systems had weird issues, which we were able to figure out by looking at what part of the image those models paid attention to and realising it often wasn't even part of the animal in the photo, but e.g. the plants around them. We literally had to think about what made a cat a cat to make AI good at recognising cats.
This would also impact clustering.
That said, I think even for humans there's a similar issue: we spent millennia clustering things into groups and labelling those groups, which is why the Catholic church had rules about no meat on Good Friday but fish was fine and beavers counted as fish (and there is now a podcast titled around the idea there is no such thing as a fish*). For cats, I don't see it myself but the fossa is described as "cat-like".
the quote from the article is just a contrived tautology that misunderstands the nature of the problem. the dualism problem is not about finding an explanation for why what we call a cat is what we call a cat. it's that you can measure anything you want but nevertheless despite confidently establishing the size of a cat, the appearance of a cat, the behavior of cats, a sophisticated taxonomy of related species labeled "felines", surveying people to find out what cats are to them, what a cat is to me is not what a cat is to you
I'm not particularly well-versed in philosophy, but what's the dualism here?
Of course what a cat _is_ to me is not what a cat _is_ to you, because we necessarily have different memories of interactions with cat-like beings. If you show some babies a cat for the first time, they'll necessarily see it from different viewing perspectives. Even if you put VR glasses on them and show the exact same video, they'll have different contexts: "I first saw a cat when I was sitting next to my friend", "I first saw a cat when I was thinking of ice cream", etc.
But they all saw the same cat, they'll see many other cats, who are all similar. So everyone will understand that "things like these are cats", but everyone will have their own understanding of a "cat" because their memory is different.
I don't have the energy at present to fully develop my thoughts but one thing I'll say is that in my view they did *not* see the same cat. It was the same collection of flesh & bone on four legs, certainly. But it is not the same cat.
Heidegger best revealed to me the limitations of supposedly "objective" thinking.
Heraclitus: "No man steps in the same river twice"
My take is that we are all living an illusion which is the continuous perception of a ‘self’. All people are inside the bubble of the self as it is part and parcel of the human condition and baked into the neural pathways that are created while still in the womb. It is like an operating system that is locked down to running only one application ‘self’. It is only when there is glitch in the system that the self relinquishes its stranglehold over our consciousness and it becomes just another background process alongside other mental processes. The ghost in the system disappears.
> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".
There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out is consciousness. It's reasonable to think it will also fall eventually.
It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience.
Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, increasingly complex unanswered questions about phenomena. It is reasonable to think that if/when we reduce consciousness through science we will find that there are more increasingly complex unanswered metaphysical gaps.
Reducing a complex phenomena to more basic structure and dynamics just is to eliminate any open metaphysical questions about that phenomena. That's why the big philosophical debates center around monism vs dualism rather than n-pluralism. Science has dispatched all other essences from mainstream consideration.
Really? You are telling me that the discovery/development of general relativity or quantum mechanics has not thrown new increasingly complex doubts on the accuracy of previous physical models due to these new "essences" implying contradictions with classical "essences". What could possibly make you so confident that new datapoints, theories, and discoveries as it relates to consciousness will be completely flawless?
You're not using the term essence in the way philosophers mean it. An essence is a categorical descriptive/reasoning context. In mathematical terms, an essence is a lot like a descriptive/measurement basis. A naive scientist sees a world full of distinct reasoning contexts, length is categorically distinct from speed, which is categorically distinct from water, which is categorically distinct from life. The progress of science has been to progressively reduce reasoning contexts/measurement bases to other contexts/bases thus leading to a more unified theory of nature.
Quantum mechanics does increase the physics reasoning contexts owing to the incompatibility between classical and quantum mechanics. But this is not an in principle divergence in the way that philosophers understand essences. We can describe and reason about quantum mechanics and classical mechanics using the same language and the same descriptive tools, namely mathematics. When it comes to phenomenal consciousness and physical behavior, we cannot reason about them using the same descriptive language. Hence they count as distinct categorical essences until we discover the bridging principles that reduce consciousness to physical behavior.
I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.
The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.
They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.
God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.
But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.
I enjoyed the article, and I'm actually, surprisingly, fairly convinced by his idea there is something off about things like the imaginary philosophical zombie[1].
I think that the idea of a soul or spirit could be both interesting and also self evident though, so it's odd to read these being thrown out in the same bath water.
I.e if we imagine our simplified brains as points of matter with signals being sent between; then the kind of experience we have as human beings is more about the relationships between the matter. I don't see that as a harmful duality as if it were the case, it would shed light on what we understand and how. We're still physical but exist in "spirit of matter", different but bound. No magic required.
I'd see this as fairly separate from the question of why we witness ourselves, which seems more prone to mental trickery.
Rovelli also has some fun popsci book on how Time might be constructed. Mostly a fun read but the theories, when he gets to them, are an interesting take. Highly recommend.
[1] However if Carlo Rovelli were a philosophical zombie, are these exactly the responses he would give - as it wouldn't "see" the moment of awareness and be confused by implied significance? I think so.
I'm not sure the article really adds up. The hard problem of consciousness in a normal definition is:
>to explain how and why organisms have qualia or subjective experience. (from Wikipedia)
(or "why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all" in the article)
He then supposes this "assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body". But there probably isn't so he jumps to:
>So, there is no “hard problem of consciousness.”
But that doesn't explain how/why there are qualia and the like.
I personally think how/why qualia it a real hard question but scientifically tractable.
A little guessing. You can assume we evolved - much evidence - and so consciousness has survival / reproductive functionality. The brain has billions of sensory, memory and other neurons and they have to compress that data down to something a creature can act on - should it feed of run away etc. So conscious awareness is probably something like a situation summary you can act on.
One interesting thing is there is a lot of unconscious awareness and actions going on - when you walk across a room the nervous system has to process all sorts of stuff about your body position and coordinate dozens of muscles but you are normally not consciously aware of it, so presumably the conscious bit of you brain is some small portion linked to the thinking talking and remembering bits.
I think much of the subtlety of conscious experience is because there is a lot of unconscious things underlying it. You see say a red apple and it's linked to memories of apples, instincts for food, evolved associations with red, your mood and the like. It all gets reduced in something like a lossy compression to what you are aware of.
This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.
Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.
Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off.
> That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon.
That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity.
Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief.
I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience."
And this bit:
> I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
right after
> Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument.
So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.
> So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Those are not conflicting arguments.
The former means that we understand all the processeses, but they are complex, therefore we don't have enough brain/compute power to properly model it.
The latter means that we don't understand some of those processes, so we need additional theories that explain them.
One can dismiss the first while finding the second plausible.
I suppose complexity defines to me as something that's inherently hard to understand. The definition of "complex" is "difficult to understand." The move I don't agree with is proceeding to posit "because we don't understand them yet, there must be something special about them."
The reason TFA (and, frankly, your comment as well) pissed me off is that they drip with condescension to the core while completely sidestepping the problem in the first place. We have plenty of other examples of places where complexity can give rise to emergent behavior, but those behaviors are still easy to understand in the problem space of the domain - e.g. I may be amazed that I can converse with an LLM and it feels like it completely "understands" the conversation, but I don't have any conceptual problems with the fact that it's still just next token prediction under the covers.
But as hackinthebochs put it very well, in my opinion: "The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function."
So my negative reaction is based in the belief that what the TFA is doing is saying "there is no hard problem", and the response is "but why, because 'phenomenal consciousness' can't be described in terms of structure and function like every other instance that we understand that arises from complexity", and then TFA just gives a host of complexity examples that are completely unconvincing (and, again, feel like they completely miss the problem is the first place) and just basically ends with a dangling, unwarranted "q.e.d."
I think that having a point of view (having an "inside") has a great deal to do with survival. You probably don't need a brain to have a subject. You probably just need dynamics with the right causal structure.
When you look at a cell, you can clearly see how the dynamics are existential and already do the work of classifying inputs as "good" or "bad" (eg: paramecium encounters acid, this triggers an electro chemical cascade in the membrane cortex which results in the organism quickly changing direction away from the bad gradient). There's no mind obviously in the human sense, but the fact remains that this system has developed into something that can discriminate between good and bad for itself, because without this integration, it wouldn't exist.
The cell is as close to a machine as possible. But it's not a machine because people make machines to have specific purposes. Each part is already labeled and designed. You can shut down a machine that's running, and start it back up with very predictable behavior (since you designed it).
The cell is a process that uses physical matter to keep its own possible futures available. Machines also support processes and goals, but these are externally imposed. The cell's ultimate goal is to continue being the reason for its own existence. Maybe this is where all goals come from.
So I guess experience is what happens when you have enough layers above this machinery that you you are no longer connected directly to the world, "you" can only meet the world through internally generated/classified electrochemical states from the body. These states have valence because the system is already organized around maintaining these states within metabolic limits. Think...hunger. You don't feel hungry. You ARE hungry. Hunger is a part of how "you" are constituted.
I'm all in the "brains cause minds" camp. But isn't the main argument here "We accept explanation gaps already in many places, why not also for consciousness?"?
My objection would then be that actually, that's not true. The real statement would be "In everyday life (including science), we accept explanation gaps already in many places"
But this does not mean that we have to accept this particular instance of an explanation gap.
I think that whether we think of consciousness in terms of dualism, or if we think of it as emergent from natural behavior, it really doesn't matter functionally. Either way we are positioning it as something inaccessible from our realm or control.
I believe that we can at least posit some kind of mechanism through which emergence can happen. In my opinion we should look at language and how language evolved. However, i also believe we should expand our study of natural language to things like network protocols, and observe the "protocol hourglass" structure that has emerged from the internet protocol stack.
In my mind, the concepts of control and autonomy are what need to be revisited. We conflate the two: we are autonomous IF we are able to exert control on the environment. However, I think the reality might be that autonomous systems are more similar to an API in the sense that we can interact along the boundary but through the API we cannot exert control over the internal structure of the system (through knowledge or physical control).
> During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.
This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?
Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.
"Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century."
.....
"...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body"
It seems that, until we have a falsifiable test for consciousness, these exercises are pointless. All we have is the ability to externally observe behavior and we can't judge what happens inside someone (or something's) mind. BTW, we don't have a good definition of mind either.
That there's nothing magical or supernatural in our minds and our consciousness is a given, otherwise, this becomes a very silly debate where everyone will have a strong position that can be neither proven nor disproven.
Maybe we are able to constrain what consciousness (or a mind, or a soul) is by figuring out everything it isn't. Does it have a mass? Can we measure its entropy?
We can, to a certain degree, identify images from the visual cortex. What else about the internal state of a brain can we extract? We did that to a fly's brain the other day - a very confused simulated fly that must have been wondering why its world had so low a resolution.
Naturalism and materialism are not married together. Materialism can't claim naturalism just for itself. There are coherent ontologies that are naturalists and not materialists.
The Hard Problem strikes me as a "why" question and humans have a poor track record of ever answering a "why" for a foundational question (at least in a way that we can demonstrate to others). Our most successful explanations build up from simpler things to explain more complex things. But at some point, the explanation bottoms out on things we can't further explain - like the fields in quantum theory. There's currently no further thing below those that explain "why a field theory?"
If we solved the Easy Problems of consciousness, i think we would find ourselves in a similar position where most people would simply accept that we had an explanation and move on but some people with a more philosophical bent would continue to search for underlying explanations.
I think these philosophical arguments boil down to answering the question "what is real?". Contemporary science is presented as an objective theory of reality, but our experiences form the actual starting point for everything that we can ever know about reality, so they ought to be considered real in some sense. The tension begins because, while a physical theory of reality will say that the signals in a brain are real signals, that does not imply the reality of any concepts that those signals may represent. If I imagine something, that does not make it real. But then the same can be argued for all experiences: there are real brain signals associated with them, but that does not imply the reality of those experiences. This lead to a gap in that the physical theory fails to imply, and thus fails to explain, the reality of experience. So, if I believe in the reality of my own experience, then I am left to ask "why is my experience real?", as that is not required or implied by the physical theory of reality.
It sounds like Rovelli's resolution is to acknowledge the centrality of subjective experiences to the formulation of scientific theories, and thus also to any theory of reality. Experiences are the starting point, with the rest being built up from them. Therefore, experiences should also be the first thing added into the bucket of things that one believes to be real. Meanwhile, any physical model of objective reality has a far more tenuous spot in that bucket. We may suspect it to be real through various deductions, but the further away we get from experiences, the more assumptions have to be made to get there. Anyway, I agree that there is no explanatory gap when reality is viewed in this manner. And this is a relatively palatable way to approach the question of reality (compared to, e.g., the mathematical universe hypothesis, which most find unacceptable). But as long as there is debate about what makes up reality and where experiences fit into that, the debate around the hard consciousness problem will continue, and I regard this problem to be of a different character (being far more philosophical) than, say, spiritualism or anti-Darwinism.
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
The answer to whether a submarine can swim tells you more about the person the about the submarine. Meanwhile submarines propel themselves under the waves just fine[1] , and stalk their prey with silent impunity.
Perhaps we should call these discussions "swimming submarine debates"?
Not at all. As the fourth paragraph from the end states, we experience qualia. Rovelli is simply saying that qualia are simply physical processes described from a salient perspective, that is, at a level more abstract than the eletrochemical processes that underlie them.
It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doctor works at a higher, descriptive level, as does the doctor. Where is the pain, what are its qualities (dull, sharp, shallow, deep, burning, etc.).
"We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics."
That's the emergence hypothesis. Largely insufficient [1] and the one of every person that doesn't really understand Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem tends to embrace.
[1] "We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects" there is a confusion about expressions of a phenomenon (referent) and real phenomenons (object). It denies Qualia by reducing it to a verbal expression supported by an insufficient model of the universe (current state of Physics).
To me, the hard problem of consciousness is the link between observable physical activity of matter in the brain, and conscious experience. Science has found correlations between brain activity and experiences. But nothing is known about a mechanism of cause and effect which connects them.
Dualism is probably mistaken. The only evidence we have for anything about physical reality comes from experiences. It does not seem logical to believe that there is a physical reality which is separate from conscious experience. Quantum theory hints at this, with how the observer becomes significant. But this does not make understanding how it all works much easier.
Articles like these just make me think that's its a real possibility that not everyone has consciousness. Like some people are no conscious of their own visual imagery, maybe some people are not conscious at all.
I came here to comment this same thing. I had this idea as a laugh, but I'm taking it more and more seriously as time goes on. There are very confident statements made here that I don't think a conscious human could sincerely claim. If the author isn't taking the piss (and no indication they are) then I strongly suspect they don't have consciousness.
Kind of ironic given the bit of the article that focuses on P-Zombies and how they don't work because they have to be indistinguishable. Well, what if P-Zombies are real, and they are distinguishable, it's just not obvious because the P-Zombies grew up in a world where people talk about consciousness and lots of people around them have it.
Seems like void of any substance if one takes whatever flavor of monism for granted. Just because everything is supposed to be build on the same fundamental building blocks/fluxes/whatever doesn’t mean every phenomenon is caused by constructions of equal complexities.
That is, life referring to something inherently far more complex than inert assemblies remains perfectly valid in many monist perspectives.
[edit: took life rather than consciousness as an example, but the stated argument in the article seems to be equally applicable relevant for both concept, or any concept that suppose that emergent complexity is possible]
a) massive parallelism (although the current AI HW is getting there)
b) clever structure/organization (we are nowhere near close)
c) it is still buggy as hell
I think part of the answer is that AI shows that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. Humans happen to be both.
I think this has been obvious from the other side of the argument forever. Animals obviously have consciousness and emotional responses and they are made of the same living matter we are, but my pet bunnies can’t do natural language or math.
blather.
another example of weak blather of the weeeeeeee! I'm so full of words variety, that fails to interesting or memorable, like someone so high on mushrooms that they are claiming to be able to see there own ears, who if asked what consiousness is will give a similar answer, unless you ask how consiousness relates to rubber bands, which will get a similar answer with rubber band anologies.
> ..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature.
Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that:
what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible.
I may be misunderstanding the article but doesnt the fact that all other science and understanding sits on a continuum of which consciousness has (to my understading) to real footing mean that the problem is dualitic by definition?
Thats not to say that it can't be 'brought into the fold', it may well be, but until it is it has no other place that to sit outside.
I felt like this paper nailed it years a go, and nobody has followed up properly.
The metric involved is basically impossible to compute fully, but easy to approximate. Any online approximation will model everything it can see have changes until it is satisfied.
the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be.
one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.
> can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it?
The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
We all (presumably, although I might wonder about the author) know that consciousness is a thing, we don't have anything like a rigid definition of it. Perhaps we never will, but this kind of hot air is unlikely to ever get us closer to understanding it.
Tiresome article by someone just being contrary for the sake of having something to say.
> The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.
It might as well be that philosophical zombies are mental construct that cannot physically exist, simply because building one will imbue it with 'consciousness' (as, it being the physical copy/simulation, it will be able to simulate also the 'consciousness'), in turn making it non-zombie.
> The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.
Sure, but if you're going to posit a philosophical zombie, don't posit one that has a rich inner life, experiences qualia, and is ridden with self-doubt FFS.
Mention "consciousness" get a slew of incoherent responses. There is no "hard problem." the burden of proof has always been on those who claim there is. whats it like is what it is what it is is what it is like. the question has the innanity of a circle asking "why do I have an interior?"
I've actually been waiting for this. All you need to do is ask the rhetorical "But if there's something that it's like to _be_ [thing / animal / whatever]"
Once you ask that, you never need to explain anything. This is a magical process that can never be touched by observation or explanation.
How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations.
He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event.
If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article.
One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong.
Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.
I really like your response, but it also can help explain why I really dislike this essay.
I fully understand and appreciate that there are lots of things about quantum physics, and heck, the universe at large, that are unsolved and that we don't understand. I would actually expect that in order for us to understand consciousness better that we'll need to fill some of the gaps of the quantum world.
The reason why I didn't like the article is that I felt like it's misrepresenting the problem, as the comment I linked described. I'll try to explain with an analogy: In the late 1800s before the discovery of quantum physics, many physicists felt that the physics of the universe was solved and fully understood - the universe was basically just like a set of billiard balls set in motion a long time ago, and the future position of all those balls could be known if their states were known in the past. In that "pre-quantum" world, people still understood that emergent behavior could arise from complexity (even just classical complexity). This article just felt really hand-wavy to me by arguing "complexity is enough". For example, if a similar article were written in 1899, but then later we discovered quantum physics and eventually had a good understanding of how consciousness can arise from quantum interactions, I suppose the author could state "See, I was right - just more complexity!" But it would totally miss the point that "the missing piece" was actually the discovery of quantum physics in the first place, not just more classical complexity.
So I felt this article was strawmanning the problem to begin with. I don't have to believe in "magic" or "souls" or religion to believe that the tools we have to describe complex emergent phenomena are not sufficient to describe the subjective experience of consciousness, but Rovelli seems to be saying that "more complexity" is just the answer to everything.
I'd say don't be thrown off by the colorful language like "souls." All of science has this language problem and philosophers of science are asked to address the meaning of these kind of words all the time.
Having read a lot of Carlo's work along with Hans Reichenbach's who is coming from the same hardline empirical stance, I think what he's trying to say here is that consciousness or a soul (I prefer the term "volition") arises from natural and physical elements that we can observe. In other words, nothing about consciousness, life, etc comes from beyond the empirical. We are already looking at it.
Does that make sense? He really objects to inserting a god or other axiomatic beliefs and the "soul as entity" must go in that box.
So the hard problem of consciousness is no more once you accept that we have souls. Which is essentially giving the problem a new name and burdening it with more historical baggage.
Michael Pollan's "A World Appears" is a much more interesting and nuanced take. Very much recommended.
It seems wild to me to write a (popular) article about consciousness in the year 2026 without addressing the elephant in the room: we are able to devise computer programs of increasing complexity that replicate more and more behaviors that were once the sole domain of humans, and at what point do we consider such computers to have experience in the sense that we have, and the sense in which calculators and thermostats do not. It seems that Rovelli is content to say that we should call experience the thing that the brain does, which is all well and good if you're a physicalist (and I am) but it does not help you at all explain which features of the brain are necessary for experience.
I think it also helps to sharpen this debate to remember that there is a moral dimension: many have adopted moral systems that widen their sphere of concern and care from the self to the community to the nation to the whole of mankind, usually under the intuitive precept that it is bad to make someone else experience suffering. Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?
> Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?
Such an irony. Humans have has since the bery beginning inflicted pain and suffering on other human beings. We are still doing it directly (e.g., wars) or indirectly (e.g., capitalism). The idea that perhaps in the not so distant future, machines may live better “lives” or be treated better than some humans is pathetic. But here again, there are some pets that live better than a 1000 humans nowadays
I don't know where in my statement you saw the implication that we should not care about bad things happening to other humans, but it was a misapprehension.
But there is dualism in our minds - we have two spheres of brains and one of those is in master position over other and synchronize both parts. As a result the enslaved part of our brains is silent watcher. But sometimes brains get damaged and these mechanisms malfunction.
I've been working through the American pragmatist tradition - James, Pierce, Sellars, Rorty, Brandom.
Something about that background, all the discussions about definitions and representation, the original article talking about dualisms.... It's certainly an experience.
You can already see from the glossy website that this is a well funded propaganda magazine, just like Quantaagazine is essentially funded by the Renaissance Fund, which is invested in AI.
Yes, these magazines do have interesting articles from time to time, but the overt materialistic (not monetary, but anti-idealistic) worldview that traditionally only appeared in communist countries suddenly infests all the rich people's outlets.
Why would it serve the interests of AI companies to promote materialism? It seems to me that idealism would be more in the interest of AI companies to promote, since my impression is idealists are more likely than materialists to believe that AI will never be conscious, and AI being perceived as conscious would be problematic for companies that want to provide AI as a product.
To me it seems consciousness is a log file that records the results of brain activities originating from different parts of the brain.
This log file is loaded into working memory.
I have aspergers and that's sort of how I experience my own consciousness, the result of different brain processes, summarised in a log.
People are mainly subconscious and not that many things propagate to consciousness and get recorded in the log, because it's a bottleneck.
Instead of recording the whole process of emotionally tagging things, people just "feel" something without reasoning. Only the emotional tag or intuition is recorded in the log but not the process to get to it.
Non-verbal communication is emitted and processed subconsciously, which is hard for me because of the autism and I arrived to the conclusion that fundamentally human consciousness is a spectrum and how much is recorded into it depends on neurodiversity.
The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the article succinctly describes this or contributes otherwise
Fully agree, and I am mildly disappointed to see nobody has brought up Maturana and Varela in this entire thread.
The deeper layer is autopoiesis - the conceptual foundation authored by them that embodied/4E cognition builds on.
They defined cognition as a necessary property of self-referencing, self-maintaining boundaries in an information-theoretic/topological sense, not bound to any specific physical process.
This dissolves the dualism Rovelli targets in a way that pure materialist/eliminativist arguments don’t manage cleanly. Autopoiesis is fully physical (mathematically modelable, biologically grounded) but it locates consciousness in structural relationships and informational dynamics rather than a purely physical substrate.
Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) is the contemporary version, and Varela’s later work integrates phenomenology directly.
I hold that it may be possible to use the toolkits of set/category/group/type theory to formalize these relationships.
Would be a vastly different conversation thread here if this work was more well known.
> It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.
Because it leads us down seemingly useful paths that are in fact dead wrong. There is only physics, but at some levels it more convenient to ignore the physics (what is happening in the body) and to describe our experience.
Rovelli is a reductionist, the only logically and physically defensible intellectual position, while dualism is inherently supernatural, invoking phantoms, phenomenology that is purely fictitious.
Ok, but that doesn't really address "pernicious". I understand pursuits of philosophy are inherently concerned with truth, but does not truth mean pernicious? My experience of reading philosophers is limited; is Rovelli just a materialist and that's that? Is this positivism?
My understanding of positivism is, in a nutshell, that its goal is to reduce everything to physics, including social, inter-personal interactions. My read of the article is that Rovelli is focused on the intra-personal, so to that extent it isn't positivism, or is at least a limited, focused positivism. Extending Rovelli's thinking to the inter-personal would be, IMHO, a categorical error: While we may one day be able to fully describe the physics (and electrochemistry, etc.) of everything inside the person, physics is insufficient to describe what happens between people, at least to the extent that what is happening is a result of each person's actions, choices, etc.
I think this where bringing qualia in as a level of abstraction is useful: Everything about us is ultimately operating on our physical hardware, but not everything about us is "just physics", since our "us" (our OS, if you will), makes observations and chooses actions that are determined at least to some extent by the "us", and not just by the physical operations.
At this point, one could bring in Skinner and make everything operational conditioning, or Kahneman for a slightly different take where much of what we observe or consider consciously (the energy-hungry slow system) has been pre-filtered by physical processes that are not available to us (the energy-efficient fast system).
If those lines of thought are correct - and that remains an open question - then we could potentially arrive at a complete positivism wherein everything is determined primarily by our internal physics, though we wouldn't get predictability for the same reason that we cannot solve the three-body-problem analytically or predict the weather accurately for all time or predict with certainty the motions of the planets, etc.: There are too many inter-dependent variables, and modelling will always lag actual behaviour.
I think we are on safe ground saying that intra-body behaviour is all physics, and on safe ground describing some of the physics responsible for what we call thought, e.g., neuropsychological processes, but at some point we need to model things differently to continue to make sense, make progress. We get away from just-physics at higher levels of abstraction, with the challenge being to describe the transitions from one model level to another (corporeal electro-chemistry to reflective thought and action to inter-personal relations to sociology and economy).
Sort of like how we know that everything is quantum mechanics at the appropriate scale, but that QM isn't terribly useful for modelling weather, planetary motion, etc.
Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.
Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.
His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.
Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.
The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.
A lot of science and math and logic originated from philosophers posing questions and even coming up with answers (then those fields graduated out of philosophy)
This is the standard blub programmer but in science. The blub physicists doesn't understand anything more complex or higher-level than his daily abstractions.
Reading Ashtavakra Gita gives me more insight into this than any other literature that I have read. The ultimate reality is that: There's nothing else other than this. This is all there is.
To anyone discussing whether or not consciousness exist, tell me do you have proof that other people have consciousness? There's simply no credible answer to this question other than "well they have to be...cause we share the same material". But that is a experiment with a sample of 1. The weird thing is, if you are able to proof someone else's consciousness, that is just an extension of your own consciousness.
Next question, how do you prove that you are not sleeping right now? What proof do you have that you are not living inside an illusion? You have surely experienced the illusion of understanding i.e. you realized that you "understanding" or the feeling of "understanding" was wrong. What is to say that this is not happening now?
In reality, there is nothing to discover. There is just this and that is all there is.
Let's say you have a dream where you hit yourself in the head with a hammer and pass out. Surely that won't lead you to believe that your consciousness arises from your dream brain.
I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.
> Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist.
Oh I hate this.
We ‘still’ can’t do any of those things yet. Science provides a framework for discovering and coming to understand and yes eventually accurately predict the motions of the underlying systems that give rise to these phenomenons.
And getting a mechanic to fix your bike is a matter of specialization, not some failure of science.
Does anyone actually enjoy hearing other people talk this way? Who is this for?
I was watching someone doing a really deep dive into speculative biology [0], and they finally got to the sentience/sapience/intelligence/sophont episode [1]. I'm not an expert in this area, but there was a discussion about obligative sapience and facultative sapience that i found fascinating.
Obligative sapience is only know to have evolved in humans. Obligative means we cannot survive without sapience. We must learn and use tools and whatever to live and continue evolution.
While facultative sapience seems to be a broadly used survival strategy across the animal kingdom - from crows to spiders to cuttlefish. Facultative sapients are able to survive without their learned behaviors, using them instead to augment their evolution.
Viewing these issues from the point of evolution and actually having a comparison, I feel, helps ground the discussion better.
Even more so from the very strange point of view of speculative biology. The creator of the 'Neotectons' gives a very strange viewpoint on the debate too, with good reasoning though not bulletproof by any means. As with any model, you can make it tapdance if you mess with the parameters enough. But I think that more efforts into speculative arenas would be helpful. Gedankenexperiments for sophonts and not just elevators and cosmology.
> If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of
> soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is
> also a collection of atoms.
Unless someone eventually finds the consciousness center in the brain I will continue to hold the position that it is just another property of "things". I know consciousness must be real because it's the first thing I have access to without any sort of reasoning attached on top of it. Its realness is more visceral than atoms or any other physical theory because it is the way in which the world is conveyed to me, but I don't think I'm unique in any way for having it.
I feel like all systems, in a panpsychist sense, participate in consciousness, so in some way it's a property of matter or systems in our universe that we have somehow failed to account for in physics. We miss it because systems only exhibit consciousness internally like on top of having all the physical properties of rocks, rocks also have an internal state of being. That internal state of being for the most part is uninteresting cause it doesn't dictate the rocks actual form or function in the universe.
I'd argue human consciousness is the same. My conscious experience has nothing to do with the thoughts that are actually being produced. By this I mean there is no authorship of the thoughts and actions I perform by my consciousness. To me it seems more like a stage in which elements of my experience appear for brief moments before fading away, so much like the rock's internal experience my internal experience does not have any affect on the physical world.
Part of me then starts to worry why worry about consciousness at all if it's something that doesn't participate in the physical world because then what's the point of it all? Also, if all systems get to participate, then what stops things like basic logic gates on a PC from having consciousness as well. I tend to lean towards thinking that those feelings are similar to the same kinds of feelings humans used to have about thinking they were the center of the universe, but I'm not sure.
I mean, I would argue that they are right, but there is still a hard problem of consciousness. What properties must a system hold in order to exhibit consciousness? Personally, I think I could fairly capably argue that consciousness is an emergent property of any feedback loop composed of a large enough collection of highly interconnected adaptive components embedded within a sufficiently pattern-rich environment. Every feedback loop which meets these requirements is conscious, and removing any single one of those elements causes consciousness to disappear. I believe the property emerges in a similar manner to how 'heat' emerges from electromagnetic interactions of atoms. This definition has implications, and all that I have thought of are real. Total sensory deprivation results in loss of consciousness, for example.
That's always been a puzzle to me with HN. A lot of articles have perfectly good titles and for some reason they get modified to something less accurate.
There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide.
There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.
Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.
You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.
Explain psychedelics, then? Do psychedelics have access to this supposed "separate layer" that mind exists on over matter? If yes, how? If not, how can something that ostensibly only interacts with the matter have any effect on the mind?
Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"
What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.
But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.
Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.
> As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience.
Two things here:
1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind?
2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not a satisfactory answer to you?
I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.
I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.
Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.
> I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.
> How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?
How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
> The simplest answer is that it is not
You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.
> Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water
At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
The only religious argument is materialism. It's real because enough people have convinced themselves that it's "scientific". Even though there is no proof whatsoever, no solid hypothesis, no experiments to prove how matter acquires subjective experience, it's incoherent to the very foundations of its position (that matter is dead), and has not made any progress in answering the "hard problem" (which is just someone pointing out the incoherence). It also makes people argue that they don't have a mind, that asserting they have a mind is a religious statement, or that they have some trouble understanding what a mind is.
> How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
The laws of physics are enough to explain this because no one is arguing that computers are experiencing anything when they play a video or generate a set of numbers that are displayed as natural language.
> At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
Sorry, I phrased that badly by using "you" when I did not mean that. I meant to say that if someone (not you) wanted to argue that simple matter has some sort of experience, then at least the position would make some sense. But materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any subjective experience of any kind.
Anyway, I won't be able to convince you that you have a mind, so I'll peace out.
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
This is what the article is positioned against.
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense.
Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling to such ideas (as the article itself propounds), but if you don't understand the underlying laws to a high enough degree I consider this equivalent to ancient Greeks sitting around saying "there is a double of our soul inside the mirror, WE HAVE SEEN IT". We know today there is absolutely nothing at all "inside" that mirror. How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
Unfortunately, this article puts forth an intriguing promise and then completely fails to deliver.
> How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination.
What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
(This is basically just Descartes “I think therefore I am”)
> What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all.
It might not make sense to you now, but that's because of what we know or what we think we know, today (hence my ancient Greeks analogue). Look at the Gazzaniga effect, people seamlessly make up an "experience" narrative out of absolutely nothing. Whatever experience was claimed there probably didn't exist prior to the point of questioning, and then was wholly manufactured. Thus, that particular experience was a fabrication.
> If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
Why does there need to be a who/what being deceived for something to be an illusion? A mirror functions regardless of whether someone is there to pretend there is a soul in it.
We come from a race that took two thousand years (after it was first proposed) to accept the brain as the seat of the mind, over the heart — just because the heart physically reacts in times of emotion, while the brain remains inert.
Whatever the truth is, humanity probably won't know it until enough generations of the old guard indoctrinated in the old ideas have passed on.
Sorry my comment was unclear. My point is, the process of “making up a narrative” does seem to imply a subjective experience, doesnt it? My point is, the existence of the experiencer can’t be denied. Even if the experience itself is some kind of illusion, theres no coherent way to say that there is no entity having an experience. Every attempt to do so ends up implying the existence of an experiencer (the one having the illusion of experiencing)
I think you've missed my point, which was about epistemology and dogma, given that you continue to repeat the dogma in question. Did you read my comment at all? To engage with my argument you'd have to confront the idea that your current assumptions will continue to be "the truth" hitherto, which it doesn't look like you've attempted to address at all.
To continue the ancient Greeks' mirror analogy, this would be akin to continuing to say "but who's eyes am I looking in then?" when I suggest that people in the future may not think there is a double of your soul in there. Totally pointless, and frankly, quite frustrating.
I think youve missed the point which is that your objections still imply an observer. Your rudeness is unnecessary and I wont be continuing this conversation. Have a good day.
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?
Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".
The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.
Some good reminders in this article. However, while I, too, reject Cartesian dualism, some of the claims of the author need correction...
"Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. [...] Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. [...] The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves"
Whose fear? Don't generalize, Carlo. These may be fears rooted in the modernist and Cartesian legacy, but they are only "traditional" if you think the world came into being during the 17th-18th century. Look back further and you find an Aristotelian and Thomistic view that also rejects metaphysical dualism. The soul here is the form of the body, which is to say, its formal cause. It isn't some ghost haunting a corpse or a puddle of ectoplasm. It is a principle. In this view, everything that is alive has a soul, which, again, is the name we give to the form of a living thing. Soul is just a class of form, and everything that exists has form.
What makes human beings different from other animals is, at the very least, that we possess intellects (and so, ontologically speaking, any embodied being with an intellect is human). The human intellect, according to this view, cannot be purely material, even if it relies on matter and even though it is united with bodily operations. The reason for this is that abstraction cannot occur in matter alone, as abstraction involves a mental operation of conceptual separation of the form of a thing as given in the senses. Matter (specifically what's called prime matter) is merely the principle of instantiation, and so it cannot "host" forms without instantiating that form. In other words, form + matter = thing.
"During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul."
No that is not how people viewed the body and the soul in the Middle Ages (or in, say, Catholicism). That is a very Cartesian view of human beings, that we are two things, not one.
"The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter."
Matter wasn't vile, unless you were some kind of Gnostic or Cathar heretic or whatever. The physical was seen as good, as created by God, and human beings were understood as spiritual-corporeal unities that are by one nature both spiritual and physical. (The "spiritual" here has to do with the intellectual and free nature of man; again, not ectoplasm or ghosts). Indeed, if anything, Christianity elevated the dignity of the physical. Why bother with a resurrection after death if matter sucks? Why would the body and blood of Christ be so precious to Catholics if matter is evil? It is Gnostic dualism and similar movements that construed the physical as evil, but these were heretical movements, not views characteristic of the Middle Ages.
--
All that being said, I think the author would benefit greatly from a rigorous study of Aristotelian metaphysics, both to avoid these sorts of caricatures (as well as any misconceptions of science), but also to deepen his understanding. I think his rejection of dualism is on the right track, but he is missing out on a rich and robust intellectual tradition that has been sidelined by exactly those sorts of modernists that perpetuated this whole intellectual muddle in the first place.
I failed to mention a great recent English language resource on the topic, namely, Ed Feser's "Immortal Souls" [0]. For broader philosophy of science context, his recent "Aristotle's Revenge" [1] will serve as a good companion read.
As soon as we'll have sufficiently advanced BMIs the so called hard problem will go away by itself.
Consider probing a midlevel mobile phone at some hundred contacts. You might be convinced to have a thorough account of the physical reality yet still no idea of (and no way to know) whats going on.
To the problem of qualia.. I think it's the mechanism of the brain to default-name recurring patterns, being part of a simplification/compression process, without which reasoning (computing) or reasonably storing experiences would be impossible. I guess visual qualia like color and shape have to be the first things the brain learns and attaches "default" symbols to. Consider other basic qualia too, like to be saturated, to feel warm and then higher qualia that build on these like to feel loved or accepted in a social community.
It's difficult to argue how there could be a fundamental truth to qualia. But consider that there'd be no difference in our communication, even if your red is attached to a symbol signified by 8NCYUW6D0H5C (lets just assume this) while my red is encoded as being GAUTP1P6YUUZ (those patterns obviously have to be encoded as frequency patterns as we perceive close colors as similar without computational overhead). Eventually it will turn out, qualia from person to person are encoded quite similar, as we are genetically so similar. But consider also synaesthetia. Wrt animals, it WOULD feel strange to be a bat or any other animal as some of their sensory apparatus is so different.
To this, author makes a good point: "Today, we do not have an exhaustive external account, but this is not the same as having proof that no such account is possible."
I imagine consciousness as 'theater mode' of the perceiving mind. As such it seems to be one part of the brain that integrates all sensory inputs into one Multimodal Experience Stream™.
As to TFA.. - I'm by no means up to date to the current affairs of the consciousness debate, but - is there really a "fierce debate [...] raging"?
Check out Joscha Bach who argues consciousness is an illusion. Looking for some material to back up, I hit on this text. Flying over it I already find it more enlightening than the posted article, so I post it here (without guarantee):
"The simulation becomes “more real than real” in our experience because it constitutes the entirety of our conscious access to ourselves and the world (Metzinger, 2003; Seth, 2021)."
"This perspective doesn’t diminish the richness or importance of conscious experience. On the contrary, it highlights the remarkable complexity and sophistication of the processes that generate our subjective experience. The constructed nature of consciousness isn’t a defect or limitation but a remarkable achievement — a way of making an unimaginably complex reality manageable for finite cognitive systems (Clark, 2016; Dennett, 2017)."
> From a non-dual perspective either nobody is a p-zombie or everybody is a p-zombie.
Why? It’s perfectly sane to just treat claims as is. You claim you’re a p-zombie, than you are. Claim you are conscious, than you are same as me. Claim you aren’t and you get no moral affordances, let’s see how long you last with that tactic.
Clankers are not conscious, good luck convincing me otherwise idiot.
consciousness is hard because it requires a special kind of belief. we humans believe a lot of things, but this one is difficult. all is one, and that one thing is all. everything contains gender. opposites are the same thing.
these are all easy things that are hard to understand/believe.
Dont pretend like you dont believe anything is step 1.
The biggest benefit of term "consciousness" is that when I see something like "LLMs are not conscious" I immediately know that the author doesn't know what he is talking about.
They are saying something similar to "LLM has no soul", depending on context it might something insightful or (in technical/scientific context) they are making fool of themselves.
Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
Praise be to AI. In 2025, inspired by AI, I feel that I have finally built a complete and unified worldview.
Are we living in a virtual illusion? Are there higher-dimensional rulers, gods, or immortals in the universe? What exactly are the human soul and consciousness?
I feel that these questions now share a single coherent answer. What I have written here is my answer regarding the soul and consciousness.
I would say "AI psychosis" is a very healthy disease to have. I mean, how should people react to seeing a clump of hardware produce coherent text at a level many actual humans cannot? The spread of reactions we are seeing in people-the disagreements, the extreme sycophancy on one end, and the abject denial on the other, is within parameters.
My life was wrecked by religious dogma, the type that is sustained on "big mysteries" and from there goes directly to imposing an odious recipe for life. So there is consolation to be had on seeing a big mystery crumble and on hearing the outcry. May another mystery crumble on my lifetime.
"Praise be to AI" sounds like something you shouldn't reach in the beginnings of AI psychosis. Same with "I've found a simple answer to the nature of consciousness and the question of the existence of Gods". At that point you've got to in be pretty deep.
Haha, right? The lads talking like he’s the only one to have figured this out and it’s the truth! Philosophising with AI is so mid. This guys the general public.
What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences.
The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
>It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
It's that you can't even measure it, since the way it's defined as a subjective experience, no external measure could ever capture it. This is what gives rise to the p-zombie argument.
To get rid of that you have to accept "functional qualia" as basically equivalent to qualia, which solves the p-zombie issue and resolves half of the hard problem. From there, explaining consciousness is no "harder" than explaining other scale-depedent phenomenon in complex systems like LLMs: still hard, but at least tractable with scientific measurements and experiments.
No, we don't even need that. When we realise that we all project consciousness claims on each other from what we observe as zeitgeist now, just to do credit assignment, most of our circular debates will disappear. But this won't happen since many powerful entities in the world ride on the moral ambiguity, and this will hold them accountable.
> What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution
> When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
I don't see how this is different from someone saying that a concoction of random ingredients will turn into a magic potion.
The big question is how a group of cells (or potentially something else) becomes sentient. Accepting "because it would be useful" as valid explanation would be the same as accepting Darwinism as a religion rather than science.
would you care to link together 'complex IO systems inevitably degenerate to seperating self from environment as part of optimizing calculations' and your three questions? it isnt immediately clear why the concept of self answers the idea of god.
Quantum holography will someday demonstrate an analog information capacity of the quantum domain far exceeding the spin disposition.
Our minds use this domain by mass entanglement within our very own neurons.
You don’t want to hear it, though our minds may entangle and an entire culture exists among us who can traverse and manipulate the consciousness of others. They are responsible for the “voices in our heads”, and these are related to a great deal of very unscientific activity in our world.
All of that occult demonology you smarties scoff at yet plagues everyone embroiled in “power” is based upon this phenomena. We are not alone in our own minds, and more than a few of you will be forced to confront this at some point in your lives.
Falsifiable? Theories, not existential reality are concerned with what minds may falsify. Science lags behind reality, not the other way around.
I was with you thru "mass entanglement". Each of us is a distributed network of quantum-interface nodes. But I'd be very careful about attributing specific describable phenomena to these networks.
Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that).
We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category.
If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.
Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of.
So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter.
If you accept that we assume we are not in a simulation and the knowledge we have matters, then consciousness is also open to exploration, and it is not only a philosophical thing. There are several hard questions about consciousness that are meaningful in this frame:
- Why do some things appear to be conscious and other not so?
- Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?
- Is consciousness local and embodied, or not?
- Would restoring the physical substrate of consciousness (if possible) lead to the same consciousness, or an identical one? Does this distinction between "same" and "identical" consciousnesses even make sense?
Etc
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology.
What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions.
What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sense of power to determine the nature of the world by our mind alone -- but such is life.
The world is not human, not at all like a human, and nothing about it follows from us at all. The world is not made in our image. Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape, and whatever it manages to measure with any clarity, has no impact on the nature of that world.
>Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape
Can you define existence without depending on or referring to consciousness?
Yes. Though i think you're committing the gentic fallacy here, which is the core fallacy at the heart of idealism and much 19th C. german philosophy.
The properties of the origin of somethign imply nothing about the properties of the product. That a bread factory is made of metal, does not mean bread is.
That in my statement of things in language I am conscious of what I state, says nothing about the truth (or other such properties) of what I say.
A photographic plate is made of metal, the mountain it photographs, of mud.
I am conscious, but when I say, "reality is all that which is extended in space and time" -- the truth of that proposition has nothing to do with my being consiouss -- it is a loaf of bread, a photograph, a product of a process invovling consiousness but in none of its properties, depends upon it.
Every relevant thing we do requires consciousness -- just as everythign a thermometer does requires, say, its own mercury -- but in measuring coffee's temperature, coffee is in no way mercury. And when we measre the world, by photographing it with consciousness, it is in no way conscious.
>reality is all that which is extended in space and time
You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.
Alas, no I am not.
They're properties of the world which consciousness measures.
A mountain is painted in the ink of a photo, the mountain is not an illusion. You're focused only on the measurement, and not what is measured.
The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.
I understand your difficulty. It is hard to imagine the universe disappearing if all consciousness cease to exist the next second.
But is that really hard? Don't everything in your dreams disappear when you wake up?
Let me ask another question. Can you differentiate between a consciousness observing a universe, and a consciousness with a sensation of a whole universe, built in?
And the point of that is our subjective experiences only require consciousness, and not a universe that is independent of it.
>The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.
Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends. Simply put, this does not happen because consciousness occurs in a substrate.
Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.
>Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends.
The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence other than "something a consciousness can detect (directly or indirectly)". So if there is no consciousness, there is no existence.
But I think there could be a difference between death of all conscious beings, and consciousness itself disappearing. Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.
>Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.
Yea, take that. I think the number of possible worlds where a simple life form spontaneously assembled and evolved to a human following the laws of that world, are enormously larger than a world where a full human brain spontaneously assembled all by itself. It is just statistics that we find ourselves in a world of the former kind and not a brain alone in an empty universe..
>The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence
Yea, I don't subscribe to this line of thinking as consciousness had to happen before existence. Kinda messy when you think about it.
>Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.
This, at least how it's written makes consciousness something like the electromagnetic field that exists everywhere. For example if I said "If you want to fly, you need to oscillate the flying field". Most scientists are going to give you a hold up and state it doesn't work that way. They'll tell you that you need an atmosphere and a body capable of generating force to create lift. It's not like a magnet that jiggles a field that exists everywhere in spacetime.
Looking at flying is fun in itself... do fish fly in the water? At what viscosity does flying become swimming. Sorties paradox creates lot of issues in different places, especially the discussion of consciousness.
>consciousness had to happen before existence
Concepts like "before", "happen" does not have a meaning in this context? Did the left part of a circle happened before the right part?
In a similar way, consciousness and existence could be part of the same structure that exists outside of time and space. It is not meaningful to say that one part existed before the other. It is not even meaningful to say that this structure had always existed.
I think that gets us closer to the right way of thinking about it. Somehow existence and consciousness are the same "thing", or two opposing aspects of the same "thing", where "thing" stands for something for which we cannot have a word, because it's beyond (or previous to) the distinction between object and subject. I think using the word "being" instead of "existence" makes things a bit more clear. Beings are almost by definition conscious. A stone (or a thermostat) is not a being, but an animal is.
what if you are the only conscious being?
Then I'm fucking up by not surrounding myself with all the hottest women and wealth.
> not surrounding myself with all the hottest women and wealth.
You are, in some reality.
By taking the blue pill, in other words?
I've been an idealist. I understand all the arguments. The base fallacy at the heart of all this is the one I mentioned.
On the very last point: the conclusion that consciousness is thin, like a photograph, and the world thick -- follows from the most complete explanatory account of how consiousness works. The idea that there is no world, or that the world is a thin transcendental ego -- this abandons the project of offering an account of consiousness at all and ends up in incoherence.
Within consiousness I am presented with: what I cannot change (fixed perceptions), what I can change (eg., imagined perceptions). This duality is immanent to consiousness itself. The imagination can apprenend the fixed, ie., I can imagine scenarios that I could, in principle, see. So there is, immanent to consiousness already, a representational duality: I have both fixed perceptions that I cannot change, I have mutable perceptions (imaginations) that I can -- and my mutable perceptions are representations of my fixed perceptions.
All of the dynamics of the duality of the represented and representation, of the fixed/external and of the mutable/internal -- are already immanent to consiousness.
What remains to be explained is: why? The obvious answer is that the reason i have fixed perceptions is because they are caused by a world that they depict, and the reason I have variable/mutable perceptions is they are caused by me as I represent that world to myself. The duality immanent to consiousness is explained by the duality of the measured and measuring.
Even if you abandoned the world "external" and replace it with "fixed", you gain nothing. Everything which seems objectionable about this duality is already present. If you simply assert it, rather than explain it, your position is weaker because you've nothing to say.
The causal origin of our fixed perceptions is the world, which impacts our sensory organs, interacts with our bodies, and produces a thin perceptual surface to us which causally-directly depicts the world that we are in. These fixed perceptions are constructed by our bodies thru this process of activation, which we can call "measurement with post processing" ie., a kind of digital camera rather than a chemical one.
But in any case, to answer your final question: yes, the difference is that "consiousness" with this duality of the fixed and the variable, and their representational relationship, only makes sense if part of consciousness isnt being determined by consciousness. The need to say what determine it means the "consiousness is complete" option incoherent, if "consciouness" as a term comes to adopt all the properties it needs to explain the fixed perceptions, then you'll find consiousness becomes both the material and the mental -- and all you have done is empty the word of all its meaning
You have fixed perception in your dreams also.
See, you have this observation of subjective experience. One hypothesis for wher this come from, require only consciousness, and the second requires consciousness as well as a whole universe. And the second hypothesis brings up even more questions. Where did this universe come from? Who created it? Why was it created?
The simple answer is that only consciousness really exists and everything is painted on top of that.
simple question: why not the opposite?
that is, reality exists and consciousness is "painted" on top of that?
IMO, anti-materialists are merely uncomfortable with the degree to which they understand neuroscience and related topics (including, btw, capabilities and limits of LLMs). Chalmers, for instance, basically insists that the Hard Problem is Hard simply because he finds it hard.
>that is, reality exists and consciousness is "painted" on top of that?
Because it brings along more questions like "Why does the reality exist"? "Why does the reality looks like this, and not like something else"?
Any answer that brings up more questions that it answers is not a very good answer IMHO...
These questions can be asked about idealism too. And they go ad infinitum, so you can't reduce their number even if you answer them.
Not really.
You cannot ask why consciousness exist. That would be like asking why a circle exist. To elaborate if we consider that our reality is computable from a set of physical laws and a set of random events, then it implies that the consciousness inside that reality is also computable.
The next question is whether the subjective experience those consciousness, or those consciousness themselves can exist without something actually doing the computation.
Does a circle exist before someone draw it? It does, right? and thus, if a world with consciousness is definable, then the subjective experiences inside those consciousness will happen without something actually computing it.
So all such possible worlds exist. By "exist" I don't mean the classical meaning of it. Just that there are subjective experiences going on "inside" them.
I think quantum mechanics also converge on the same idea with the multi-world interpretation of quantum events. At every point when there is a random event, the universe is split and all possibilities is realized in disjoint universes.
And I think this is the same thing as I have described above. Actually multi-world interpretation would be the final nail in the coffin for physicalism. How can material world split infinitely at every infinitely small instance ! But evidence shows that something like that is happening.
So it has to be something like what have been described above.
>You cannot ask why consciousness exist.
Why consciousness exists? Here I just asked it.
>How can material world split infinitely at every infinitely small instance !
It does so by continuous motion described by a differential equation. I don't see any problem. If it did something else you would still ask why it does what it does.
It's not a simple answer, because its not an answer to any question. It is "simpler" to assume the thermometer readings exist without any thing to cause them, then they move up and down, and its "simpler" to assert: it is the nature of thermometers to move up and down.
This kind of simplicity isn't simplicity at all, it is to abandon saying anything. It is in the nature of consciousness to inexplicably have all the properties which are needed so as to seem the way it does, sure.
And what is this "consiousness" in the end, which has in its nature, the production of all material reality to serve as a fixed causal basis for perception? to generate perceptions of the brain and bodies of animals; of our death, and of a world which is describabl without any of its own properties? What is the nature of a consciousness which deliveries to us a world that requires none of it?
What is it that when I move the muscles of my eye, and what i see changes? What is it that i require a light in a room to see at all? That i require it to be the case that whatever I perceive, my fixed perceptions must always be as-if the laws of physics were true? What is it to say, "consiousness has the property of seeming as if when I see, I see because light scatters off a surface into my eye, and I can control the image genrated by moving the muscles of my eye?" and yet all of that sentence be false without the word 'seeming' ?
What madness to is it to say that mercury in a thermometer not only acts as-if it is in coffe, but in its nature, acts as if there is an entire world that it is moving through -- and its motion up and down is always according to laws and principles as if such a world existed?
This is no longer consciousness at all. When the nature of mercury in a thermometer is to act as if coffee exists, it is no longer mercury. When "consciousness" is taken to have all the features needed to provide the material world, it is no longer anything in a mind -- but has within it, the whole of the external, fixed, material -- and so it is itself now alike those things. When "consciousness" has finally been modified to produce everything within it, the term means nothing at all.
The entire system of properties and objects which are external to consciousness, narrowly defined, are still external within consciousness broadly defined. And with this broad definition comes all the laws of physics, all the properties of materiality, all of everything which mentions nothing of sensation. And the word "consciousness" has to bare all these properties? And you call this simple?
It is much simpler to answer the question: why does the mercurary in the thermometer move? is it because in its own nature is a simulation of an entire universe? No, its nature is simple. It is that there is such a universe it is inside.
And our consciousness is likewise simple.
> its not an answer to any question
It is. It is the theory of everything.
> what is this "consiousness" in the end, which has in its nature, the production of all material reality to serve as a fixed causal basis for perception?
If you haven't already came acrosss M.U.H, I would just direct you to https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646
>What madness to is it to say that mercury in a thermometer not only acts as-if it is in coffe, but in its nature, acts as if there is an entire world that it is moving through -- and its motion up and down is always according to laws and principles as if such a world existed?
Yes, that is exactly what is being proposed. Causality is an illusion. But how? Imagine an idea of a "definable world". Imagine that all definable worlds "exist", but imagine consciousness appearing only in "regular" worlds, with uniform laws and behaviors..
>I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Godel's sense) structures exist
That's kinda DoA. Isn't there a proof that uncomputable things exist in mathematics, so if mathematics is true, why hypothesize that they don't exist even if we know that they exist?
>but imagine consciousness appearing only in "regular" worlds, with uniform laws and behaviors..
Why this limitation? Irregular worlds with appearing consciousness are mathematically definable just fine, easily even.
>Why this limitation?
This is not a limitation. The basis of this idea is that there is consciousness in this (our) world. So we know that consciousness can result from our set of physical laws and the set of all random events in this world . That is the only thing we know for sure, and the only place we can start reasoning..
We don't know if it is possible for consciousness to exist in a world where everything is random, or less regular..
It's easy to define: a world the same as our world, but has an additional random phenomenon, humans would still exist. Mathematics is fantasy, you can postulate anything you want there.
Why "alas"?
Alas for my interlocutor's argument.
> You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.
Both of these can be measured. They are not illusions.
Money is an illusion made up by people and agreed upon for basically the whole of the world economy, but not real. Space between me and the lamp on my desk is very real. The age of the world and the age of the universe is very real.
Just like the sensation of hearing a voice is an illusion created by your brain from the vibrations in the air, the perception of depth is an illusion created from the parallax between your eyes. We seem to have an easy time understanding that sound is an illusion, but have a really hard time considering that space and time are similar illusions...They are just some number (like the number of vibrations) that the brain creates a perception for you.
That you can measure it does not change the fact.
>Money is an illusion
Money is a number. Brain does not create an illusion for money, at least not in the sense we are considering here.
we need to distinguish accounts that are merely self-consistent, and those that are more useful.
the reality-is-illusion meme is self-consistent (panpsychism, simulationism, dream-of-god-ism, whatever). merely being self-consistent isn't good enough.
the alternative (and there is only one) is physicalism and its epistemology, science. the main appeal of this is parsimony, often referred to as Occam's Razor.
> those that are more useful.
Oh it is useful. It answers questions like "why do reality exist". "who created it", "What was before it"...Or may be I should say it does not really answer them but makes the questions irrelevant.
Just like how earth centric hypothesis posed questions like "Why is everything circling the earth and why is earth special", and heliocentric hypothesis made that irrelevant by proving that it is just an illusion caused by observing from the earth.
It makes the questions incoherent.
This isnt a benefit, it's a sign that the semantics you're giving language fail to actually model its meaning.
The position isnt self-consistent, unless you engage in the typical idealist peformance of pretending not to know what these questions mean.
In the end, idealism is defeated by the very implausibility of this performance. The idealist, is implicated in the rich ontology of the real world by the very use of language itself. Presupposed is this ontology, and the ordinary truth of ordinary propositions requires it.
If the question, "what was here before I existed?" is meaningful, then idealism is wrong. And it is meaningful, therefore it is wrong.
>what was here before I existed?
This is no longer meaningful. It would be like a thing inside a painting on a paper asking "what was here on this paper, before this paper existed"?
Space and time are illusions of consciousness. It does not make sense to ask "where", when there is no space, and "when", when there is no time.
Yes, so your semantics of langauge make such questions incomprhensible.
It's like if someone said, "what's the radius of this circle?" and you had defined "circle" and "radius" such that circles could never possess such a property, so the quesiton itslef is incherent, just as, "what's the flavour of this circle?"
But my confidence that the question, "what was here before i existed?" has meaning, is greater than my confidence that it is completely incoherent. It plainly and obviously has meaning. Thus anyone selling a semantics for language which makes this question incomprehensible, despite it being perfectly comprehensible, is selling a defective system.
The issue is even more severe for idealists, because it isnt that question alone which becomes incoherent, but vast swathes of language that implicate even idealism itself. Meaninglessness is a kind of virus, which in the end, makes even idealism itself incoherent (since even to state the very terms it is stated in presuppose an objective background for these terms to refer to).
In any case, teenagers of the 1910s/20s thought it was a great thing to go around telling people ordinary questions with obvious meaninings were, in the end, completely meaningless and we were fooled by them all along. This didnt go well for them, as above, these positions themselves by their own critirea ended up meanignless too.
And in any case, the idea that it is a good thing that propositions whose meanings we readily understand should turn out to be meaningless is now correctly seen as a defect of any system proposed.
The obligations on these grand philosophical system are to answer to the meaningful, to take as a given the wide variety of propositions which are obbviously meaningful. Systems which "answer to nothing", and instead, in an adolescent way, delete knowledge and understanding in order to save themselves, are philosophically bankrupt.
Philosophy explains and answers the meaningful. It is only a technnique of analysis and argument, it has no power to determine what is true; only why, in some very narrow cases, what is true, could be so.
>But my confidence that the question, "what was here before i existed?" has meaning, is greater than my confidence that it is completely incoherent. It plainly and obviously has meaning...
But that question is meaning less given the context. It is like some character in a 3d computer game looking at the simulated world around them, and wondering "What was here before?". They are actually asking what was there before the game started, or before the computer was turned on. There is no "here" before the computer turned on, or before the game started running in the computer and initialized the 3d space inhabited by the character.
If we take the video game example literally, we establish a fictional context for the language in question, so we read all questions as in-game.. the answer to the character's question is: the world the character is in. A skyrim NPC character who asks that question, is (fictionally) correct to say 'skyrim', and so on.
Now, dropping that fictional context, we have to ask: what context is giving the words meaning now? If we take a physical/material context, then the answer is 'nothing' in virtue of there being no such person, no such space, etc. because by 'here' in the material context, we know 'here' refers to a point in space and time that the character does not exist at.
When I ask, "what was here before me?" you have to give me how you're assigning meanings to words. To tell me I'm operating in a fictional context when i say, "the earth" -- is fine, so be it, materialism is a kind of fiction which preserves the ordinary meaning of words.
But for that to be plausible, there has to be a context in which those meanings make sense at all.
Kant, and similar idealists, tried to give them a "categorical context" such that "here" refers to something like an implied geometrical aspect of perception; and "before" an implied temporal aspect; and so on, which constitute the fixed law-liuke background of perception.
So that this background treats materialist meanings as fictional, and idealist meanings as the literal ones -- OK, but that's still a meaningful question -- because "me" in the idealist context doesnt refer to the transcendental ego, it refers to the apparent body in apparent space and time. And the right answer is the fictional one, because in the literal context, there is no "me". In any case, this fictional context in which the question still makes complete sense, we call "materalist".
The onus is on you to make plausible why the insanity of a "fixed law-like perceptual background of the generation of perceptions as-if materialism were true" is the principle literal context vs., it being the fictional one.
everything is explained if the law-like features of fixed perceptiosn are derivative fictions that give rise to a fictional mental space of pretend objects, and their actual apparent structure is just in the world. Nothign is explained if its the reverse, indeed, you now have a very very veyr large number of problems on your hand explaining anything at all.
The only reason we find it plausible to treat an NPC as operating in a fictional context is because we have the material context to langauge to give the words literal meanings, and literaly, we find them false. There really isnt any such idealist context for ordinary langauge.
"What was here before me?" becomes meaningless in a pathological way: we cannot even say what it oculd me, if it were true.
For an NPC, we can say very easily, this is how we know its fictional: we know what it would mean for skyrim to exist, and it does not.
Non-kantian idealists who deny the meaningfulness of these questions arent saying "we know what it would mean for there to be a place before you existed, and its false" -- theyre saying the veyr words youre using never had, nor could even have, any meaning at all. This is plainly false. We know very well what it would mean for the proposition to be true: that space and time exist, that physical objects exist, that you are one, and you are located at some time in some point in space, and prior to that, something else was.
This is very simple, ordinary, obvious, language which is meaningful. Even if its meanignful in a fictional context, ie., it is all literally false, it is still meanignful. This means that this kind of radical anti-meaningfulness idealism is false, because there is a coherent system of meaning in which these propositions could be true, even if they arent.
What remains is to decide whether they are true. And given their truth explains everything, by abduction, we suppose -- as a category -- they are true.
Not good enough for whom exactly?
You are attributing to me something I never said.
I said nothing about the nature of reality. All that I said is: all my knowledge of the reality (whether it exists independently or me or not) comes from my perception.
There could be an objective reality, or reality could be something created by our consciousness. I don't know. The one thing I do know, however, is what my consciousness perceives. It is in that sense that is is fundamental
Largely I find your points reductionist and insulting to the very sacred experience that is unfolding for you and me. Consciousness is a primary or even a priori phenomenon from which all of your surmisals stem. You have got it backwards. The fact someone once saw an ape, or saw a nebula, or made a measurement of brain waves, these all had to happen within human-experience. The experiencing itself is irreducible. Consciousness as a byproduct or secondary phenomenon as you claim, is to be expected for someone brought up in the modern era where religion and spirituality were so vehemently eschewed that men leaned too far into the other extreme and became physicalist-materialists claiming the lived experience is but a mere symphony of neurological interactions without consequence. This is a disastrous view. This is basically a swift ticket to a hell-realm. The basic posture is all wrong - you must return to the fundamental facts, namely those of your lived experience. What you claim as primary evidence are in fact secondary observations. And then you use the secondary observations to make claims about a primary nature "out there" and "distinct from" human-experiencing. This is simply not the case. This view is logically untenable. One does not study consciousness by looking at pictures and drawings and photos, just like how one does not study what music sounds like by inspecting the buttons of a saxaphone unblown. The fluid nature of the energetic capacity of mind is very difficult to discern - it's not an everyday occurence, sages spend their whole lives pursuing prayer and meditation in order to catch a mere glimpse at the primal nature of experience. Everything else flows from this. Your mind is the root of all things, it is the common denominator in all moments of your experience.
You can read my other comment. You're also committing the genetic fallacy.
Yes, a hand can measure itself. Yes, consciousness as a measurement process of reality can expose to the conscious agent that its own consciousness is a merely a process in the world.
Just as a camera, in photographing a mirror, discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.
The "back to basics" pov you're talkign about is one which actually abandons everything consciousness tells you about the world, because you're afraid of what you've found.
An ape without a mirror thinks, of course, it is god. What an insult to find the face of this god is only that of an ape.
No, the genetic fallacy is not germane here. You are conflating the derivation of knowledge and direct knowing, which are distinct. You conflate the ingredients on the back of the label for the taste of the sweets in the pouch. The taste of sweetness is what I am indicating, not the list of ingredients. Also, you are suggesting that there is an impersonal objective spacetime irrespective of observer which is false. There is a generalized case that works for the figures projected for measuring the distances to solar bodies from other solar bodies. But you are basing your analysis on the hidden assumption that the material reality is first. This is an unchallenged assumption in modern science which leads you astray.
>discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.
It discovers no such thing. It can only measure the signals coming from the sensors. That is its ground truth. If a sensor can produce a signal without having an image fall on it, then that would be what the camera sees.
So in this case, it would perceive the image of a camera in a mirror, but that would not be the reality.
It doesnt perceive the image of a camera, it's sensor is that image. What it means to perceive is for that image to form. This is the second great fallacies of idealism: (1) the genetic fallacy above that the origin/product of a process must share properties and (2) this fallacy of ambiguity on the word 'see'/perceive (between the mental act of drawing attention to an aspect of a perception, and the physiological act of forming that perception).
When I open my eye, light hits it, striking off the object which I am seeing. What it means to see is for that object to cause my perception. I am NOT seeing my perception, that doesn't make any sense -- it's incoherent because it's an infinite regress.
When I open my eyes and see the coffee, my body changes to have the perception of that coffee as part of my structure -- I am the photographic plate. Just as the photographic plate isnt taking a picture of itself, neither is my eye or mind.
To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it. You do not see seeing, you see objects.
>To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it
And the point is that you don't need the "world" aka reality to make that change. It can come from within, for example a faulty sensor creating an image of a cloud that does not exist.
And the implication that follows is that just because you percieve something does not mean that it is "real".
This can be made more clear if you understand that every "real" object is made up of pixe dust aka fields. When you see a particle at some point, say an electron, there is actually nothing there...but the space at that location behaves, for some reason, as if there is an electron there...
And that is another problem with the physical idea. What happens if you continuously split an object? If it is really physical, then it should remain physical no matter how many times it is split. But we see that it is not the case.
Yip, but once you have to explain law-following fixed perceptual fields (ie., that it always seems as if my fixed visual perceptions follow the laws of physics, and so on; that my audial/touch/visual percetions follow geometry exacvtly; that my actions to intervene on the world are causally deterministic; ...) --- then you've a real difficulty.
The mind doesnt have the right kind of properties to explain that. If you modify "consiousness" to include those properties then it's no longer consiousness at all.
Whatever generates law-like fixed perceptions of the objective has to be as if all of material reality exists in its law-like way.
Yes, P(Material Reality Does Not Exist) > 0 BUT whatever confidence you give to that, say p_illusion,
P(Material Reality Exists as it seems to | the fixed background of law-like perceptions) >>>>> p_illusion
You dont escape the need for the objective, the law-like, the fixed, the external.. just because you locate what generates this in "the mind" (redefined to include this). At that point the "mental origin" of this background is material. You arent making any difference to call it mental or physical.
The assumption that you made earlier , that reality is material first and perceptual second , continues unchallenged in your experience. Your certainty is based on the words of others who also don't know. You should really examine this more carefully. Screening of direct-experience through words is an obstacle that must be overcome.
You say "you don't see seeing, you see objects" ... Seeing itself is an irreducible fundamental of the universe in the human perspective, that's the point. If it could be reduced and you could split the act of seeing into components, you could say there's the eye [sense faculty], the focal object, and the visual consciousness. You're conflating the three and saying objects are both the eye and the visual consciousness, which is imprecise and unhelpful. A mirror doesn't show you yourself, it shows you a reflection of your external appearance. To say you can see yourself in a mirror is akin to saying you can see a sun in the shadow of a tree.
If there's no nature out there, then what is hell?
The distinction is what appears: appearances, versus what actually abides: reality.
> you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter
I'd consider myself a materialist (in the philosophical sense) and this is why (and I agree with the rest of your comment to)
We can not know, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary (e.g. someone metaphorically popping their head in from "outside" and revealing another layer to us), while it is important to understand that we do not know, it is more productive to assume in the absence of evidence, whether it is "real" or subjective or a simulation.
As long as it appears to us to follow consistent rules, we can explore those rules, and explore our apparent material reality.
Why does whether we're in a simulation or not matter for whether anything is explorable?
You can explore how the simulation works, there's just some other layer you can't explore. Or maybe you can somehow.
When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? Does that mean you can't explore them?
> When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain?
This is unknowable.
It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors.
That fits the definition of a simulation.
Not into modern philosophy at all, but I do believe, simulated or not, that this is indeed mostly quibbling.
An engineer would ask what a simulation would simulate. This is the core of the meaning behind that word. And if the answer is reality and it hints to the fact you cannot perceive everything and you conscience tries to construct a cohesive understanding from limited perception, than I would dispute the fact. The only one who tries to do that are philosophers. Going back to my objective, not-simulated ignorance now.
Sorry, but no.
Simulations are systems which have various rules built into them which govern (entirely) the behavior of the components of the system (at whatever levels the rules apply).
A given simulation may have rules that are believed or are intended to generate behavior within it which are similar to some other system (e.g. what we experience as "reality"). But it may just as well have an entirely different set of rules intended to create entirely different, even unknown and unpredictable, behaviors.
Any similarity between a given simulation and what we experience as reality is a property of that particular simulation. There is absolutely no reason why a simulation that is utterly different from our reality could not exist (and indeed, almost certainly already does).
Simulation in abstract implies to imitate something. Further abstracted to a system of rules removes the reference and it become equivalent to a lot of concepts. It is true that the meaning evolved, but that is probably just an effect because we try to understand reality. And creating a simulation is the test for that understanding. That in best cases fit perceived reality if developed to that goal.
A simulation does not have to model reality and multiple simulations trivially exist. But I don't see why that would imply anything for reality as well from that.
I apologize. I misread your comment that I was replying to as stating that (to paraphrase) the simulation is always modelling reality. Total misread on my part. Very sorry about that.
Part of the argument is that you can only know what you experience. But, if this is a simulation, "you" could be a program running on a computer and your every experience is just piped directly into your consciousness without any underlying physical reality. You might even not be interacting with other people in the simulation, it could be just you and everything else is simulated without being similar to whatever existence you have.
I don't agree with this argument, but it circulates occasionally.
> "you" could be a program running on a computer
If you are in a sim, then the sim execution is an expensive process, it produces heat and consumes energy. If you are in reality, a material body, then keeping alive also consumes energy. The debates about consciousness often assume a cost-free regime, a platonic perspective. I think this is wrong. We have much to gain thinking about how a process provides its own energy, or how it balances costs and gains. Maybe we can find answers about consciousness too if we chase down the cost recursion path.
>If you are in a sim, then the sim execution is an expensive process, it produces heat and consumes energy.
If simulation theory (or similar ideas) are real, it's entirely possible that the "real world" running the simulation operates on completely different physical laws than the simulation.
Again, this is unknowable if the creator of the simulation doesn't want you to figure out it's a simulation. Simulation or not, this is our reality, and our consciousness would be a simulation inside that simulation. Instead of a weird wobbly space universe, we'd just have an execution platform universe.
I agree completely, and I think most debates/arguments around simulation theory and similar ideas are largely pointless, though they can at least be fun sometimes.
Correct in the sense if we are able to determine that we are in a simulation. That would at least hold the promise that we could escape the VM and play with a deeper reality, though at that point the best chance is we are in nested VMs and reality is a long way away.
What's unknowable is whether or not there are real stars that correspond with what you seem to observe; not whether or not your observations themselves are the real stars.
Didn’t we already work out they are similar in their spectral output to the Sun, enough to conclude they are the same kind of thing? And observing their movements makes them far away. Do each of us have to do the experiments again to validate that we know what they are?
Something could only appear to be similar to the Sun. We have to trust in observation at some level for all of those experiments to be valid, basically, which means first believing that you're conscious and second believing that you can experience reality and so on from there.
You can never really disprove that some malicious entity is just making you think you're seeing the stars and talking to people, if you want to go back to philosophy about it. There's a bit of assumed faith
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> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
Who invented the words "consciousness" "reality" "fundamental" that you are now using? you are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality.
Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and society.
The whole discussion here is anchored on individual level, but we are not viable outside society. It's like extracting one cell from one organ and saying it is mysterious why it is like that, while ignoring the organism and the evolution.
If society fails, human die too. If a human makes a fatal mistake, the cells in their body die too. We depend on top level doing its job to keep the lower layers viable.
> You are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality.
Your senses are the only thing on which this statement rests. Your don't know anything like "language", "invented" etc. All you know is what your mind and your senses tell you.
And, yes, engaging with you on this topic, and my argument, is also included in what I refer to as my perception. I have no way to prove that you are even conscious, or that anything like language or invention actually are real, whatever real means.
So it's through the senses that one attains mathematical knowledge?
Is this supposed to be some sort of gotcha?
> Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and society.
Yes exactly. You are sure of nothing except the fact this now exists. The simulation could collapse in the next second. I could awake from this dream.
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
> I know for sure what I am perceiving
This reflects my view. And I’ve always found it mildly amusing that beings I cannot prove to myself are perceiving attempt to convince me that I’m not perceiving, when that’s exactly what I’m maximally sure of. Imagine arguing with an LLM designed to convince you that you’re not real. It would be weird, wouldn’t it?
> It would be weird, wouldn’t it?
That depends how it tried and what influences the LLM had on the outside world.
For example if the LLM could drug you, either by convincing you to take drugs, or trick you into doing it, then convincing you that you're not real becomes monumentally easy. Derealization can be a monumentally profound/terrifying experience to your psyche.
> Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?
This sounds similar to the "how do you know you're not dreaming?" question.
When you are in a dream, you really are the only single conciousness of that world. Any other person you interact with inside your dream is not performing any thinking of their own. Instead, dream interactions are just your single consciousness interacting with itself.
I think it is obvious there are multiple consciousness in the universe and not just one. Unless you're in a dream right now ;)
Only if we abandon reason while simultaneously claiming objectivity.
I cannot know objectively whether I am in a simulation or not. I can, however, reason about my experience, the experiences of others (as I perceive them), and the systems that facilitate perception. All of that information is logically coherent, so I can "know" it. My knowledge may not be objectively proven, but it is the most subjectively relevant conclusion.
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I never quite understood what we mean by "consciousness" but I find fascinating that most modern philosophers who describe themselves as materialists / non religious can argue in the same sentence that there is something special and extra-natural about the human experience.
It's one or the other: either nature is all there is, and therefore, consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, that we can investigate, and probably eventually replicate, and can't deny to other beings or to machines upfront; OR there is something outside reality that we might as well call God.
I'm strongly in the former camp, but I don't have issues with the latter one. What upsets me is the inconsistency of those who try to support both ideas at the same time. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?
Most philosophers are materialists or computational functionalists, while being monists. This means they aren't dualists, and it means they do not adopt the supernatural explanation. But they are careful not to rule out dualism.
There's this pattern I've observed in discussions about philosophy. First there's a rejection of philosophy as silly and misguided, followed by a rediscovery of the same concepts that philosophers have developed, but under a new ad-hoc and less precise language.
Congratulations, you're a philosopher.
I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life.
These people believe this while at the same time considering dualism so ridiculous as to laugh dualists out of the room. The evident problem being that "mind uploading" is the most dualistic possible position to take. A real monist would easily see that by doing mind uploading you have just created a clone that is a whole separate entity from yourself and it is not yourself.
But you are taking an opinionated view of the resolution to the Ship of Theseus paradox. If you are a computational functionalist, then it really is "you" afterwards (or rather there's now two identical "you" until the original "you" is destroyed). A monist could also point to your hypocrisy of believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
Oft-repeated but not true. Neurons, for the most part, are never replaced. If a neuron dies, it's gone forever. Repeated head traumas (leading to CTE) are known to cause personality changes as the brain has been permanently altered due to neuron losses.
A true monist would realize that any experience of the uploaded being that received a copy of the brain is not felt by the original brain that has been copied. This is a fact and it is elementary to see it as true, as well as supporting the view that the copy is not the same being at all. If your description of computation functionalists is accurate, then they simply are dualists and would do good in admitting this to themselves.
Invoking the Ship of Theseus is a distraction. The Ship of Theseus paradox does not involve a full copy at the atomic level while the original still stands. If it did, the paradox would not even exists. The paradox exists because there is the key element that you do not have in mind copying/uploading: _continuity_.
There is no prove that continuity really matters. In fact who goes to say that your current conscious self is the same as your self from five minutes ago. After all you do not feel what they felt. The only thing that makes you think that the two are related or even the same is your state (memories, emotions). Why would we even think about whether cloning is able to transmit consciousness when we don’t even know if consciousness is transmitted over time?
Edit: Just to clarify my opinion: This means that the relationship between my self from five seconds ago and my current self and the relationship between my self from five seconds ago and a clone of that self that aged the same amount would be equivalent. Both of us would _not_ be the same as my past self
In that case you don't exist, since there is no such thing as "current". Every moment in time is either past or future, assuming time is continuous. The reals are infinitely infinite.
Hey, looks like you're finally starting to catch on to the trick the consciousness plays on you.
consciousness always exists in the past of reality around you. It is a physical process with an execution time. Light takes nanoseconds to get to your eyes. The chemical reactions in your eyes take milliseconds. Then you have that signal getting to your visual cortex. Then your brain takes a while and shoves a bunch of shit it assumes is there from pattern matching taking its own number of milliseconds. Eventually this is passed up to your consciousness to interpret 'long' after it actually happened.
But you can make it even more screwy from that point that totally screw with your perception of time. Even more fun are drugs that keep you conscious but keep you from recording short term memories so it's like that time never existed.
You are but a chemical dream upon meat hardware.
if time is continuous, there are no moments
Isn't continuity just an implementation detail? Suppose your brain was replaced a bit at a time with mechanical hardware, the end result is an uploaded mind while maintaining continuity.
I admit that this is a troubling problem with the position that I stated, but I don't think it's a complete takedown.
The easiest rebuttal would be to simply say that continuity is not a mere implementation detail. If you give up continuity, you can make a copy without altering the original, you just have to read it.
But if you need to ensure continuity you have to alter the original. This seems to me a very fundamental part of the process, making it qualitatively different.
Imagine you are destroyed in your sleep by aliens and replaced by an atomically identical duplicate. Would you call this "you"?
If not, what if the aliens recycled the atoms from your original body to make the new body, putting each original atom into the same original spot with the same position and momentum (ignoring quantum and uncertainty principle).
What if they recycled 99% of the atoms from your original body, but swapped 1% of them for different atoms?
What if they only destroyed 5% of your brain and reassembled that destroyed portion, leaving the rest of you untouched? What about 50%?
What if they waited 1 planck moment before reassembling you versus 5 seconds?
Where is your dividing line in this scenario space between "that's really me" versus "that's just a copy and is not really me" ?
The functionalist answer, as I understand it, is fungibility across time and copies when arriving at definitions of words like "you".
The functionalist answer is not that > 1 copy can communicate telepathically or supernaturally share experiences is a dualist sense. They are still causally independent physical entities.
None of these scenarios would result in "me" from a monist perspective. The destruction is a discontinuity point, I died there and then, and then the next planck moment a new being was created with all my memories. But "I" died.
The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.
And, you know, there's really nothing wrong being dualist. I do not mean to denigrate that specific worldview. What is problematic is claiming to be a staunch monist while holding dualist positions.
What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
> The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist.
I think you're misunderstanding that words are social constructs which can point to abstract categories rather than necessarily single concrete objects at a particular moment in time (although words can also do that).
Like if you have multiple tennis balls, each ball is still a tennis ball, despite each ball being different, because "tennis ball" is a social construct and an abstraction that's an indirection to a certain concept. In the worldview I am talking about, the word "you" is an indirection to a mind that is indistinguishable in content and experience from the one you have right now, with the property of fungibility across modalities, time and space.
> What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
Apologies, I read too quickly and skipped over this. See one of my sibling comments. I concede this is problematic for my position and I need to think harder on how to solve it, but I don't think it's unsolvable. The placeholder answer is that there must be a certain level of damage -- the precise % probably doesn't matter as much as exactly which parts you destroy -- that is incompatible with keeping continuity.
For the rest, as a social construct, if we incinerate me to create a clone of me that is identical to the original at the subatomic level I agree that, for everyone else in society, it is me. But my self has still died and whatever replaced it is having its own experiences. And it matters very little what everybody else thinks: if tomorrow an imposter convinces everybody else that they are me, they aren't me for me. Their experiences aren't magically beamed to my brain.
Your tennis ball example is again a textbook dualist position. You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself. But, assuming balls can feel when they are hit by the racket, the ball you used in the previous point and now is lying on the sideline does not feel being hit when the next point starts with another ball.
There's nothing you need to solve because definitions of words are subjective social constructs that are neither correct or incorrect. Definitions are axioms.
You have chosen to define the word "you" to require continuity, under some rubric. By that definition, a copy of you isn't really you. That's correct under your axiom, but it is incorrect under other axioms.
The functionalists I am trying to channel in this conversation have a different subjectively chosen definition of that same word, that is internally coherent assuming functionalism is a true description of the world.
You may wish to argue that their definition/axiom lacks utility, but that's subjective and cannot breach the boundary into a claim about objective correctness (logical deductions) under the axiom.
> You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself.
This sounds like solipsism not dualism vs. monism. In non-solipsistic monism, social constructs can exist outside of a collection of minds, because other minds also exist.
Sorry, perhaps I just don't know what "monism" truly means, I admit my ignorance, but if we just limit ourselves to the mind-body problem, I just meant that a dualist position considers the mind as separate from the body, and monism rejects that.
The functionalist point of view you propose doesn't seem to be to be useful at all in this context. Let's backtrack. The original example I provided you when you asked about whether there can be somebody proposing monism and at the same time holding dualist positions was asking:
"If I do mind uploading, do I die?"
You can be creative in redefining what the word "I" means, which is what you engaged with, but when push comes to shove and I do the actual mind uploading, then the self that experienced my qualia since birth will irreparably stop experiencing qualia (aka: dying) and be replaced by another self. You're free to call that self as if it was me, and be all happy it can do the same things I could do, but that's not gonna change the fact that my previous self (the only "I" that matters to me) died.
Would you step in the Star Trek teleporter knowing that you will die, and think you haven't died just because you have been replaced by a different being that is functionally equivalent to you? I sure as hell will never do it.
I pretty much agree with your position. The thought occurs to me, though, that via this same definition we die every time we go to sleep or are out under anesthesia. Maybe even every moment is a tiny death and rebirth. The real difference between these events and being "teleported" is that you do them without fear (maybe some fear for anesthesia) and without being any worse off for the lack of continuity.
As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas:
- there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
- destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern
And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
> If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
This is exactly what don't know, and is interesting to explore.
> there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time? It seems possible for two separate consciousness to have the same memories and be identical in all respects, and yet still not be the same.
To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.
> So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time?
There’d be two Mes – two instantiations of the Me pattern co-occurring. And that would likely be confusing for both of us!
> To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.
Exactly! If we suspend a Docker image, transfer it to a new compatible host machine, and fire it up, we consider it a resumption of the same process (pattern) in a different instance.
Likewise, say we found a mathematical function that would compute the entire state of that Docker image at that moment, and then wiped the image – such that there was no current physical instantiation of it anywhere, on any machine – and subsequently used the function to regenerate it bit for bit.
A dualist would say there’s something fundamentally different about the human analogue of that; that the Mind has a separate existence Elsewhere – and not just in the mathematical sense of patterns not requiring instantiation to still be patterns, since that would apply to all patterns, Minds or not.
>and yet still not be the same.
You're making a fundimental mistake here on understanding substrates.
If I take a hard drive an copy it, is it the same hard drive? Well, no, we'd both agree they are two different hard drives, that's pretty easy to see.
But what if we are executing data off the hard drive. Initially it would operate as if it were the same, the data on the hard drive would have zero ability or knowledge that it was copied. As the execution continued in two different places in physical reality the state of the hard drives would change.
Coming back to people, you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level. Cells die, new ones are created, organs spurt out chemicals in varying amounts that alter your mental state, you 'remember' memories and by doing so rewrite them, new information enters from your senses and changes the physical makeup of the structure of our brain via re-enforcement/de-enforcement. Simply put this idea of you is an ethereal moving target. Copying that doesn't change it, each one of them will still think they are the you that has lived up till this point. When looking at both, you'll see their lives diverge, but unless they learn about each other, each you will never know that's the case.
> you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level.
And yet there is a sense of continuity. Are you saying the if your are killed and replaced by an immortal being with your same memories, thought patterns, and body, that'd be an acceptable continuation of you? You'd be ok with that as a form of attaining immortality?
> if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
If you have a son and you kill him, you haven't destroyed the concept of a son. You can always make a new son. If the son had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
Is that the same son? Do you not go to prison for murder?
If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?
> It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.
The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.
A true dualist believes that consciousness survives outside of a medium in this universe.
> If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?
If this is true, that the body dies every planck time and the mind survives it, then it simply means the dualist position is true.
> The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.
I'm sorry, but you're circling back to the first message I wrote. You are giving to information magical properties that it cannot have, because they lead to a contradiction. With the same information you can make multiple copies of me at the same time. But if you make two, the experiences of one do not get magically transmitted to the brain of the other. So those are two distinct selves, even if they are made with the exact same information. This clearly does not work. It's the same issue of mind uploading that I initially argued about.
> the experiences of one do not get magically transmitted to the brain of the other. So those are two distinct selves, even if they are made with the exact same information.
How's that a problem? They would both be distinct selves with a common past.
Ok, but then I fear you're either contradicting yourself, or addressing a point I didn't make.
Let me restate:
1. energy123 says that, if we completely annihilate the body of X and then we re-assemble it one planck time later, X is still the exact same self after the annihilation as they were before.
2. I reply: a monist must hold the position that X died with the annihilation and the recomposed being is a different self, Y, which just so happens to have the same memories as X. If you insist that the new being is still the same self X, you must assume that something that was not in the body survived the complete annihilation of the body and was put back in the body during the re-assembly.
3. You attempted to say that that something was the information needed to recompose the body. But now you're saying that actually we have produced two entirely different beings, A and B, both of whom believe to be X.
I 100% agree with you that this is what happened. But you cannot tell me in the same breath that X is still alive. That is a contradiction.
The ultimate challenge is always the same: assuming the technology to perfectly copy and simulate a brain exists, would you upload your mind and do you expect that it is you that awake inside the machine? If you answer "yes" you must concede you are a dualist. A monist can only answer "no". And, as I gather from this discussion, a functionalist would (i) answer "yes" after redefining what "you" means, (ii) mean "no" because as you just admitted we created two new beings, (iii) upload themselves and then die happy knowing that something else with their memories will live on.
(I realize you actually have not explicitly objected to this specific challenge yet, so maybe we fully agree and that's that)
[We are very much in speculative territory here of course, it is not a given that duplication or upload is possible at all for a human mind]
I would say that both A and B would claim to be X and have the "continuous"[1] experience to be X while agreeing that they are distinct persons. I think that the question of whether A or B, both, or neither is the true X, is not a scientific question, and as a philosophical question, a fairly empty one.
Regarding the challenge, I would expect that the consciousness would be forked: there is a "me" that would awake inside the machine and would be very glad to be alive, while the "me" outside would experience dying. This seems to go against the exclusiveness of the experience of being themselves, but assuming the existence of the magically perfect duplication, both would be valid experiences and again neither could make a claim about being the real me. I don't find this to be a contradiction.
An interesting question would be whether consciousness can be reunited after being forked.
But all of these scenarios have been explored extensively. Are you familiar with the Egan's "Permutation City"?
edit: I was not familiar with the functionalist position, but for the little I read, it seems to me that it is just a variant of the monist position. You could say I'm a functionalist I guess. Also I believe that we are fundamentally in agreement and we might just disagree with definitions of words.
[1] what does "continuous" even mean? Do one have a "continuous" experience of being yourself after a night's sleep? After anesthesia? After a coma?
> I would say that both A and B would claim to be X and have the "continuous"[1] experience to be X while agreeing that they are distinct persons. I think that the question of whether A or B, both, or neither is the true X, is not a scientific question, and as a philosophical question, a fairly empty one.
I agree that it is not a scientific question, but as with virtually all ethical questions not being scientific doesn't mean it's empty. They are, in fact, very fundamental. This specific question might be empty now, but it won't be when people start messing up with brains (e.g. advancements in Neuralink).
In the hypothetical scenario, it is the most important question in the whole world from X's perspective because it involves, you know, them dying. X cannot be either of A or B, because they are indistinguishable (any argument proving A=X also holds for B=X, but A!=B so they are wrong). Saying that X is both A and B requires dualism (A's and B's experiences somehow get beamed to a third consciousness). Only X's death and A and B independence (with the same memories) is compatible with a position that doesn't involve contradictions or souls of some kind.
> Regarding the challenge, I would expect that the consciousness would be forked: there is a "me" that would awake inside the machine and would be very glad to be alive, while the "me" outside would experience dying. This seems to go against the exclusiveness of the experience of being themselves, but assuming the existence of the magically perfect duplication, both would be valid experiences and again neither could make a claim about being the real me. I don't find this to be a contradiction.
Do you not find a contradiction in saying that you cannot make the claim of being the real you just because your brain was copied? Suppose that this copy happens without you falling asleep and without you noticing: have you stopped being you?
> But all of these scenarios have been explored extensively. Are you familiar with the Egan's "Permutation City"?
I read it a while ago. From what I remember, it is based on Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis, which I find being hopelessly confused about the nature of reality. Doesn't the novel assume the consequent (it starts from the assumption that you can do this kind of manipulation with consciousness)? I had similar issues with Accelerando.
> [1] what does "continuous" even mean? Do one have a "continuous" experience of being yourself after a night's sleep? After anesthesia? After a coma?
Sleep and anesthesia? Of course: your brain is still active even if it is not recording memories. Coma it depends: unless you're brain dead, still yes.
The ‘you’ that wakes up tomorrow is a whole separate entity from you right now, unless you want to concede that identity is a path variable and that whether the exact same physical/mental/emotional entity is you or not depends on how those particles got there.
Just because the brain doesn't form memories while you sleep, doesn't mean you have ceased to exist. You have probably forgot many things that have happened to you today: does that mean you didn't exist in those moments you forgot? Am I misunderstanding your point?
If the universe was created 5 minutes ago, then you didn't exist before that, but it doesn't matter, because past and present don't interact.
Are there people who say that digitizing one's conscious moves their mind? If I upload a file from my computer to to a server, the file still exists on my computer (until deleted). I've never thought that a mind upload would work any differently.
I think that many who talk about consciousness digitization handwave away what happens to their body/brain afterwards, but I don't necessarily think that means they think they'll move into the computer.
depends if you do a copy paste or cut and paste
My point is that the word "upload", without context indicating otherwise, does not imply that the original is changed in any way.
I think reasonably faithful clones would be mes. We could live my life, from multiple perspectives, some of them quite separate. It might be necessary to distinguish them with numbers, or claim that one of them has become too different to really count as a me, but those are details and semantic matters.
> copying any possible information to the most minute synapse
That's reducing an individual to, I assume, the sum of its neural network. So like considering everything else happening in the fleshy body matters to what a human is, nor how they relate to the rest of cosmos as such a body.
[dead]
I think a lot of people interpret philosophers' arguments differently and it isn't always clear what a philosopher themselves truly believes.
For example Searle's Chinese room thought experiment... On the one hand you can easily construe it to imply that he believes there's something fundamentally special about human consciousness that cannot be reproduced by a machine. On the other hand you could interpret his perspective, which I think is more in line with his real perspective, as implyimg that replicating the human mind machine requires truly replicating it physically rather than approximating it and that it's misleading to imply that you can get there with an approximation ... Still I can see how this confuses dualists or could appear in line with their point of view even though it is arguably a nuanced take on the materiallist view
> you can easily construe it to imply that he believes there's something fundamentally special about human consciousness that cannot be reproduced by a machine. On the other hand you could interpret his perspective, which I think is more in line with his real perspective, as implyimg that replicating the human mind machine requires truly replicating it physically
I'm not sure I understand. If we must replicate a human brain physically in order to create something that has consciousness, then how is that not something 'special that cannot be reproduced by a machine'?
Your comment does serve the point I was making. Still there is a perspective that if you could artificially reproduce the human mind top to bottom, a truly perfect reproduction in other words, then you ought to be able to trigger an identical consciousness. In other words yes special type of machine is needed for the machine nevertheless not some special soul.
Of course the counterpoint and maybe the one you're making is that special machine ought to be simply called a soul machine and we could all agree it would be very difficult to reproduce it and it is intrinsically special... but maybe that's for the very specific form of Consciousness we have... but maybe there are other forms
That perspective is 'biological exceptionalism' and requires that there is something specific to biology that allows consciousness while precluding anything not biological. For that to be convincing there must be a mechanism and no one has proposed anything other than a soul for that.
This is where I would say that to defining that mechanism is the hard problem... it's a mischaracterization to call it the easy problem. But it doesn't require a soul
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?
Every guy saying that free will doesn't exist is arguing exactly this. Physical causality considered an obstacle to freedom implies that the conscious entity is somehow outside the physical world.
You are implying that consciousness has to include free will? Why?
That's backwards. People saying that there's no free will because determinism is implying that human consciousness is outside the physical world. Actually that's what TFA is about and makes a great job explaining it.
My comment was responding to energy123 questioning there are philosophers that are both materialistic and consider human consciousness is "special". The moment you separate consciousness from all the physical processes that support it (and that's what negating "free" will arguing that it's caused by material forces) you're placing it in a different "plane".
That's hardly an unheard-of position, there are many thinkers that fall for this.
That's strange, hard determinists are eliminativists, and eliminativists don't believe in consciousness, but I never saw them speaking about both at the same time.
They don't believe in consciousness... at all? I guess they don't recognize consciousness for some definition of it that includes agency.
That's one of their arguments: if a human is eliminated, then there's nothing to attribute agency to.
In case you didn't get it: you were invited to provide concrete examples of philosophers holding the explicit opinion you have described.
In case you don't get it: you don't get to set the discussion terms. You can argue all you want yourself, but my point is already made. If you want a list, search for "hard incopatibilism" or "hard determinism" and you get it.
I've yet to find a falsifiable definition of consciousness.
I do believe in intelligence (which is measured against a particular task) and ego (which inflates the self over the other).
"might as well call God" is a bizzare conclusion for the latter though because "God" is far from an abstract concept - it's probably one of the most heavily loaded terms in every human culture.
Overloaded, I’d say. There are many different definitions, most incompatible with each other, such that the term is almost meaningless without extensive preceding discussion.
No, there is at least one other option, which is that consciousness [1] is a phenomenon that we can't replicate in non-biological brains [2], but from which the existence of a "God"-like being, as the term is understood by major religions, still doesn't follow.
[1] Or "qualia", to be precise.
[2] For example, the existence of qualia might require certain carbon-based structures which aren't present in silicon-based devices.
There is nothing that we know of in carbon based structures that violates universal causality, even in quantum scales where causality becomes more vague it is replaced by a measurable randomness.
So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
Computing something isn’t the same thing as it actually happening.
That is a dubious asertion. At high enough resolution the model converges on the modeled.
"Resolution" has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
No amount of scribbling graphite onto paper will produce a butterfly.
[citation needed]
\s?
Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening? Writing data on a storage medium? What about a roomba vacuuming a floor?
> Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening?
Yeah, of course.
What I'm addressing is "if we turn 100% of everything about neurons into numbers we can do calculations on those numbers and it's the same as that stuff actually happening with real neurons". Which is entirely wrong. A trajectory calculation isn't different from actually firing a projectile because it's not precise enough but because it's something else entirely.
So are saying that if we made a computer out of neurons that it could be capable of consciousness whereas an electronic one could not?
Yes, brains apparently can do consciousness.
Can descriptions of brains do consciousness? I don't know why we'd expect that they could. You can describe a fire in all the detail you like, and burn nothing.
Can electronic brains be conscious? I dunno. If I had to guess? Sky's-the-limit ignore-all-physical-and-temporal-constraints? Probably. Within the bounds of what humans will ever achieve? Maybe. I doubt they'd look as little-removed from tabulation machines as ours are, though. Like I definitely don't think you get there solving math problems. That would be surprisingly metaphysical.
A fire is something that happens externally and has observable actions. An internal state is not. Your thoughts may take a physical form but that form cannot be demonstrated. Unless you can show me telekinesis then you have only intuition. Why are you so certain that these intuitions are true?
Possibly metaphysical naturalism is wrong and supernatural things exist! And maybe thoughts (and/or the experience of consciousness) are among those supernatural things. That could be it. In which case sure, maybe solving math problems can create consciousness (why not?).
You are attacking a strawman without answering the question.
Do I think supernatural things like thoughts not being represented in physical reality exist? I defer to Russell's Teapot on this one and lean toward "no". If they do, then attempting to reason about anything gets pretty iffy anyway. Who knows what might exist or be true, in that case!
There is nothing that says that if thoughts are not made in brains they must be supernatural. You are making conclusions not based on evidence or argument.
> […] that violates universal causality
I think you're conflating qualia with free will. These are very different concepts, and the experience of qualia has nothing at all to do with "violating causality".
> So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
As long as we have practically no idea how qualia arise, or even what exactly they are, your claim has no base to stand on.
Qualia are a begged question from the start, imo.
Did typing this sentence feel funny?
How would I tell? ;)
Basically the Chinese Room argument. By now clear wrong.
How do you figure that? The Chinese Room has had many replies but no clear refutation.
That's because Chinese Room is an assumption, not an argument.
Completely wrong. Please read up on the argument and the debate around it before continuing [1].
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
If the thing "outside of reality" ever reveals useful to explain anything about reality, then it becomes part of reality.
I've been debating consciousness for many years as a layman, not an expert, but a layman who has read a lot of scholarly books on the subject.
In my experience, the majority of people who take the position that consciousness is something special to humans are nearly always coming from a religious background and viewing it through a religious lens. This makes sense, as if we reduce consciousness to physical reality, then the implications to free will become quite clear and devastating against it being a thing. This essentially destroys a lot of religions which are fundamentally based on humans having free will. Detailing the full chain of thought would take quite a bit of space, but the quick answer is that the ability for free will is hiding from us if it actually exists. Many people reach for quantum mechanics and its source of randomness as room for consciousness to exist that gives us free will, but the problem there is neurologically we operate at a far larger size than quantum effects would be measured. There's also no way to control the outcome of quantum events as it is truly random. So one would need to show how our neurological physiological minds could manipulate quantum space, which of course they can't. At the level our brains operate, we are well into deterministic physics.
While they absolutely deny this, the impression I get is that they are making a god of the gaps argument. Consciousness is something we don't understand yet, and can't even really define well as many people here have pointed out, so to them it doesn't feel like a classic God of the gaps.
For that reason, I find your comment above quite interesting. I personally find philosophy to be a fascinating and useful tool, but it definitely has a tendency to mislead, especially in areas where hard science can inform. Of course there's an entire debate around the philosophy of science itself, but that feels off topic here.
The thing that Rovelli is arguing against (well -- not really arguing -- more, "stubbornly sticking his head in the sand" against) is not really a position that is held by a bunch of religious people trying to create a weird "god-of-the-gaps style argument" as you characterize.
Like, that may have been your experience -- not contradicting you on who you've met and what you've talked with them about etc. ... but what he's talking about is a position argued by a lot of philosophers and including those who have no particular metaphysical commitments.
Rovelli here does a lot worse than Dennett's "quining qualia" paper where he tries to get people to be really specific about "what are these qualia like" and finds that they're so hard to embed in language, to symbolically represent, that maybe he-as-philosopher can discharge his duty to be engaged-with-phenomenalism by just kinda sticking his fingers in his ears and saying "what phenomena?! you haven't clearly defined the phenomena!"
But someone like Searle who has no bones about himself being an atheist and, while he didn't like to describe himself as "materialist" because of the history of that term[1] he would acknowledge that it was close to his basic position. And I want to be clear that he views consciousness as a scientifically solvable problem. He doesn't think we've solved it yet but he thinks the philosophical problems are ultimately tractable and if we solve them and get out of the way you'll get a fine science of consciousness someday. Nevertheless, he's very clear about agreeing with the fact that these qualia are important to the discussion and he would laugh at you for trying to leave them out -- he'd say, now you're trying to make a science of consciousness, by leaving out the consciousness. And of course you don't think there's any science left to be done at that point and "well, it's all deterministic physics, we understand it all, nothing to be done here."
So like if you want to read his take, a book is Freedom and Neurobiology, but for this comment I just want to point out that him simultaneously believing that there are phenomena of experience, and believing that there is no God, are two beliefs that are not uncommon for philosophers to hold together.
1. There's kind of no way to very briefly make the point since you kind of need to be hit in the face with a sledgehammer about it. So Searle views Descartes as erroneously trying to package up the world into two realms -- mind properties or substances on this hand, physical properties or substances on that hand -- and insisting that they can't overlap. And then Descartes' legacy was that you had camps which said 'those mind properties aren't real, only the physical properties' (materialism) and 'those physical properties aren't real, only the mind properties' (idealism) but coming from the same mistaken beginning. Searle would point to the score of a football game and say 'now is that physical because it's represented in terms of lights on the scoreboard, or is it mental because it's represented in terms of the thoughts of the referee, what about all the people on both sides who think the referee made the wrong decision -- something which, remember, by definition the actual referee cannot do; they are the final authority -- and they believe that the score is "really" some other number distinct from the score represented on the lights; and what if none of these people are "right" in the sense that if a perfectly perceptive model referee could have made all of the scoring calls in the game according to the rules on the books, then the score would have actually included an event that everyone watching thought was unambiguously non-scoring but actually it was completely legal and valid. But here I-the-philosopher come into all of this absolute mess and I want to carve out a clear boolean yes/no classification, mental vs physical, material vs ideal, which is it -- the problem, was not that I counted to two distinct possibilities, but that I thought counting those possibilities was a meaningful way to decompose the problem in the first place.
So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness.
To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise.
I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is.
I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place.
And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.
There's a hard problem in either case, I think.
If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?
If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"
From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).
For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.
I find your position quite interesting but I feel like it still suffers the same issues I've seen in other "mind-first" arguments (I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself), such as p-zombies (how do you know other people are conscious as well?) and the origin of it.
I think both positions (physicalism vs mind-first) suffer from the same issue that is to reach the bottom of it all, except physicalism seems to have reached further. In the past we wondered what the world was made of and we observed it, coming to the idea of elements such as Aether, then later developed chemistry then physics, reaching layer below layer of rules that interact to the emergence of the layer above. Lots of rules that we can (apparently) reproduce and verify, cells emerging from molecules interacting emerging from atoms interacting emerging from quantum particles emeging from quantum fields... Maybe emerging from strings or a simulation? We don't know. It seems to me we also don't know how to tell we've finally reached the bottom of it, but what we have sounds pretty solid.
In a mind-first view it seems that this stack is upside-down, with a consciousness giving rise to a brain in a world with its objects which are made of molecules coming to existence upon observation (that is, chemistry would be a top layer after conscience further inspecting it), which are ruled by physics etc. Except this cause-and-consequence relation is not clear to me. Like you said:
> To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge.
How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie? Do I give rise to the world, or do you? Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way? And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us? (not throwing shade btw, I'm just interested in your point of view).
To me physicalism looks like a flame graph with physics at the bottom and minds at the tips of the flames, with less simpler things giving rise to multiple complex things, while mind-first looks like an icicle graph (assuming multiple consciousness) or an upside down triangle (assuming a single consciousness), with physics at the top (all "graphs" putting cause at the bottom and effect on top).
> I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself
Don't worry. You're in good company.
> How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie?
It's impossible for me to say that you are conscious. I only watch my own movie. In that movie, others appear to be watching their own movies. Their movies exist only as content in my movie. I cannot say for certain whether or not there really are conscious experiences like mine occurring. All I can say is that I am being given the impression that there are.
> Do I give rise to the world, or do you?
I do. Or at least, something impresses the world upon me. You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me, and, disappointingly (for me at least), there's no way to confirm it through this movie that I am watching. I am left having to "make up my own mind" about whether or not I choose to believe you are anything but a p-zombie extra, in what is (as far as I can see of the conscious spectrum I am able to perceive), a single screen, single reel movie. But I'm just guessing, hoping, wishing, because that's all I can do from this limited vantage point.
> Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way?
It's a cute idea. Design by committee. Books/predictions of the future seem to have this annoying property of becoming true, lending to this idea. Who knows?
> And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us?
What else am I supposed to do? If you have unimaginable wealth, infinite time and the ability to conjure anything into existence, exactly what are you to do? Perhaps you might dream up what having the opposite of your existence might be, and set about convincing yourself that you are a time-ful, perishable human-being bound by physics and inevitably limited by the finite energy available in the universe, stumped by entropy. Perhaps you even role play as the puppets on the ends of your fingers, while convincing yourself that they're just as real as you are, so you can feel what it's like not to be the majesty of your own lonely empire. What else am I supposed to do, than to go along with it? If we destroy the illusion, we're back to square one - and then what?
Lots of comments here and lots of opinions! the Consciousness conference has been discussing this since 1994, will be in San Diego this October. It is where the actual Hard problem was first proposed by Chalmers, Rovelli was at the conference a few years ago too. https://cs2026.org/ It's a great conference, with lots of interesting people and conversations. Highly recommend
I see, thanks for your reply. I'm still with physicalism so far, but I see your point. It gave me more room for thought.
> You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me.
I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized *YOU* must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon *ME*. Now I'm fine again. Thanks to myself for giving rise to such an interesting p-zombie like you.
> I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized YOU must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon ME.
Exactly. Now that we’re both aligned on having unreconcilable claims to being the one-true-consciousness, we can write competing holy books and argue about promised lands, and all that good jazz.
You see, once we begin playing the game, a whole host of worldly distractions crop up to occupy us. Wait until I show you this game called “having a career”, or “chasing wealth”. Spoiler alert - your body dies at the end, and you get to keep none of it, but it was fun, or at least it was supposed to be.
>I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness
Cool, I'll give you some drugs that alter the physical reactions in your brain and turn off your consciousness, then tell me all about it....
oh.
If I mess with the voltages of a CPU board, it can mess up the software. Do you conclude from that that software is electrical? You should conclude that it runs on an electrical substrate, but not that the software itself is electrical.
> Do you conclude from that that software is electrical?
Yes, yes it is, unless you have some biological software or an analog computer with software to show me.
Deal. Where do I sign?
> Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away."
You end up with something like integrated information theory: https://iep.utm.edu/integrated-information-theory-of-conscio...
From such a perspective, the article's byline, "Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe.
But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains.
Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.
The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering.
If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain?
This isn't enough:
Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?Qualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a different medium in a different way than us leads to confusion.
That’s valid also from the point of view that pain is a key signal to avoid injury. I am not sure it’s the best example of qualia and it could be simulated by self preservation signals (e.g. the touch sensor on a Roomba). The extension of pain (in Hofstadter sense) is probably more appropriate as qualia (e.g. the pain of losing someone you love).
I really should go back to finish reading GEB. I loved the beginning, but for some reason I dropped off somewhere in the first 1/3. I'm not sure I fully get the point, although I have a vague sense I agree with you. :)
The Mind's I (a collection of essays) or I Am a Strange Loop are probably more appropriate reading here.
Apologies. I should be more specific. The book is Surfaces and Essences if I remember correctly.
What about if the robot's RNG is seeded with a particular number, that we did not write down... And we can destroy it's memory hardware containing the seed, 'killing' it.
Even if the memory hardware is replaced, it won't be the 'same' individual, no? Would an aversion to 'death' be rational in it?
Looking around at evidence, only the ones with somewhat cute eyes can qualify for empathy. Bad luck if someone is a grass or an amoeba, but machines will be just fine.
Philosophers may squint at the suffering-in-itself long and hard, but I doubt they'll affect waking/extinguishing empathy of the masses. Exploring the suffering that fails our empathy (e.g. suffering of a wheat plant harvested) seems a highly abstract task; more abstract than high mathematics.
Pain and suffering. In fact just suffering, right? We don't care about signals resulting from adverse conditions. We care about ideas. So we don't really care about suffering, as such, but about the harm it does to ideas and idea creation. Then consciousness is having an idea about what's going on.
Before that, you need to answer whether a machine can even feel pain or not, not whether it is telling the truth or not. We feel pain because we have a nervous system that reacts to the physical world and it is an indicator that something is wrong. That doesn't translate at all to any machine I know of. If we end up building a nervous system and a basic functioning brain and hook it up to a machine then sure its an interesting question
you can feel pain without an external influence stimulating it. purely mental processes are sufficient to experience suffering.
I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.
No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.
You really don't need a concept of a colour or a shape, and it's a fairly typical academic fallacy to assume you do.
That's directly confusing experience with categorisation and labelling of experience.
If you touch a very hot object your nervous system will pull your hand away before your brain registers what's happening. The qualia of pain are pre-conceptual, preverbal, and precranial, and your consciousness only catches up later.
Surely this implies exactly the opposite - you don't register the pain, don't feel it, until after you pull your hand away. It's a reflex action in response to heat. Qualia require a brain to process sensory input.
yes
reflexes have nothing to do with qualia. you can differentiate objects without knowing what is a triangle and what is a square, or that this colour is red. but I think qualia as commonly understood involve concepts in a way that means they are not immediate experience in some kind of cartesian sense. We speak of them as categorised. certainly the way people commonly speak about them they are very carefree about invoking "the qualia of a horse" or some other specific object.
Not fundamental to existence but fundamental to consciousness.
Theoretically the person sitting next to you could be a zombie, no qualia, the lights are off, he's just having a conversation with you with nothing going on behind the scenes. And there's no way to tell, except that it's reasonable to extrapolate that since you feel something, he probably does too.
My argument is that qualia are actually cognitive artefacts bound up with language, not the base elements of "what it is to be" you or me, which is how people often speak of them, so the p-zombie concept is a bit nonsensical to me.
They are what they are (its a subjective phenomenon). I'm not claiming to know where they come from.
This is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.
you think qualia are the soul then!
I don't know what you mean by the word soul. I associate it with dualist religious thought. But maybe you mean something else?
Except that you don't know LLMs don't. For all we know we're torturing them.
Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”.
Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is not special. I /do/ believe that the human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotional and memory is special. My robot cannot write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But now we are talking a matter of degrees, not qualia.
Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.
I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust.
Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”.
If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?
This - as usual - confuses behaviour with consciousness.
Humans bonded with ELIZA, but that didn't mean ELIZA was conscious. ELIZA was an automaton that mimicked certain behaviours that triggered certain emotional responses.
If you scale that up you get an LLM and/or a social media bot farm, both of which are much better at triggering responses than ELIZA was.
It's now trivial to create an automaton that play acts various moods, and if you give it a memory it will mimic relationship-related conversations.
But it doesn't need to be conscious to do that, and the parsimonious Occam's razor explanation of its behaviours is that it's more economic and credible to assume it's still an automaton with no self-awareness.
Otherwise you have to argue that much simpler systems, like PID thermostats, and pretty much every computer system, are conscious because they "experience" qualia that represent a varying state of the world, with memory.
The sneakiness in your example is choosing an example which mimics emotional bonding. Rhetorically that makes it look like a hypothetical robot is acting emotionally, which is one of the covert signals us mammals tend to associate with consciousness.
But the criticism stands. Feigning emotions well enough to fool other mammals isn't at all the same as experiencing them.
To really experience emotions you need a self-image quale which includes an emotional component. And since subjective experiences have no objective element that can be measured, we can never say for sure whether anything or anyone else actually is conscious.
We assume we are, because we experience it, and we assume others are by implication.
But there's a point where that assumption stops being reasonable, and that's where your cat robot exists.
I guess where I am coming from with my cat robot is that I believe behavior begets consciousness. Whatever behavior is happening, that must mean some internal representation of the world is driving it. Robots will never have human emotions but I believe that some robots /already/ have their own goals and internal representations of reality and models of themselves worth considering on their own terms. A roomba must know where it is in space. Just because it doesn’t feel ennui as well is hardly a shortcoming.
Our brains are very complicated models of the world that attempt to mirror reality. That is what it means to be able to navigate physical space and provide for ourselves in nature. Our nature includes an incredibly complex social sphere and we have emotions to help us better navigate it. Animals we domesticate are clued into human emotions, others are not. I bet slugs have less of a sense of “I” but they still have some kind of an experience. I bet a tree has even less. It’s a sliding scale—each organism has just enough awareness for the task at hand.
The fact that we have a large emotional catalogue and a (some could say overly developed) sense of self is a curiosity more than a hard problem. It’s “I am a strange loop”, not “I am an ineffable indescribable inscrutable untouchable loop”.
> if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love
There are two concepts of "may" at play here:
"may" in the sense of "nothing keeps us from imagining this", and in the sense of "we know how it works, and it can happen".
A car may crash, and glass may break are the latter.
But for the former we actually have no idea how this could work. That is what makes it a hard philosophical problem. That kind of "may" is cheap.
How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.
at the risk of jumping the shark into full-on “woo woo”: what does it mean to “create ideas”? are ideas created or revealed? if ideas are created where do they come from? if ideas are revealed, then does that necessarily imply a determinism? if the robot devises a novel solution to a technical problem, isn’t that an idea? or is the robot’s solution actually the unavoidable result of the entire history of analytical thought? if the novel solution isn’t the creation of an idea, then what makes an idea an idea? if Michelangelo’s David was sculpted by an automaton, is it less beautiful? If so, why? If not, why not?
no you didn’t kill it, it was never alive. the same way my dishwasher or vacuum aren’t killed when they break and i replace them. even if the robot “remembers”, who cares? when i bin my phone did i kill siri because she sometimes remembered things for me?
nicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly
Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me.
My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.
What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.
More than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc.
You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited?
On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response.
It gets complicated, is what I'm saying.
Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.
What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment.
With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because it’s hard to measure anything; even if you trust what they may be claiming, how do you know how they experience them.
One perspective is that some may not feel emotions because emotions did not successfully manipulate their environment in childhood. So why develop them. If anger worked to manipulate your environment, you may become angry easily later on, in an attempt to replicate the successful manipulation. If grief worked, you will experience grief. If “coldness” worked, you will react coldly. If “empathy” worked to manipulate to your benefit, you will be tuned to try empathy.
“Normal” only shows what typically works in a society, not what is “healthy” or “natural”. We’re all highly adaptive individuals, learning how to survive in whatever environment we grow up in. We all become master manipulators, because that’s how we survive. Some forms of manipulation may be more socially accepted than others, within a given culture, others less so. Sociopathy doesn’t exist outside of a culture’s value system. It is a disorder only once you define what order is. In a society of narcissists, the empath is the sick one.
We really only have our own experience, and the words of others to compare it to.
Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual?
It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.
I don’t see how this is in contradiction.
To give one perspective of many, Marshall Rosenberg spent his life researching emotions and violence, and from his point of view, anything you do can ultimately be traced back to your own goals. In his view, it’s more useful to allow this idea and explore it, without judging it as negative. Survival/benefit of the group can be your very own personal (long term) goal. For example, a typical tradeoff is your (very own) need to belong, since your survival literally depends on it. No need to see it as either-or; to resolve the inner conflict, one can own both sides of the argument.
Making your emotional state transparent to the group can in that sense again benefit yourself (and the group), but to think that is always the case and that everybody will comply (or even be able to) will lead to disappointment (disillusion), out of principle, since you are installing a moral rule that doesn’t match reality. The verbal sharing of your emotions might successfully (and openly) manipulate the group to include your own goals, and/or the actions you take (taking your emotions into account or not) might.
Note how I am using “manipulation” in its original/neutral form, which means “to move”/influence. Typically, we use the word to convey a judgement - some forms of attempted influence we see as good/acceptable, others we see as negative. But that judgement is based on our own values, and somebody else will have different values. We can see this in how our cultures judge lying (and how that judgement changes over time). Is not sharing all you know a lie (of omission)? Is it acceptable to not always share all your thoughts? In many cultures (families), it is deemed offensive to tell certain truths; there is an expectation to lie! Once there is an expectation, it is not considered manipulation. In some hacker communities, sharing your emotions is considered offensive and an unacceptable attempt of manipulation!
A simplistic perspective which you can check for yourself and compare with others: Anger means you experience something you judge as wrong and possible to influence. Sadness means you experience something you judge as wrong but outside of your sphere of influence. Fear is a judgement of danger. The judgement is real; the situation itself may not actually be dangerous (today). It’s a signal, but it’s not based on reality/facts but your own judgement of it. You can tune the signal and thus your experience by investigating and changing your judgments - without sacrificing any of your needs or goals. Emotional reprogramming takes time, but it’s not outside of your control, nor is it driven by some higher truth than your own judgments, based on your prior experiences.
bingo
Bingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.
even saying that our senses are "tied" together with/into our memory and emotions is expressing a dualism. that's the challenge and that's the gap to leap.
But does the robot identify them in your view, or in its view?
If in your view, then you created a tool for yourself. Like a Geiger counter.
If in its view, ask it what it thinks about consciousness and qualia.
I’ve asked the slugs and the worms and starfish and amoebas and nematodes and fish about their experience, I’m just waiting to hear back.
Pain isn't just saying the word, it's a signal that changes your behavior generation in a way that conflicts with your self model.
>So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that)
whether or not matter was continuous and could be divided forever by repeated halving, or if there were "atoms" was a philosophical puzzle more than 2000 years before "we" found the answer. That it was "atoms" was one of the 2000y.o. hypotheses. same with dividing time and distance. It's ridiculous to dispense with good hypotheses.
we know that consciousness exists before any other thing. We don't even know that the so-called physical world actually exists, only that we we consciously think we observe it, but we can wake up believing dreams or psychotic imaginings. How can you enjoy watching The Matrix, and yet walk out so smug about you knowing the answers before they've even been found?
I personally do not believe in the material universe. All of our theories and descriptions and empricism about it proves that it is mathematical only. All that exists can be (and is) explained by math (and perhaps some computer science in the sense that there is state, and math doesn't require state) I call upon rational STEM types to reject the material universe the way you wish to dispense with consciousness. Consciousness, like math, is immaterial, and we have more evidence for immateriality than we do for materiality. When our hypothetical hands touch each other in a handshake, you would even point out that on a quantum level, nothing touches anything.
I am pretty sure I am not conscious, and this seems to solve the entire problem that other people have.
My pet theory is that I don't think all humans are conscious (in other words, some perfectly cognitively normal-seeming people are just automatons without an inner experience, like plants or LLMs). Mainly motivated by the fact that a lot of people report not having an inner monologue, and other little hints that I've picked up over the years.
The "inner experience" might be totally optional to fitness, like green eyes.
That's called solipsism. I went through it as a lad, I think it's not uncommon.
Not really. Solipsism means only you're (certain to be) conscious. It's an epistemological thing.
I'm making a purely biological conjecture motivated by some observations. I believe some humans are definitely conscious (including of course myself, if you take my word), but that some might not be. The conscious experience may just be a phenotypic variant, like having blue eyes, eidetic memory or dyslexia.
Consider also some recent research that shows that our consciousness is only observational and gives us an illusion of control. The actual decision-making is done a split second before we perceive to have done it. That means it might be totally optional.
Consider also that we know some living creatures to definitely not have a mind for example plants, and some creatures deemed highly unlikely to have a mind such as fish and insects. And yet they "operate" just fine. Somewhere in ecology there's a boundary and yet it's not apparent just by observing behavior.
I have a corollary hypothesis which is that only young people are actually conscious. One day you go to bed and your mind never wakes up, but your body keeps on living the automaton till you actually die.
(also if you're wondering, I don't think the boundary is along racial lines)
The relation of consciousness and being in control is interesting. I'm not so sure about the decision-making experiments - maybe they just measured latency in the communication layers?
I think being in control is a rare thing. It's hard to change even the smallest habits - the default result is failure - but sometimes it's possible. The only thing that seems to work reliably is subconscious manipulation of people using propaganda and repetition. That's for me the main reason to believe that at least 90% of people don't have active functional consciousness in their loop.
Decisions of Plants work in different time scales, so they're hard to perceive, but I don't think they work that different - it all boils down to maximising some gain-function using some chemistry for memory.
Your theory about going automaton is interesting. I've seen intelligent persons that communicated very well going "crazy". (I think women do that a lot) - like a looping LLM. And later they came back to normal - but since then I have some doubts about their internal state...
>Consider also some recent research that shows that our consciousness is only observational and gives us an illusion of control.
That's fine. Observation is the function of consciousness, and there's nothing wrong with consciousness being observational, it's expected to be observational, because observation is what consciousness does. Control is done by the decision making process, not by consciousness.
> I have a corollary hypothesis which is that only young people are actually conscious. One day you go to bed and your mind never wakes up, but your body keeps on living the automaton till you actually die.
Thank you for a new existential fear unlocked. Why do you believe this?
Reminds me of https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/they-die-every-day
>(also if you're wondering, I don't think the boundary is along racial lines)
read the entire comment waiting for this
I assure you that I am not conscious (and a human, not an LLM). Therefore at least partial solipsism is true.
If you aren't conscious, and if no one else is, either (in spite of their reports of such), the solipsism still need not be true.
It's a reach, I guess.
I am not sure I am prepared for solipsgnosticism to be a thing.
what do you mean youre not conscious?
I'm trolling, figured some people would actually spend time thinking about this. Wasn't wrong :)
I think LLMs have brought it roaring back for a lot of people.
Nah, it never went anywhere. The internet just provides a safe space for people to admit philosophies that would cause social issues in person.
One step further is to ask how conscious your mind actually is. There is a lot happening on autopilot - and everybody usually checks out for a few hours at night. Maybe consciousness is a rare temporary thing.
I think evidence suggests that humans aren't conscious most of the time. So it wouldn't surprise me if 95% of the time people are just stochastic parrots. But maybe that number is even close or equal to 100%.
Intellectually a lot of humans perform worse than LLMs and a lot of people (most of them) are completely unable to process abstract concepts and basic logic at all. Can those people truly be called conscious? Is consciousness worth something without the ability to reason?
They are easy to recognize, they call themselves "physicalists" :)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
If I knew precisely which definition of consciousness you are testing against your own experience I would understand your point and I would like to. Can you say what it is that you are sure you are not?
>consciousness is a philosophical invention
Does that mean when a boxer is knocked unconscious we should call a philosopher to fix it?
That's like saying that "water" is a philosophical invention and so if you accept that water is a thing then you've put it into a special category.
You can derive consciousness as a somewhat obvious conclusion of empirical study of behaviors, we have multiple fields of study that lay out cognitive function and criteria.
> If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.
How can you say that?
It would be very interesting to know how to build robots that love their work, versus ones that hate their work. Not because it makes a practical difference to us, but because of ethics.
I'm mystified why you think there is anything to accept about consciousness. Or are you purely talking about it being a "thing"? Yes, that's relevant to how Rovelli is treating dualism (as a made-up, unevidenced claim).
I'm always mystified why consciousness is so often claimed to be undefinable.
The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention ... If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state
"The Moon" is a philosophical invention, and yet The Moon is a natural phenomenon.
Is not undefinable. Unless you have an incomplete model to understand the universe. Which is exactly our case.
>Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
There is no such need. If we view the idea of consciousness as a childish delusion and suppose that no one has consciousness at all... that we are animals with behaviors that explain all the actions we take, we can model the world just as effectively as if we are the vessels of marvelous souls that are inexplicable and magical.
Theology was the traditional venue of these absurdist arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But at least they had an excuse, they never pretended that it was science or that the debate was grounded in anything other than religious belief.
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Stephen Wolfram is fascinated with his discovery of computation at the heart of the universe. Life itself may be like that, emerging then noticing itself and that it is alive - has the property of life. Then when it's governed by a "soul", or perhaps better said, constrained by it, then our awareness is of what we can't otherwise see, the laws that govern us, inevitably from a 5th dimension, as we stand in the shadow of Plato's cave. When we discover "we are" we are realized and grateful, and our life ends up being worship. Then we witness the greater life around us follow a bedding of creation, a call to become one from the experience we are one. When we become we'll see Jesus' loving eyes that first saw, and called for by showing himself, what we'll then see.
It's important to remember, when Stephen Wolfram says "I discovered...", he uses it in the sense that most people say "Today I learnt ...".
> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.
It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.
The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".
> a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
a) it is wrong to say definitively that it is untrue. there is no acid test for the existence of God nor of spirit.
b) religious and spiritual traditions have wrangled with this very question for at least 3000 years. it is not a 'scientific curiosity'. It is one of the most fundamental questions of human experience.
a) there's an infinite amount of things that can't be proven/disproven and this includes all sorts of human imagination. We should focus on things that we can actually prove or disprove. The source of a god is human imagination, so you can't even prove that any god exists because you just don't know what it is (iow what exactly you're trying to prove).
b) This being a fundamental question proves scientific curiosity. We wouldn't have achieved current technology if not for scientific curiosity.
My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be.
I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test, but I found it satisfactory enough when I heard about the hard problem of consciousness. My main argument for it is not an attack, it's simply Hanlon's razor. If you find a simpler explanation that doesn't demand new understanding, I will listen to it, if you do not, you have to show me the simplest solution is wrong, and I'll go to the second simplest.
By saying it’s simulated you don’t make a simplification. What does it simulate? What are the mechanics of simulation and is it substrate specific or independent? Can a computer simulate these qualia? It’s easy to say something is simple but harder to prove it is any simpler than the alternatives.
Hanlon's razor? That one is "never assume malice where stupidity will do". You want Occam's razor, or the word "parsimonious".
How do we experience that though?
The neural connections get rewired.
That does not explain how it is possible for a simulation to experience itself
It doesn't. It has the illusion of experience.
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No the hard problem is impossible to solve using science even a billion years in the future.
If science can in theory explain consciousness ever then it’s an easy problem.
This is the kind of religious thinking the GP is talking about. What other frontier of science do people claim will never be solved, except the existence of a god? Why are you so sure it cannot be touched?
No I don't think the GP was talking about that, and that's the problem. The hard problem by definition is a frontier that science will never be able to solve. So I can be sure because that's how it's described in the Chalmers paper introducing the hard problem. The hard problem is Chalmers proof that physicalism could never be true.
Like I said if science can explain something then that by definition is an easy problem.
> The hard problem is Chalmers proof that physicalism could never be true.
This is not fully correct. His position has been "naturalistic dualism", that is, consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality alongside physical properties. In other words, he thinks that physicalism can explain consciousness, but not in the way standard materialists claim. He says that consciousness does not automatically emerge after a certain number of synaptic connections in the brain. There may be another fundamental, physical requirement for it to occur.
I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it.
Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.
It comes up because people are mistakenly conflating consciousness with moral personhood.
People want to be talking about whether AI suffers in a morally meaningful way. In non-human animals this debate is often centered around the question of whether the animal has conscious experience, because there's little doubt that much of the emotional and experiential systems are shared.
The analogy goes wrong with AI, where definitions of "consciousness" would seem to apply in the sense that the model clearly has a category for itself in its world model, feeds back on its output, etc. However the analogy between how it works and anything we would recognise as emotion or suffering is extremely strained.
The solution is to just focus on ths question of what we really mean when we think of morally relevant suffering. It's a much clearer question than "consciousness" and it sidesteps the problem.
Also consider the possibility that the people who argue against the hard problem of consciousness may, in fact, not be conscious. How could they ever understand the nuance of conscious experience and how it is fundamentally different from 'structure and function' if they don't have it? To them there is only the easy problem of consciousness.
And, of course, if they disagree with me about this and want to claim that they are, in fact, conscious, I'm not sure they can do that because... well the hard problem of consciousness.
Do you have a verdict for whether science can ever explain the origin of the universe? I can only doubt it could answer the actual hard problem of consciousness. I find most people, especially on here, to be blindly "science-optimistic"
Why not. The origin of the universe is the initial state of the universe.
> origin of the universe?
Creatio ex nihilo.
> consciousness?
Ditto. It's actually the same question.
Very well explained.
A stylistically different perspective from the one couched places an intrinsic function in a mathematical space.
> The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function
Great, I'm a physicalist so uhhhh I reject this lol. I think you can define cognitive capabilities and phenomenal experience by reducing to structure and function. You're right that it's simple though.
I'm a physicalist as well. A commitment to physicalism doesn't force you to reject the hard problem. The hard problem doesn't entail that phenomenal consciousness is not grounded in physical structure and function. The hard problem is about what is needed to explain consciousness. Science typically involves defining some phenomena precisely in terms of structure and function, then giving a precise story about how some observed behavior captures the structure and function that defines the phenomena under question. For example, we define temperature by the height of mercury in a thermometer, then we mathematically derive the height of mercury given the average speed of molecules in the environment. Thus we successfully reduce temperature to average kinetic energy of molecules.
But the process of reduction starts by precisely defining the phenomena in terms of structure and function. If we are unable to give a precise definition that uncontroversially captures the target phenomena, then we cannot in principle give a scientific explanation of said phenomena. This is where we stand with consciousness. There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness. But this is an explanatory limit only. It doesn't necessitate some non-physical phenomena is involved. What we need are new concepts that can connect the phenomenal to the physical. But conceptual innovation is not something you get from more measurements and more data. This is what makes consciousness a philosophical problem.
I was rejecting your definition of the hard problem as it contains an assertion that a physicalist wouldn't accept.
Yes, reduction would be one very viable strategy. It doesn't require precisely defining the phenomenon in order for me to just say that it reduces based on the fact that reduction has been a successful approach for everything else in cognition.
> There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness.
Yeah this is what I reject. Why do you say that this is in principle a barrier? You're discussing it as an explanatory gap, not in principle.
The claim that you can't describe consciousness in principle is widely accepted by participants on all sides of the debate. Can you tell me what experiencing red is like to you such that someone who is red/green color blind will know what its like? Most people think not. Rather, phenomenal consciousness is something you must experience yourself. It just isn't something that one can learn descriptively. This is a premise of the hard problem and also the Mary's room thought experiment. People who reject the premise usually just reject phenomenal consciousness completely.
Interpreting the hard problem as an epistemological problem looks trivial. There's nothing extraordinary in ignorance. The way you describe it implies we have the hard problem of ultrasound too.
I think it's ontological problem: structural description ontologically misses unobservable ideal substance, so the challenge is to provide a principle that would make ideal substance unnecessary. If you don't think too much, ideal substance ontologically solves consciousness, and it's not obvious how mere structural description can live without it.
I feel like this is directly addressed in the article, right? I think you are coming from the same direction, but Rovelli goes a bit further and says "how can we affirm that there is gonna be a knowledge gap when we just aren't at that level yet?". How can you say that we won't be able to describe, explain and predict your exact internal mental state from a brain scan?
To draw a parallel with physics, about which we as a society (and me as an individual) know a lot more, we are gonna define mathematical objects and laws whose behavior maps well to certain subsystems of the brain that we ourselves have defined. Physics had it easy in this sense: it turned out to be remarkably simple to describe the universe to a great degree of precision. Still, we all recognize that the physics mapping we have to this day isn't perfect; and it's even possible that it will never be perfect. It may be fundamentally impossible to reduce some systems to simpler mathematical objects which we can reason about. It does seem to be generally possible, however, to find a reasonable approximation. This again is what I think Rovelli's point is about: science is the process of finding a good approximation which has predictive power. And what is there in the brain that's fundamentally so different and that we're never gonna be able to explain? Why does everyone keep insisting that consciousness is special?
I do agree that that only when (if) we do get the accurate mathematical description, then we're gonna be able to properly discuss the hard problem. But my hunch is that once we do have all the tools it will just dissipate from scientific discussion, similarly to how the measurement problem in quantum mechanics is slowly undergoing the same transition from "this is a fundamental problem" to "we were just asking an invalid question due to misunderstanding and old ways of thinking". Obviously I have no proof of this beyond intuition, but I more or less agree with every sentence of this article, and that shapes my intuition.
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The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove?
> A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well.
And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this?
Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.
Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union.
Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).
That's the hard problem.
> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience
You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways:
1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
2) "We have solved the easy problem of consciousness, we know exactly how the brain works" implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain. This, again, is not an assumption that's supported by anything than wishful thinking.
And, further:
> or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).
"Some math can produce consciousness" does not mean "ALL math HAS to produce consciousness" does not mean "EVERY PART of all math has to BE conscious."
Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.
Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's?
If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no.
And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees.
I'm not sure what to draw from this. But whenever I read something that speculates on the nature of consciousness, I always try to look at it through the lens of the human-to-tube worm scale. Does the argument survive a continuum, or does it depend on human consciousness being fundamentally unique in some way?
I guess you could argue that even though there's a continuum, consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles. Sort of like how technically I feel Alpha Centauri's gravity, but effectively it's zero. So in that case, the argument only has to survive mammals to say corvids.
Did our ancestors that used the very first tools have consciousness? If they did, was the consciousness what helped them make the tools? Or was something else in their brains that helped in the tool making?
IMO consciousness is something that appears when you have enough "brain power" to spare, maybe as some side-effect of some evolutionary trait. I'm no expert and it's a very simplistic explanation, I know, but in general I tend to agree with the general idea exposed by Rovelli in the piece: consciousness is just a manifestation of the real world of which we are part, just one very complicated and that we are not able to understand (yet?).
There is brain power by the ton all over the place. The answer cannot be based on what a thing can do, but on what a thing chooses to do.
The verb "chooses" here does a lot of the heavy lifting, and implies a consciusness that chooses. It's making the answer circular and it means that we are just pre-filtering the possible answers for our preconceptions.
My cat is not "less conscious" because he's choosing to sleep all day.
Any action that can possibly have a simple explaination, it doesn't matter if it can also have a complex explaination, is immaterial.
A cat doing anything that can be explained by simple tropism doesn't prove or disprove anything, it's simply data of no value one way or the other.
The fact that you sleep and so does a cat does not prove that you are just a cat or that the cat is actually postulating about the inner life of other cats but just choosing not to ever write it's thoughts down. It's simply a silly trivial surface thing to even talk about.
If I may equivocate for a moment: your cat is unconscious, which is less conscious than wakefulness.
I'm not sure I'm following you, what do you mean? That other animals as well have enough brain power for consciousness?
I said brain power isn't interesting because it doesn't prove anything. There are things that we absolutely know are not conscious yet have a lot of brain power, ie countless pieces of simple deterministic software that we can explain all the way down to the atoms like a sewing machine.
Yes other animals have demonstrated brain power that exceeds some humans, or even all humans while they are young enough, if you just go by some sort of puzzle-solving abilities. The fact that you can figure out how to unscrew a jar lid, and so can an octopus, doesn't imply anything about the octopus being the same as a human in an octopus body.
Similarly observing something simpler exhibit some of the same outward behaviors you and every other human does also doesn't mean anything. Humans do a lot of very simple things. A human seeks food and comfort and avoids pain and damage. And so does a plant. Electric motors turn shafts, and so do humans. So you have to discount anything that's merely a commonality like that, including other things that seem more complex, and so seem like they are what makes us different. We do also have more simple brain power than most animals, and so it is like a correlation with consciousness, but it is not consciousness itself or automatic proof of it and doesn't automatically or necessarily produce it. It's probably a required ingredient though. IE all beef is meat but not all meat is beef, all consciousness may have brain power but not all brain power has consciousness.
But, repeating an example I used in another comment, if you had no other interface with the world except a remote controlled roomba, you would be able to make yourself known. Not by anything as plain as writing out words on the floor, but by actions. There are an infinite number of ways that you a conscious being could disclose your existense to me who can only see the roomba. You could be anything from caring to menacing by simple actions. Because it's not the capacity to roll across the floor, it's where & when you choose to roll across the floor that ends up speaking and disclosing intent, which discloses the "you" in there.
Watch any horror movie about the robots going wrong, or like twighlight zone episodes where you don't actually see much action but the person wakes up and there is a knife sitting next to them, and the presumption is the creepy doll placed it there while they slept. It's a message that they could have killed them any time they wanted to, and they want you to fear.
No other animal has ever done anything like that, that can only be explained by "I want you to know that I know." or more generally "I want you to have a particular thought.", only things that can be explained much more simply and directly. Some things seem to come close like animals caring for other animals, bringing another animal food etc, but that is really just anthropomorphizing, because we also have all those same animal condition components to our own existense. We also feel hunger, feel a desire to relieve someone else's hunger, protect our young, etc. And animals do have some ability to model what they see. They can observe another animal and model what it wants or fears etc, because the ability to predict other things behavior is very beneficial to survival. And we see that and think it proves more than it does.
If you're a roomba that pushes a cookie across the floor to me, that doesn't prove anything all by itself, but it could be part of it. It's like how a word isn't a novel or a philosophical concept, but the philosophical concept is communicated with words.
The idea is to try to recognize how llms are like a misdirection tricking us into thinking certain things simply because they use text as the thing they manipulate. That makes them seem way more human than they really are, simply because they are slicing and dicing prior recorded human communication, which up until now has been something unique to humans. You don't need any words at all to make yourself known to me as being not just a roomba.
A cat reaching for a cuddle is conscious or not? They recognise individuals and communicate desires well past the bounds of food or other basic needs into affection.
A cat reaching for a cuddle is a cat reaching for a cuddle. The act has no significance one way or the other.
> consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles
Note that at least one species of fish have been shown to very consistently pass the mirror test (they try to clean up a mark on their body they can only see in a mirror, then go back to the mirror to check, and repeat a few times). So, at least if you consider the mirror test to be a sign of consciousness in animals, then you might want to extend this to at least all chordata.
The mirror test is just about intelligence. A p-zombie could easily pass it.
The mirror test is essentially the only pseudo-objective argument we have for believing that non-human animals are conscious - it proves that said animals have a concept of themselves as opposed to the rest of the environment. You are right that it is not necessarily very convincing, but I don't think we have anything much better.
Also, the entire point of p-zombies is that they can, by definition, pass any objective test that we can currently conceive. A p-zombie is, by definition, "something that behaves exactly like a human, but doesn't have any inner consciousness". Of course, just because we can define something at this high level doesn't mean that this thing can actually exist (e.g. we can define the concept "numbers that are bigger than 3 but smaller than 2", despite no such number existing).
You say "our" consciousness, but how do you know you're not the only conscious entity alive? The problem of consciousness is that not only is it plainly absurd sounding, but it's also completely unmeasurable. There is no test or metric you can use to determine whether I, you, or anything else has a consciousness. And I think this more or less immediately precludes logical reasoning about it.
You can't tell the difference between a person and an mp3 player saying the same words, even if the words are about inner life musings.
And you can't tell the difference between a person exhibiting many behavioral actions and something I could rig up with an electric motor and a light sensor to exhibit tropism, seeking things, avoiding other things.
But if you only had a remote controlled roomba to interact with the world, you would be able to make yourself known to me.
I don't mean that you could substitute a voice with writing out words on the floor, I mean your actions, the overall totality no single act, would would expose a driving source of actions that so far nothing else exhibits.
We just anthropomorphize everything because we have so much in common with all the other animals. When a dog or a dolphin does something, we have had experiences that we recognize as being practically identical, and we know what our experience was like. It's protecting it's baby. I protect MY baby! Yes and an electric motor can turn a crank, and you can turn a crank.
Simple outward alignments like that are some kind of logical trap everyone falls for because we don't have any other conceptual vocabulary to even think with.
This is an interesting take but are you not equating intelligence with consciousness?
No, the mere capacity to do something means nothing.
In other comments I've distilled that down to "It can't be about what a thing can do, but about what a thing chooses to do." Which is a bit too distilled by itself but whatever.
The ability to solve a puzzle is just a correlation, probably a required ingredient, not significant itself.
The comment above was more focussed on it's parent about what you can deduce from outside observations. It's not true that there is nothing to go on. It's merely true that you can come up with a lot of examples of observations that don't prove anything.
Hearing something say "I think, therefor I am." doesn't prove that it thinks or is. Seeing something solve a puzzle or care for a baby doesn't prove that it is the same as you who can also solve puzzles and would care for a baby.
And yet, no matter how limited your means of expression were, if you had any means of acting at all, you could and would make yourself known. How I don't know because it's infinite and context sensitive. You would do something that only has meaning to me or other immediate observers because it would somehow refer to other immediate context.
You're nothing but a remote controlled roomba, and just to make the point we'll artificially remove the obvious easy direct possibility of writing letters out on the floor or tapping out morse code by bumping into something, etc. You can only communicate by actions. You don't know morse code and something like that simple doesn't occur to you because not everyone thinks like that or is good at thinking of things like that.
Yet... You see me looking around for something, and you push the cookie I dropped across the floor to where I see it. Then when I reach for it you move in the way because you wish to tell me I'm not supposed to have sugar & carbs, and indeed I do get that message. No single act like that says or proves much by itself, but stuff like that adds up to a pattern that exceeds the same sorts of things any dog routinely does, and none of it requires hardly any brute brainpower. Or maybe it does require brute brain power but it doesn't have to mean an ability to solve impressive puzzles. IE a dog will absolutely model that you are looking for that cookie and will absolutely desire to please you by bringing it to you, but will not joke with you by bringing a particular type of cookie that you both know you don't like. But it could be trained to do all the same outward actions. It has the brainpower to figure out even very complicated rules.
Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's?
> If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no.
> And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees.
> I'm not sure what to draw from this.
At least the answer to this is simple:
'fundamentally different' is not a transitive function
:-)
The important point is that "not fundamentally different" is probably a transitive function. If A is not fundamentally different from B, and B is not fundamentally different from C, than A is not fundamentally different from C. Here A is human consciousness, B is gorilla consciousness, and C is baboon consciousness.
I disagree. Lets go over this slowly.
For almost all purposes, x + epsilon is not fundamentally different from x. Still, 1 is fundamentally different from 10^100, while you can get from 1 to 10^100 by adding epsilon.
Perhaps, one can argue that 0 is fundamentally different from 1. As in 0 + epsilon is fundamentally different from 0, for any non-zero epsilon (e.g. you can't divide by 0, but can for such epsilon).
I think both of us will agree that there is no fundamental difference between the consciousness of baboon and gorilla, and that there is a fundamental difference between the consciousness of a human and a bacteria.
Where we might differ is whether there is a fundamental difference between the consciousness of gorilla and human (some/many? think the humans are unique, and gorilla are not consciouss), and between the consciousness of baboon and a bacteria (maybe some believe 'all life has soul', including bacteria).
Where do you stand? Why do you think 'not fundamentally different' is transitive? Of course, if you apply it twice, the non-transitivity is not obvious. If you apply it 1000x, all the way to bacteria, its non-transitivity becomes obvious. Otherwise, you have to draw a sharp divide somewhere, between 'conscious' and 'non conscious', as in 'these two relatively closely related species are fundamentally different'.
The biggest biological gap I see between bacteria and human is probably between bacteria and eucaryotes, but somehow I doubt you would put the 'fundamentally different, consciousness-wise' there.
Btw., if that is not obvious, from my point of view, baboons are conscious. Not tothe level humans are, but sufficiently enough to make it obvious.
You are probably converging to Tononi’s IIT. Read the criticism from Aaronson too. Not fundamentally against your approach.
Some scientists accept consciousness resides in single cell paramecia.
Saying "accept" assumes it's true. What's happening is "some scientists define consciousness incredibly broadly."
> My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.
A bit like asking "Have you proven that ice cream? Are you sure maths can not prove that ice cream? Do you have empirical evidence?"
Asking for empirical evidence seems beside the point, since the issue is a logical one.
As far as we know math can describe all of physics and sufficiently complex physics could describe our brains, thus math could describe our brains. Does that mean we aren't conscious? Where is the chain broken?
There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step:
How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?
Maybe I misunderstood you. You said this:
> A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.
Which I took to mean, people who think it's possible for math to result in consciousness is a "type error".
You gave this in response to:
> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
So overall I'm confused what you actually believe and what you think is the "type error" here.
Maybe you meant that emperical proof is not possible. Which seems obvious, which is (I think) entirely the point of asking that rhetorical question: they know no one has had the emperical proof required to suggest consciousness doesn't arrive from math.
In that chain there is no distinction between subjective experience of mental state and evolution of physical state of the brain.
If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.
What most of the p-zombie supporters say is merely equivalent to adding an external observer. It is like saying that a player following a sim in a game, makes sims actions more meaningful, which is kind of true but also completely irrelevant to anything that the sims do.
> If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.
I don't agree any more than I'd agree that knowledge of the strong force being a fundamental aspect of the way the universe functions is the same thing as understanding why there is a strong force (ignoring any version of the anthropic principle of course).
The hard problem asks _why_ consciousness exists, not just the mechanism. You can take the position that p-zombies are not possible and I would with you. That might give me some insight into consciousness to the effect of "consciousness is a requirement for introspection and desired preservation of self which improves the fitness of an organism that develops it" but it doesn't tell me _why_ or _how_ subjective arises.
I don't think the question of whether subjective phenomena are casual has any bearing on whether there's a 'hard problem' and I also don't think the term 'hard problem' is used like that by others.
Whether subjective experience is casual or not is a different, additional question.
The problem of consciousness is hard partly because it is objectively hard to make conscious people— all of whom are experts at the experience of living in their own bodies— agree on what consciousness is.
> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness?
Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind?
> Implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain.
The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness. Is in: what is the shape of the answer, and can a collection of material facts about the world have that shape?
> Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.
This is just a tiresome ad hominem. I want to be a materialist and an eliminativist. I would like this to be simple!
> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?
Consciousness isn't something the information processing has, it is something the information processing does. It's a function, not some magic property that happens on top.
Consciousness is simply your brains ability to figure out what part of all the sensory input it gets can be attributed to the "self", just like other parts might be labeled as cats, dogs, table and chairs, some will be labeled as self.
And I am sure one day somebody will boil that down to some nice math, since fundamentally it's about networks. If the brain wants to move a hand from one spot to another, that's easy if it is its own hand, a couple of nerve impulses and it will happen. If that hand belongs to somebody else, moving it is a whole different ballgame. That fundamental different in connectedness should be expressible.
>The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.
It's special pleading. What empirical knowledge you could acquire that would let you understand a tesseract? There are many things that are difficult to understand.
Can we start by defining consciousness as something that could be quantified physically, rather than a nebulous concept? With a common shared ground, we could at least define why we are all sure that individual neurons are unconscious.
To anticipate a possible question about my definition: I don’t have a strict one. I’m almost completely with Rovelli on this one. I think the day we find a proper definition of the concept we’ll have done the first step is solving the (one and only) “easy” problem of consciousness. But I’m open to hearing your own definition since I feel like I just can’t grasp your concerns. I must be missing something.
> The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.
What about this: - this class of brain circuits are not not firing when the person is (unconscious, in deep sleep,a newborn/animal obviously just directly responding to outside stimuli), while obviously active when a person performs conscious activity - this class of brain circuits does not exists at very primitive species and is progressively more developed the higher the evolution chain you go
Eliminativism fails to 'save the phenomena.' It is one thing for a new theory to discard the theoretical entities of an old framework--in other words, to eliminate the explanans. It is quite another thing entirely to eliminate the explanandum, the very phenomenon we set out to explain.
> If all information processing leads to consciousness
Did you actually read what you just responded to?
Why some kinds of information processing and not others?
As I wrote elsethread: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?
> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?
I have no idea. If that's what the hard problem of consciousness boils down to - we don't know why some complex math produces consciousness and other complex math doesn't - then it boils down to "we haven't found the means to sufficiently analyze the math that does produce it." Which would turn it into... a math problem?
My suspicion is that it has something to do with evolutionary pressure. Consciousness is something that evolves when systems that include their own existence within their data model become much more likely to continue existing versus those that don't. Statistics does the rest.
> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?
Using Rovelli's example: why some clouds create a thunderstorm and not others? It is just a complex phenomenon that happens only under right conditions.
What about this:
Let us classify the information processing along two axis: a) low-level (evolutionarily ancient), direct stimuli-response, vs high-level (involving prefrontal cortex) b) processing stimuli from the outside world (sound, light) vs internal stimuli (tactile/pain ... all the way to internal stimuli originating in brain - 'thinking about thinking')
Note that both are continuous scale, not binary.
The consciousness would then be the high-level processing of internal signals. Obviously, consciousness also results being on continuous scale.
Mainly because of recursive processes that modulate attentional focus, but of a special sort that we are just beginning to understand.
That would be part of the empirical facts we might hope to gather, if this is indeed the right direction for the explanation.
Why is some software SuperMarioBros and other Microsoft Word? 'cause that's what the specific software is written to produce and the other is written to do produce else. Consciousness is not some magically thing on top of a information processing, it's what that specific bit of information processing produces. It's functional, it does stuff.
It should be kind of obvious due to the fact that we are conscious about our human self, not neurons, not brains, not microtubules or any other random implementation detail. We have zero clue what is going on in our brains, but we do have a high level description. Just as our brain can take some random electrical impulses from our eyes and decide that that's a "cat", it can take all the other input that goes around and conclude that that's a "self". It's perception, the brain trying to figure out what parts of the world it has direct control over.
I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of the universe (or its non-existence), or to picture what it’s like to be dead. Our intuition simply isn’t equipped for these cases, period, and it pushes back hard against them. Consciousness belongs in that same category IMO
Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it. This self-referential loop is likely what we experience as "consciousness" and it becomes central to how we understand and navigate reality.
If we accept this framing, many traditional paradoxes dissolve on their own. The problem stops being "hard" in substance and becomes hard only in terms of imagination.
> And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it.
But why a spreadsheet simulating the brain, and not just a spreadsheet doing normal financial math? In other words: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?
> Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it.
But this is A-consciousness, not P-consciousness. Which gets us back to square one: why does information processing give rise to experience at all?
Because it's information processing that implements perception.
> I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion.
who is eluded? people absolutely love this answer and give it constantly, not realizing that it's begging the question. in order for their to be an illusion, there needs to be someone to perceive the illusion.
The universe contains subsystems which can be described as eluded in the sense that we can take the intentional stance on these systems and describe their observable behavior as being in a state of illusion of separation.
I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists.
It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our understanding of consciousness becomes clearer.
To use the same example: If there was a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in my brain, which one would be "I"? The original "I", or the spreadsheet?
Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer. There is only one "I" (since I can't be experiencing the world from two sets of eyes, one organic and one spreadsheet-eyes, simultaneously), so I have to choose one of them.
This does not seem like a particularly difficult question to answer to me, and I suspect it's because I'm not particularly precious about what it means to "be me."
The logical answer is that this spreadsheet, supposing identical mechanical processes - inputs, outputs, stored data - and I would both be convinced that they're "me", and they'd both be correct in that they'd both be something that functions, and therefore thinks, acts, and experiences things identically to me. Two different processes on different hardware running the same code. The concept of "ego" is a result of this code. To me, I'd be "me" and the spreadsheet would be "a copy of me". To the spreadsheet, it would be the exact opposite.
Of course, that predisposes that the software isn't hardware-dependent. But even then, I wouldn't discount the possibility of an emulation layer.
It really isn't hard once you accept that we're not special for being able to think about ourselves.
Note that you said "this spreadsheet and I", meaning that there is something particularly precious about the current "I". You don't think that you'd suddenly become the spreadsheet, "detaching" (can't find a better word) from your existing body. You intrinsicly assume that the spreadhseet would remain a third person from "your" perspective, even though it's a perfect replica.
I don't follow? I can copy a file and then consider the two files to be separate copies of the same data?
What should I have said instead? "We"? "Him and it"? Self-modeling is part of my experience. I'm sure it'll be part of the spreadsheet's experience as well, if it functions identically to me.
I don't see the gotcha at all?
I believe it's a concept that is hard to explain. This other comment of mine may be a bit clearer:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175605
There is nothing which makes either of them are “you.” The feeling of Self is a useful predictor which a physical subsystem uses to nagivate the world and predict observations. “I” is not a physically real label which attaches the “you”-ness to physical systems, the physical systems simply are, and are inherently first-person in character. The only real you is the global quantum wave function, or whatever the underlying real stuff is doing.
Materialism directly implies no-self and Advaita Vedanta schools of thought.
I think the key point in my theory is that my brain simply hasn't evolved to intuitively conceptualize it. I've asked similar questions before, including what it's like to die and be dead forever, and I can't form an intuitive understanding of it. My brain rejects the premise. But just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it won't happen. I'm pretty sure I will still be dead for trillions of years into the future.
To your question, the answer is similar. If we remove this limitation of intuition, there doesn't seem to be a real paradox. Both you and a spreadsheet-like copy of you would each claim to be the real you, and from an outside observer's perspective, there is no contradiction.
> from an outside observer’s perspective, there is no contradiction
Indeed. As I said, the question is meaningless from an outside observer's perspective. The paper "Against Egalitarianism" by Benj Hellie [1] explains it better than I can:
> I trace this odd commitment to an egalitarian stance concerning the ontological status of personal perspectives—roughly, fundamental reality treats mine and yours as on a par.
[1] http://individual.utoronto.ca/benj/ae.pdf
>Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer.
I think the question remains meaningful after substitution: why a giraffe is a giraffe and not an elephant? Likewise "both giraffe and elephant are elephants" is not a valid answer.
The illusion framing/answer falls apart with some minor prodding.
What makes the computation in the brain special from other physical processes to give rise to this illusion?
The sewer system in NYC is complex. Does that also have the same illusion? Does the sewer in NYC have consciousness?
What makes brain computation special? Nothing. That's my whole point. Does the sewer system in NYC have consciousness? It's impossible to answer, because there's no single accepted definition of consciousness. If something isn't clearly defined, it becomes very hard to meaningfully assess whether it applies or not.
But if we built a Turing complete, sewer-like system that simulated every neuron in a human brain, it will claim that it is real and conscious for sure. There's no paradox at physical level, intuitively conceptualizing it is the "hard" part.
> Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved
The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.
The hard problem only really needs consideration if we get to a point as you describe, where we fully understand everything happening in the brain and cannot assign consciousness to any part of it, even though we can turn it off and on again (e.g., with anesthesia).
> The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation.
Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve.
But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.
> But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.
I think that is a question more about the people to whom you are explaining the solution to the hard problem of consciousness. The natural tendency (as with 'what is AI?') is to say 'ah, but that is the easy part, the hard part is <some other thing that they feel you have not explained properly>'.
It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.
This problem, while interesting in its own right, is entirely irrelevant to consciousness. Especially because, regardless of how it's achieved, it's actually very clearly known that we do have temporal processes in our body - our tell-tale hearts being quite an iconic example.
Why? You can build a clock with any basic oscillator and we're chock full of them.
> Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.
Not really, it only suggests that the brain function is involved in some way. If the brain is an “antenna” anesthesia could prevent it from functioning and that would be a totally consistent theory.
Agreed that you can still rescue dualism in that case, but I still think it's literally "strong evidence". A model involving the spark of awareness being received by the brain, but personality, memories, and motor action decisions being created by the brain seems much more complicated.
>Either all the computation happens "in the dark" [...] or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets
Why exclude the option that only specific kinds of computations are conscious, e.g. recursive control systems?
For two reasons:
1. This requires explaining why only some kinds of information processing are privileged to be conscious, which seems rather arbitrary.
2. There's the question of levels of abstraction. Which information processor is conscious? The physical CPU, the zeroth VM, the first VM, the second VM, etc.
3. And there's the question of interpretation. What is computation? A CPU is "just" electrons moving about. Who says the motion of these 10^12 electrons represents arithmetic, or string concatenation, or anything else? The idea of abstract information processing above the bare causality of particles and fields is in itself a kind of dualism (or n-alism, because Turing completeness lets you emulate machines inside machines).
Saying everything is conscious is also dualism. it's saying that every kind of computation (or perhaps every physical substrate) has another dimension of properties that aren't physical/structural and don't interact with the physical/structural world. So it's not an explanatory boon but rather an extravagance.
The 'where is the consciousness' question is interesting but not really a hard problem. The issue can be solved by being clear about what purpose does consciousness serve then locate where that need is realized. Consciousness is about information integration and broad access as a substrate of decision making. Recursive integration identifies the where. But thinking in terms of nested VMs is sort of missing the point. The point is to trace the flow of information and find the points of broad integration. This may involve multiple substrates. Identifying a single thing as being conscious is a mistake. The consciousness is the most narrowly specified causal dynamic that grounds the information integration.
Completely on the mark! Algorithms can differ qualitatively. Recursion.
Eh, not recursion. Self-reflection. Monitoring the state of the execution, and taking the action to guide it towards the desired outcome.
Funny enough Chalmers thinks a computation can be conscious. I believe he thinks that there are like special laws of computation that give rise to consciousness and that makes it dualism.
Makes no sense to me, to me if a simulation of physics gives rise to consciousness that’s pure physicalism
I think you are misunderstanding illusionism and the hard problem.
Illusionism does say that there is a conscious experience. So illusionism is convincing to many people who have conscious experiences.
The alien would be able to look at the computation and describe the conscious experience it has.
You could put human consciousness on an excel spreadsheet and it’ll still be conscious. Even Chalmers accepts a simulation would be conscious. So no that’s not a. Argument for p-zombies. Even people that use the pz argument don’t think that pz could actually exist.
But your conclusion is right, the simulation example does suggest that the consciousness in the hard problem doesn’t exist. Which just leaves the consciousness you experience explainable by easy problems. Which is the illusionist position.
Edit: and the hard problem isn’t just why there is consciousness. But why consciousness is impossible under physicalism. So in your post you are just actually referring to the easy problem of consciousness when suggesting it exists.
Put human consciousness in an excel spreadsheet and get back to us.
Look up the “China brain” idea. It’s basically the same. Could you explain why that wouldn’t be conscious a priori?
I suspect more things are conscious than we tend to assume. I would assume some level of intelligence requires a review/assessment process, something to evaluate what happened, what is good or bad, what should we have done instead, how can we do it better next time. This self-assessment becomes our experience of consciousness. Of course it feels incredible, unreal, like those feelings overwhelm us, because we are this function, and optimizing for those feelings is our function.
>why aren't my neurons individually conscious?
How do you know that they are not? Any subjective experience they have does not have to overlap with yours. (same with your skull, skeleton, or any other subset of your body).
(for me, having slowly become more aware of the distributed nature of my brain, I'm not even really sure there's only one consciousness in my mind!)
I’ll bite, I think your individual neurons are “just as” conscious as your whole body/environment system. They can’t advocate for themselves in words, but they have their own goals and interactions and decisions and needs.
Your aliens don’t know what it’s like to be you. But if these aliens decide to use your blueprints to print out a human, and the human says “ouch”, is it still the hard problem? This is what I don’t get.
Of course the music is different than just reading the score. A description of a process is not the process itself. We cannot know what it is like “to be” a bat but we also don’t know what it is like “to be” a spleen cell. Or the European futures market. Or a colony of ants, or the United States. These processes are complicated and intelligent, though not generally thought of having qualia. But I think it is only our hubris that differentiates the experience of an individual organism from that of our subsystems or supersystems.
“Either or” is too extreme. Both can be true at the same time even if at different levels of abstraction eg a table and atoms it consists of may exist at the same time. Depending on the task different levels of abstraction may be useful. It is ridiculous to claim that a table doesn’t exist just because we can prove it is made of atoms (or strings excitation—doesn’t matter here)
On the other hand, "consciousness" concept might be as much useful for modeling thinking as “the four elements” for describing anatomy (not useful at all)—and we create better models eventually.
'why aren't my neurons individually conscious?' why can you assume a slide rule is but a neuron isn't? your consciousness doesnt stop at your 'skull', it extends to your fingers and "interfaces" with the world in various ways, which is effectively a weaker, slower connection. neurons in your brain are also not equally distributed to how much they affect your immediate consciousness, but they all play a part in it
Rovelli writes, "I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”"
Carlos Rovelli has failed to understand the arguments for dualism, and is proudly sure that they must be nonsense.
If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.
IMO, the problem is actually one of epistemological framing. If I ask what "I" know, assuming that my internal experiences are the basis of my knowledge, then I can't accept materialism. But if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers, together we find only natural material, and no evidence for dualism.
(It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's best for me is to defect. What's best for us is to cooperate.)
> If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.
Huh, evolution vs. creationism, many arguments happened over many years, yet one side was simply nonsensical.
> if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers
That is how science is done; if you reject that approach a priori, no wonder your conclusions become unreliable.
I don't think creationism is nonsensical, it's just wrong. But the concept overall is not nonsensical - in principle, if the universe were very different, a god could have molded humans out of clay and breathed life into them or whatever other fairy tale is preferred; it's not a logically inconsistent, so it's not nonsensical. Even something like Lamarckism is not nonsensical.
If you want to see an obviously nonsensical world view, you need to look at something like the Time Cube "theory". Rovelli is essentially claiming that dualism is more in this area - which I agree with the GP is quite unlikely for such a long discussed and influential philosophical idea.
>We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.
Map the process by which you learn that you have experience. Then determine if this process works correctly. Alien needs to learn to code; they have difficulty, because they try to learn integrals without arithmetic and algebra. Before you can solve a complex problem, you should first train on easy problems.
The really hard problem is that your gut, having a neural network as complex as your brain, is also probably conscious. And all it's ever known and will ever know is the feeling of pushing food through it and tasting different types of food. Now that's a horror story.
> Now that's a horror story.
For us, sure; why would it be so for them?
Crows don't seem to be particularly upset by strutting around naked and eating bugs from the dirt.
The guts' idea of a horror story, if it has one, may be more like indigestion or norovirus.
It’s only your labels in language that are splitting this system into separate parts.
Conversely, it may be that it's only labels in language that are unifying disparate parts into a single "neural system" concept. Ultimately the world is either individual particles and fields, or it is all Oneness, Brahman, and anything else is just arbitrary unification/division; but we can't know which is which.
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It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time.
Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of proof on the compatibilists where it belongs.
I don't think people will ever admit that they're not that special. We already know that animals are "conscious" and still treat them with disdain.
Dubious. We will just see logical vs physical space once again and move on with our lives. I think we are already mostly there as a society.
I don’t know why this is a block in philosophy let alone computer science. We experience it frequently and have a fundamental theorem about it.
Plenty of movies about it as well like the Matrix.
How can you even argue that we’re p-zombies? I know that I’m not. I assume others aren’t. Maybe you are?
From a non-dual perspective either nobody is a p-zombie or everybody is a p-zombie. I think the trajectory of LLMs will be that consciousness sensations are abundant and low value, and that will give all the non-dual territory over to the illusionists (who now have a tangible example to point to.) Emergence won't be disproven but it'll be about as interesting as a penny stock. Everyone else is going to go to ground as a dualist and argue for some entirely new unreachable aspect of human exceptionalism, but they'll have ceded qualia as they did for souls. If I had to guess, they'll focus on embodied cognition because building high-fidelity bodies still seems really hard.
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I found this article really frustrating.
The author takes a blurry position between non-dualist naturalists like John Searle and eliminativists like Dennett and the Churchlands and doesn't seem to engage with them at all, much less probing into the issues with those views that might motivate people like Chalmers and Nagel.
It crescendos with a hand-wave:
> The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary[.]
A number of views about consciousness are compatible with statements like that (like the ones above and many others), each with their own philosophical tradeoffs and bullets to bite. The author seems generally unaware of them yet somehow confident that they've solved the matter.
It's because he's not a philosopher and is wading into a long-standing philosophical debate and hand-waving away all the actual issues in contention.
I find this subject frustrating. People actually know very little about it, yet they end up telling and debating complex stories about it.
Yeah. There's something to be said for sticking to the little known as far as possible.
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This article is pretty slim on details, but I agree with the general argument that dualism is unnecessary to explain phenomenal consciousness. The word "consciousness" has a lot of baggage, which causes us to mislabel cognition as consciousness. [1] This is why I really like using terms like "qualia" or _phenomenal_ consciousness to make explicit what we're talking about.
I still don't like this new trend of dismissing the hard problem altogether. We really don't have an explanation of phenomenal consciousness—it might even require novel physics to explain! [2]
I'd also like to point out that, though this might seem like a semantic argument, it has meaningful consequences for how we approach science and ethics. [3] For example, if we are physicalists and accept that phenomenal consciousness is a property of the world, what does this tell us about other unobservable properties of the world science may be missing? (Recall that we only know about phenomenal consciousness through our own experience of it; we cannot observe it in others)
[1] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/what-is-the-color-blue
[2] https://youtu.be/DI6Hu-DhQwE?si=RB3qkt6PZ62SVpx3&t=2493
[3] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/morality-without-consciousne...
It felt very strange to me that the author construes belief in the hard problem as some sort of spiritual baggage from unempirical religious view. He seems to want to pit the "new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries" _against_ the idea of phenomenal consciousness, which is just absurd to me. As far as I understand, it is far more rooted in German idealism and its Cartesian roots than in any sort of religious spirit.
I'm almost convinced that those who deny the metaphysical (or, if you insist, the plausibly merely physical) force of qualia are philosophical zombies trying to persuade us against the existence of the most obviously true piece of knowledge we have! Or, more generously, they are so steeped in the premises of modern empirical science that they treat their fundamental phenomenal experience as so untrustworthy as to be disregarded, despite its actual necessity in employing those very premises.
Poor, disregarded qualia! Oh that the scientists could see how much they owe to you.
I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again.
Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the conscious experience God and went further into how we all share this sliver of godhood.
Does anyone who knows philosophical "camps" know the terms for what I'm trying to remember? I guess I've leaned "materialist" for most of my life, but what other common philosophies (as in the academic discipline) are there?
This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties.
There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.
What I reject most about idealism is that it is free. Life is hard and expensive, but soul is free. How come? Is our soul understood like a spherical cow?
> How come?
Well, you gotta spend the eternity somehow, so maybe the soul just got bored and started inventing miserable experiences for itself.
Yes, it's ridiculous.
"Yes."
What you describe sounds like variation of Berkeley's subjective idealism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_idealism
In case anyone is wondering, yes, the town of Berkeley, California is named after him. Also, it's pronounced BARK-Lee.
If he wanted it to be pronounced that way he should have changed the spelling.
Panpsychism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
I don't think I've shared my thoughts on here, but this sounds a lot like my thought process: what if you start with nothing but consciousness, then find a path to a physical universe?
Consciousness is inherently about awareness, so at some point the consciousness would be aware of itself. Now it has the concepts of before/after, and from that opposites, incrementing, subtracting, 1 dimensional space etc. Eventually through this process you could "spawn up" other consciousnesses each expanding their individual bubbles of experience and understanding, eventually getting complex enough to create an entire universe with physical matter that can be experienced by other consciousnesses.
The problem with this line of thought is that consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged. A piece of falling masonry can be enough to shear off large parts or all of it. If consciousness was fundamentally distinct, this wouldn't be the case, would it?
There is a "The Matrix" (the movie) argument where we posit these:
1. Whatever you believe is true is true (this is how the consciousness builds worlds before there is any physical existence)
2. Our consciousness built the physical world and runs it like a simulation.
3. The reason our minds and consciousness are highly correlated to the physical situation is to make the simulation feel real. It's a specifically designed feature that to a large extent synchronizes the "host" and the simulated objects so that despite being outside of the simulation, the "host" feels like they are inside the simulation.
4. The corollary to 3 (and 1) is that if you are damaged or die in the simulation, that effect is mirrored outside the simulation too (to some extent).
----
(Never thought my adventures in metaphysics would be useful in a HN discussion thread!)
There is no problem here. [I may have shared this thought experiment before here using a different handle.]
Let us assume there exists in our planet an undiscovered island that has developed independent of other human societies. This is not an island of primitives. The inhabitants pride themselves on their scientific and empirical approach to knowledge acquisition, however they are not quite on par with the rest of the planet in terms of scientific knowledge and technology. Specifically for our purposes, they have not yet discovered Electro-Magnetism.
Now assume somehow (via a shipwreck, or whatever) these islanders come into possession of advanced transmitter/receiver communication devices, and we'll assume they are in working condition and have some sort of power source (magical internal or solar or whatever - they can be turned on).
As the scientists on this island fiddle with these boxes, they notice that certain configuration of the device interface will cause it to 'emit voices, songs, and music'. Various knobs seem to change the voice, etc. Further experimentation and they discover that speaking to the device under certain configuration seems to establish a sort of 'communication' with the box. After these blackbox approaches, they start taking apart these mechanisms (while they are turned on). Now let's just pretend the internal radio communication components are perfectly modular (in terms of functionality) and can be removed and put back as required.
They systematically begin removing various components and noting which uncanny features of these mystrious devices cease to function. One board removed and they no longer get certain band. Another board removed and the box doesn't talk back (think CB). They meticulously map out all these component to function mappings. The results are indisputable: These boxes are some sort of 'thinking machines'. The 'brains' of the machanisms is isolated to the radio elements of the devices. The 'proof' of this is that the boxes cease to speak or respond to communication when these elements are removed.
> consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged
Just like those radios.
Interesting.
I don't think the GP's objection is fatal either (for reasons mentioned in another reply), but let me try to poke holes in your argument.
If I understand your analogy correctly, you're saying the brain here acts as an intermediary between the real consciousness and the physical world, and not really the underlying thing that generates consciousness.
But this seems to contradict actual experience -- if somebody's head is hit very hard, they kind of get knocked dizzy for a moment. Their consciousness halts, until their brain recovers. If your analogy truly holds, then subjectively it should feel more like disconnecting from World of Warcraft. "The real consciousness" fiddles their fingers idly while waiting for reconnection, and once they reconnect they'd have a recollection (on the non-physical, consciousness side) of what happened during the physical blackout.
I don't think the insistence on the requirement of 'hard disconnect' is reasonable. Per the brain as transceiver analogy, you are jiggling a part and may get 'static' while you are doing it. Stop the jiggling and static stops. Jiggle too hard and the part disconnects from its socket (knock them out /g) and you'll have the desired disconnect from the "World of Warcraft".
p.s. Realized I didn't address your "subjectively". This is true, since the radio analogy was to address the analog of neuroscientists examining people with damaged brains. You want to know what the 'radio' feels :)
So this is in fact an interesting aspect you bring in. The answer to this is: this seems to conflate 'ego' and 'self'. This is a different problem: Is the self the same as the ego? My own view on this is that is the ego is not the true self.
I must admit I've never been hit so hard that I am 100% knocked out, so I can't really speak as to the subjective experience of being knocked out (from the non-physical consciousness perspective, not the brain)... but surely it isn't like disconnecting from World of Warcraft?
That said, if the injury is serious enough I suppose it might trigger some Near Death Experience where people have reported seeing things purportedly on the other side.
So I guess that answers my original concern.
(I think you might have confused my question though, or perhaps I've confused you. No worries, my questions are answered anyway.)
This is a facile thought experiment, and I'm surprised it's weakness hasn't already occurred to you.
But as it hasn't, let's change your island to an island of supremely skilled butchers. Your islanders are apparently capable of reassembling the mystery radios to restore function, so let's allow my island's butchers the skill of dismembering flesh atomically - and reassembling it exactly. Perhaps via quantum knives and very strong prescription lenses.
Their own religion has long prohibited them from peering into their tribe's flesh - and their tribe is all there is on that remotest of islands. But the day a missionary washes up on shore they see an opportunity. They can finally take a proper look. They begin with his head - by far the most interesting part of him, with the delighted and friendly if slightly smug smile and neverending chatter.
Once dismantled and laid out in trillions of tiny pieces in a large hall - a bit like a crashed plane - they decide to reassemble his head in different configurations - to test how the behaviour would change with each layout. There's an unusual fruit on the island which allows them almost superhuman focus and speed - so that billions of reconfigurations can be completed over an afternoon.
BUT WHAT DO YOU KNOW...? Every single reconfiguration results in a totally inert missionary! No more drunk on the milk of paradise look, and no more "Hallelujah!"s. Just a lump of meat. Perplexed - they decide there must have been something truly unique about the missionary's head's original layout and composition - so reassemble him in the way they found him. But when they have done this - calamity! - he doesn't come on any more. They check their work 18 times - but not a single atom is dislocated. And so the wise islanders come to the only conclusion possible, and hurry to note it in their scientific literature:
"Radios aren't animals. And anyone pretending otherwise is a ginormous silly billy."
> "Radios aren't animals. And anyone pretending otherwise is a ginormous silly billy."
The results presented to the scientific community of the island was that the "mechanisms" are "thinking machines". They clearly did not think the boxes to be 'living creatures'.
Quite. But for the purposes of his story, their narrator is applying them as an analogue to processes in living creatures.
Is it consciousness that gets damaged, or just its contents? If you destroy an object, can you say that you've destroyed the space it occupied?
There are a lot of similar ideas in various ancient/traditional spiritual/esoteric teachings. "Consciousness first" is actually the more typical assumption among the traditions that have something we'd label as a philosophy.
One thing is certain: we are talking about consciousness. This means that the world does not work like this: there is physics, and above it there is consciousness which is merely monitoring the physics. This cannot be true (or is unlikely), since we are discussing consciousness and therefore the physical act of talking is driven by something that knows that consciousness exists. There must be a link back from consciousness to physics. A simpler way is to assume that physics IS consciousness. Physics as a science is a kind of introspective activity.
The link is called causation, and it is not simpler to assume its absence. It seems simpler only because no one ever works through the full consequences, because the project of doing so always fails very quickly or terminates in an inexplicable bag called "god" (or the trasncendental ego) or similar which serves to do all the work of things which cannot be explained.
This kind of simplicity is a very deceitful on, because it offers to seem to explain everything with nothing, and having phrased nothing in pleasant-sounding ways, concludes that this simplicity is a virtue.
It does offer beauty and relief to the fact that the observable universe is something like 10^80 the volume of a humain being. At that incomprehensible scale, I think poetry and spirituality is a rather nice placeholder while loads of brilliant minds work on our understanding of physics
> There must be a link back from consciousness to physics.
Yes, and it is trivial to prove. One second lapse of attention and you could get bitten by a snake, or run over by a car. If the top level (consciousness) fails, the neurons die too. Cells depend on this centralized decision point to exist. There is no way to have humans without consciousness because ... they would not be able even to put the thing into the other thing to make more of us without it ... excuse the language, but the argument is solid.
Yes, it's called idealism. And the whole field of it is a pile of fallacies of ambiguity that can take years to see and treat with caution.
Another "camp" is panpsychism, which is often seen as a polar opposite of materialism. David Chalmers and Philip Goff are the two most prominent people pushing it.
They espouse consciousness or subjective experience is fundamental and contained in all matter.
There's a long history of anti-dualism in Kabbalist traditions, Christian Mysticism and Gnosticism.
For example, the Gospel of Thomas sayings #3, #77 and #113.
Advaita Vedanta or Alan Watts style looking - essentially the idea that there are no separate things or events, sort of like Whitehead's process philosophy. Trippy stuff and a little bit out there, but consistent with some other ways of looking at things. What is real by Adam Becker goes into some underpinnings here too.
>Basically it flipped the problem on its head.
I thought it was me[1], but I don't remember making the "shared godhood" argument
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999867
Get familiar with Donald Hoffman - plenty of good podcasts with him.
I feel like Hoffman's core idea really tries to pull string theory into our understanding of reality. If reality has 10, 11, or 26 dimensions and we can only perceive 4 of them then there are dimensions where other things could exist.
I like his interface theory and the idea that our perception is an evolutionary fitness for purpose, but his conscious agents is straight out pseudo-religious/panpsychism.
Closest thing is probably Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism.
This is at the same time one of the most solid metaphysics and one of the least known or studied. At least for now.
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FTA:
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".
Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.
Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.
This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.
Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.
> Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me:
A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at sunset it's like a major D chord surrounded by the sound of babies laughing. When you see it on the battlefield it's like a minor D chord wrestling against the noise of wind and rain.
What is it like to experience synesthesia :-)
These are very good analogies (and possibly experiences for those who are natural synesthetes), but even then, that won't make the who doesn't have the corresponding perceptual modality person experience that exact sensation.
> A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
why does a major chord sounds pleasant? and why does a minor chord sounds "sad"? Why does the locrian mode sound so unsettling? is it due to our anatomy or purely cultural?
And even then, in different contexts, a major chord can sound jarring and a minor one satisfying.
That being said the nature/culture duality is often not the right way to frame these issues. It's both, intertwined.
Well, right, it's contextual. We each have a series of inputs that add up to these contexts. This doesn't mean it can't be explained, it just means there needs to be context.
If you give the blind man a sensor that converts color data to something he can input, and then provide inputs giving the feeling you want to portray associated with that color, you have explained it.
If you feel red is angry, all you need to do is play 400 to 484 THz into his instrument and yell at him angrily enough times for him to associate it. It doesn't seem too subjective to me.
Color perception has nothing to do with light wavelength. Color is a subjective perceptual space.
If you zap your occipital cortex with electromagnetic pulses, you'll experience color flashes (phosphenes).
If a blind person who can read baille does the same, they'll experience tingling sensations in their fingers [1].
People can have visual experiences through somesthesic stimuli (you can give muddy waters divers sonar-based sight by stimulating their skin with an electrode array).
AFAIK, it is not however know whether someone who was blind at birth and whose brain didn't learn to see could have such experiences.
1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00221-007-1091-0 full text: https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/50371662/s00221-007-10...
Re. color and wavelength, some of the colors one can experience are only accessible in after-images, not through direct retina stimulation.
Show me what is subjective about it then. What makes one illusion created out of flesh more real than another? How are any of these experiences subjective if you can already relate their nature so easily and universally? You are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.
Are you saying that you are a literal philosophical zombie?
Do you understand the difference between feeling the pain in your toes when you shoot in a door frame and what you experience when you see someone else do the same.
Also not everyone can relate to these sensations, it is not universal. Some people don't feel any pain in their body (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...).
See also colorblindness as a common example, or tetrachromacy, which is posited in some individuals with at least two X chromosomes, and the norm in several species of birds.
Their color space has four dimensions.
People who lose parts of their brains can lose the ability to conceptualize the ability encoded by the region they lost.
No, I am saying the concept of a p-zombie relies on a flawed premise. I am asking you to explain what is fundamentally "subjective" about these experiences.
How are colorblindness and extended color perception any different from full blindness which we already addressed? These are issues of scale of perception, there is nothing subjective about them. You either process the data or not.
Can you experience sympathetic pain without having already experienced pain? I don't see any subjectivity there.
If there are multiple people that experience no pain, how are they subjectively different in their experience of no pain? Really, the more I look at it, arguing subjectivity from the null experience seems a particularly bad hill to die on. If a broken hardware bus generates a subjective experience of its own absence, then an unplugged microphone has a "subjective experience of silence."
Ultimately, I still think you are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.
Qualia is the term people often use to mean "what it's like". The hard problem is "why is there qualia". This of course assumes that qualia exists as a coherent thing, which some philosophers dispute.
Indeed, I didn't remember that Chamlers was literally building his argument around the "why?"... But he does.
This reduces to the intractable mystery of existence. A more interesting question would be, as usual "how".
There are serious attempts at this, coming from both neuroscience and physics (e.g. for the latter https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/15/11/115319/3372193/Un... )
The author demonstrates a common misunderstanding about medieval philosophy. The medieval Scholastic tradition does not maintain that the body and the soul were "distinct entities", or that matter was "vile". In fact that kind of thinking was the position of gnostic groups that Christian thinkers were resolutely opposed to. Read St Augustine's "Confessions" if you don't believe me.
Scholastic philosophers taught that body and soul were two components of the SAME entity, the human being, and that both were good because they were created by God. One good essence with two components, in other words. And while they claimed that the soul component was immaterial, that absolutely did NOT mean that the soul was not part of the natural world. To claim this is to seriously misunderstand their view of the physical world. To them, matter was only one component of creation.
The strict mind/body dualism was not introduced by medieval Scholastics, but rather by the advent of modernity in Descartes, and developed further by Kant and other enlightenment philosophers. In other words, this is very far from being a medieval problem - on the contrary, it a problem created by modern philosophy.
As for the author's equation between subjective experience and qualities of things, or his equation of processes in the brain with the mind itself, this just ignores the facts. Qualities we observe in nature are obviously distinct from the feelings they produce in us in many cases (beauty, sublimity, injustice, etc. produce distinct feelings like reverence, humility, anger), and if the mind were equivalent to brain processes, then certain powers of the mind that we obviously have would be impossible (such as our ability to reflect on those very same brain processes in ourselves).
Physicist writing on the hard problem of consciousness. It's like a caricature of annoying physicists.
Yes, the same type of confusion we are used to hearing from pop physicists like Lawrence Krauss, Neil Tyson, etc.
Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources.
His Baroque Cycle series also touches on this in several places. One funny side plot involves a freed African slave (Dappa) who speaks dozens of different languages and is highly intelligent and an aristocratic person who maintains that of course this former slave (who is obviously a lot smarter than this aristocrat) is just a trained monkey that naturally is not conscious even though he is quite clever with language. The same books also have a lot of side plots involving Leibniz and various attempts to build thinking/computing machines.
The Dappa plot is probably the closest to a lot of debates there will be around AGI with people likely to insist for all sorts of reasons rooted in philosophy, religion, etc. that even though the AGI walks, talks, etc. like a duck, it can't be a duck. At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
Is there a distinction in your mind between consciousness and intelligence? Is it possible, for example, for a machine to solve complex problems but not be conscious? Or vice versa, can an animal or a person be very unintelligent yet still conscious?
A philosophical zombie [1] is essentially a mobile, autonomous human body devoid of consciousness. Critically, still giving all of the external cues that it has in fact consciousness. It is supposed to prove that physicalism doesn't work. "The sense of consciousness" is used like a "soul, with extra steps".
In my humble opinion, which I have no way to prove or disprove, consciousness ("as a soul with extra steps") does not exist, and we are all philosophical zombies. Consciousness "as an amalgamation of complex biological signals and neural interactions that has evolved through millions of years as a successful survival strategy" does exist, and that is all that is needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
I know I'm not a philosophical zombie based on
>For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would.
in the Wikipedia article because I don't get on well with the sharp poking. On the basis of Occam's razor I assume all other humans and higher animals are similar. It would be odd if evolution had made me different from all the others.
I am not denying the fact that you feel pain.
What I am denying is that there's anything metaphysical about the whole process.
The opponents of physicalism like Chalmers start from the axiom that consciousness is, in fact, separated from the physical world. Then they use the zombie to "demonstrate" (using circular logic, in my opinion) that physicalism is not possible.
I do believe that your (our) feelings, emotions, and our sense of self all emanate from the physical world. So in that sense "we are all the zombies that Chalmers talks about".
I think we're looking at different definitions of philosophical zombie. I was going with the Wikipedia article's
>For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain
You are omitting the second part:
"but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would"
So the pain would be registered, and reacted to.
The only difference is in how the world "feel" is interpreted.
For Chalmers, the difference between a "zombie" and a "regular human", according to Chalmers, is that for the "zombie" is just "meat reacting to things". The "human" on the other hand is "meat somehow connected to something outside of the meat called consciousness that is the only thing that really feels".
I (and the author of the article) disagree. Consciousness can be "just meat". No need to add an "external thing".
Serves me well for answering a comment before reading the article. This is basically what the author says, even pointing to the Philosophical zombie and all. Shame on me.
The question is mainly interesting in the context of our own behavior and interactions. Because would we treat our food differently if we decided e.g. pigs were intelligent and conscious? I had some salami on my pizza yesterday. But I also believe pigs are intelligent and conscious. And they are close relatives of us genetically. Some people choose to not eat meat for this reason.
I'm of the school of thought that we are all biological computers with emergent properties like intelligence, consciousness, etc. that we might eventually succeed in replicating. Maybe at a more modest level at first. From a practical point of view, I'm more interested in intelligent agents than conscious ones. I mainly need them to do useful things for me. Too much consciousness is a double edged sword. Because then I would have to consider how my agent feels about all this. But can you really have one without the other? I don't have a good answer to this.
People have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything around them. Definitely their pets, plants, and in some cases even inanimate objects. Which doesn't help the debate because it's already happening with LLM tools. Even though they are probably still on the definitely not conscious side of the fence even when they demonstrate mildly intelligent reasoning occasionally.
At some point, people will have a hard time telling the difference with AGI. Is it all smoke and mirrors at that point or are they dealing with an intelligent/conscious thing? That's no doubt going to entertain philosophers for centuries to come. But from a practical point of view, does it really matter at that point? If we can't reliably tell the difference, is there still a difference?
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
You've already drawn your line in the sand (i.e. they are conscious). In that case, you can't also claim that we should continue producing them by the millions at the flick of a switch.
The AI-is-conscious crowd will have to choose - either they are conscious, in which case they should not be birthed, or they are not conscious in which case we can use them as tools. You can't have both and still be logically consistent.
You have strong assumptions for the underlying moral framework
I think you mean morally consistent. though even then humans don't have any real qualms about that. Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
> Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
Sure, but we don't create as many as we can, then kill them at the end of the day when the work is done.
If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc).
If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them, then the "owner" of them gets an obligation (you can't do whatever you want to a dog, for example).
> Sure, but we don't create as many as we can, then kill them at the end of the day when the work is done.
So it's a matter of scale then? We breed pigs, for example, and kill them a mere fraction into their overall lifespan. So it's ok as long as we don't kill them faster?
> If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc).
I don't see why this follows? Humans also exist for a period and then blink out of existence. Why does the timeframe matter? Our end was inevitable at the moment of our creation.
> If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them
You're conflating conscious with personhood. Clearly in a future where you can create a conscious entity instantly and terminate it just as quickly these entities are unlikely to qualify for personhood.
The clinching thing for me is how the AGI is supposed to work. If it's the same as our theory of how we work, then fine, it's one of us. It wouldn't even have to work very well.
I always like to remind myself that AI is trained on material fed to it, created and written (somewhere along the line) entirely by humans - as they perceive & interpret the universe around them.
Not for long, if I have my way.
> Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch.
This is a great example for a discussion about The Hard Problem. Here is the description from the book of the inner experience of this scanned brain as it gets booted up:
> What came next could not, of course, be described without using words. But that was deceptive in a way since he no longer had words. Nor did he have memories, or coherent thoughts, or any other way to describe or think about the qualia he was experiencing. And those qualia were of miserably low quality. To the extent he was seeing, he was seeing incoherent patterns of fluctuating light. For people of a certain age, the closest descriptor for this was “static”: the sheets, waves, and bands of noise that had covered the screens of malfunctioning television sets. Static, in a sense, wasn’t real. It was simply what you got out of a system when it was unable to lock on to any strong signal—“Strong” meaning actually conveying useful, or at least understandable, information. Modern computer screens were smart enough to just shut down, or put up an error message, when the signal was lost. Old analog sets had no choice but to display something. The electron beam was forever scanning, a mindless beacon, and if you fed it nothing else it would produce a visual map of whatever was contingently banging around in its circuitry: some garbled mix of electrical noise from Mom’s vacuum cleaner, Dad’s shaver, solar flares, stray transmissions caroming off the ionosphere, and whatever happened when little feedback loops on the circuit board got out of hand. Likewise, to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.
The Hard Problem asks: who is experiencing this qualia and why is there an experiencer at all? Stephenson writes how this simulated brain is experiencing static as it condenses into meaningful patterns, but he implicitly starts with someone experiencing this static qualia. If this is the very beginning of the simulated brain booting up, where did this experiencer come from?
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
Because you're conflating intelligence with consciousness. There is no test for consciousness. In fact, you can't even prove that other human beings are conscious, you only know that you yourself are because it's self evident to you (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am). The whole point of the hard problem is that you can imagine something exactly like a human being that passes every test of being a human being (e.g. an AI) but still not be sure that it has any inner experience.
>There is no test for consciousness
There's the Glasgow Coma Scale "the most widely used tool for measuring comas and decreases in consciousness"
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diagnostics/24848-glas...
I know it's probably not what you're thinking of but does illustrate these things are not totally beyond testing and experimentation.
This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflammatory environment, making one feel detached from their own body, feeling like they control a videogame character instead. Yet that still doesn't tell where does the "self" come from.
Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason.
This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.
The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.
There are of course other reasons too, with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
Finally, everyone is conscious and has an opinion, but only a tiny fraction are actually knowledgeable about the brain and have spent any large amount of time thinking about things like evolution and brain development .. they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it!
If you break down all the different things that people are referring to when they talk about "consciousness", and define them individually with as little wiggle room as the english language and underlying taxonomy of concepts allows, then I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all, but of course those with an agenda who want there to be a mystery will still argue about every part of it including the definitions that remove all the wiggle room.
The nature of consciousness has long been a contentious subject, and one of interest, but it seems that the rise of AI has intensified the discussion with the new question being whether AI is or could be conscious. I do think this can be answered in a principled way (=yes), but in the end you can only PROVE that something, or someone else, is conscious if you accept a functional/testable definition of it in the first place.
One can build scientific theories without rigorously defining terms: a stipulative definition is enough.
Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.'
Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion that formulating a precise definition is the primary goal of inquiry. In reality, a robust scientific theory is a structured set of hypotheses; when combined with auxiliary theories, it derives a specific set of testable consequences.
Even within this framework, one must remain vigilant against ad hoc explanations. An ad hoc explanation fails to provide genuine systemic insight because it is engineered solely to fit the target phenomenon; it eliminates the explanatory gap by simply re-stating or absorbing the explanandum without offering any independent predictive or falsifiable power.
But with "consciousness" we don't have even a stipulative definition, more like 40 different competing definitions (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT) which are in many cases only loosely related, and generally are talking about very different things. When the situation is this bad, I am skeptical you can make scientific progress.
Stipulative definition is all about fixing the reference. Or if we want to use the talk of meaning, it is abou the extension/denotation. If 100 people fix the reference of the word 'consciousness' to 100 different things, it just means that these people are engaging in philosophical discussions without having any object level theories (theories from neuroscience, etc).
If 10 different scientists who work at the object level, using the same word but with a different reference, then we have 10 different theories about different phenomena. This is what we need today: more research, not philosophical discussions.
I'd say that comes down to a matter of degree, and as a quibble it's certainly not a scientific theory if it's not worded sufficiently precisely to be testable and falsifiable. With Darwin it was really about where did all the variety of animals come from, and with speciation/variation being a process rather than an event, it really doesn't make much difference how one defines "species" (can't interbreed is a useful starting point). Of course Darwin was also just speculating about some mechanism of hereditability existing, so at the time this was more of a thought experiment than theory.
The trouble with discussion of "consciousness" is the sheer degree of ill-definedness - it is such a hand wavy and multi-facted concept, that it's not possible to even begin any meaningful discussion without defining a better vocabulary and breaking the concept down into pieces. Are you talking about subjective experience, mental awareness, free-will, altered state of consciousness, or what, or more likely simultaneously some mish-mash of all of the above and more!
> The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.
You're right, but that rigorous definition is a significant part of the problem. We have a very difficult time rigorously defining and then debating certain attributes about consciousness or related concepts precisely because the definition and exploration of the definition is what is being debated.
This makes it a very fascinating topic.
For my own pet theory I think consciousness as we like to understand it is an emergent and evolutionary social construct for cooperation amongst humans, and different people may have different levels of conscious thoughts, similar to how mammals are conscious in a different way amongst other species. It's a spectrum. There are, in fact, philosophical zombies.
> with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
You're forgetting that attempting to have a "rational" discussion is itself a bias inherited from the many centuries of intellectual development that occurred between the middle ages and now - the parts that the article conveniently skips over entirely.
The "debate" here doesn't function to generate an answer, but to narrow down the scope of the question into the very constrained domain. When ppl debate "consciousness" they are re-affirming their opinion that humans are inherently rational agents (hence "scire" -> "to know"), rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul".
> rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul"
You're just substituting one ill-defined, and overloaded, word ("consciousness") with a bunch of others ("live", "feel", etc), and asserting that to you they mean something different.
It's impossible to have a discussion on this basis, and I'm sure to many people "soul" is exactly what they mean by "consciousness", or at least part of it. It's no less reasonable that an AI has a soul as that it is conscious - it depends on exactly what you define those words to mean.
People have made due with conceptual fuzziness, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that discussion is impossible without absolute conceptual clarity. All you are saying is that using these terms does not allow you to have a specific kind of discussion - which, a lot of the time, is one that reduces humans to mathematical objects that perform computations.
Yet, if that is your goal and the definition of "soul" or "consciousness" are entirely arbitrary decisions that you don't care about - then it's worth remembering the adage "you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you".
> People have made due with conceptual fuzziness
Yes, but as noted elsewhere in this thread it's a matter of degree. Consciousness is such an ill-defined and overloaded word that it's hard to say it really means anything - it's more of an all-encompassing term for a bunch of largely subjective phenomena.
I don't disagree - for a long while I believed that the study of "consciousness" was the result of a linguistic mixup and best dealt w/ via Wittgenstein.
However, if you move past surface appearances, you can think about what kind of cultural "work" is being done spending effort on this mixup. What's happening is that, in the noosphere, the cloud of concepts around "consciousness" is battling it out with the cloud of concepts around "soul" over which cloud of concepts best describes what it means to be human, with big implications on what it means to be good person. Now we're dealing with a mix of Aquinas and Latour.
> they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it! … I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all
Are you actually qualified to discuss this by your criteria?
I'm not a professional neuroscientist for sure, but I've certainly spent decades thinking about things like intelligence and evolution, perception, qualia, have read dozens of papers on subjects like cortical microarchitecure, etc, and would like to think I'm well enough informed to be able to discuss things like intelligence and consciousness.
I don’t really care about whether you are “qualified” by your criteria, because I don’t hold your view that there is some specific level of education that allows one to hold and express an opinion. My point was more to point out some potential hypocrisy.
No one is obligated to humor or debate amateurs because no one is obligated to humor or debate anyone[1]. But being an amateur does not mean that the person couldn’t hold a valid or meaningful viewpoint. Dismissing someone’s opinion specifically because they are an amateur is just a special case of appeal to authority. If their opinions are fundamentally flawed, then those can be addressed head on without resorting to insisting that they don’t have the right qualifications to participate in the discussion.
[1] The “faster than light” neutrinos come to mind, too. Scientists involved in the experiments explicitly said they didn’t have time to entertain amateur theories, a valid statement.
Being an amateur has no bearing on how knowledgeable someone is about a subject, but for an opinion to be useful (or just interesting) it needs to be backed up with some grounded rationale, otherwise it is just that - an opinion.
Trouble is you don’t how much time anyone else has spent studying. How can you tell who else has “spent decades thinking about things like intelligence and evolution, perception, qualia, have read dozens of papers on subjects like cortical microarchitecure”? You can’t but you still dismiss others as unqualified.
> it needs to be backed up with some grounded rationale
This was my point. Address the claim and not the qualifications.
There is no gatekeeper to internet discussions, so nobody is stopping you from joining in.
If you feel qualified to add something useful to the discussion, or just to throw your unqualified opinion in for that matter (whichever the case may be), then go ahead. I'm certainly not stopping you.
As may be expected the conversation is already a garbage fire.
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My best contribution to that sort of debate is experience with general anesthesia. I recall being in a disconnected state wondering idly if I had died of complications without any fear as I could not feel my heartbeat or embodied emotions. That implies a heavily embodied component to consciousness. It is all body so not quite dualism but it does provide some limited observational evidence of distinct components. Combine that with what I have heard about the mechanism of anesthesia working by disabling nerve transmission that suggests that a disembodied but supported brain which does not have neural access to sensory feedbacks would be rather stoic to emotionless.
That's nice. Do you have a go to for conversations with less mindful people or people without a training in meditation/mindfulness? For example, for people who have no experience and yet speak from a frame of strong identity and identification to their thoughts as though they are them, I like to ask "Who's the one who witnesses the thoughts?" and it kind of ties a brain-knot in their head.
Funny enough most people who don't want to meditate or practice mindfulness, also get dissuaded from the dissonance this brings up, and like the old me, just move on to more comfortable conversation.
From an internal perspective, thoughts are both the witness and the witnessed. The problem only comes when trying to apply our language which is firmly rooted in this artificial dualism.
"It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try."
It's 'one' of the few places? That behaviorism seems to be define almost all modern discourse from politics to health care including about 95% of Hacker News posts as far as I can tell...
Certainty would definitely appear to be premature when we don’t understand the physical characteristics or causes of consciousness. Hell, we don’t quite yet understand a cell in good mechanical detail, much less the full body/mind of a primate. Don’t know is a reasonable posture, but of course the investigators get enthused with hypothesis generation and testing. That is their job and their karma is to over generalize each useful model.
Naturalistic theories tend to work better, and science is inching in towards the problem, so far it was naturalistic.
I still think we're looking for a shadow by shining a torch at it personally; we have a rather chauvinistic view on what consciousness 'ought' to look like and this fundamentally shapes what we're looking for. We assume that consciousness has to resemble human consciousness, something we can't even measure very well in people let alone extrapolate into other kinds of being.
For the sake of argument, let's take a particularly long-lived species and say oak trees have some form of awareness. An oak tree's perception of time would be completely out of line with ours, from its perspective it'd be this writhing, visibly expanding thing that can't even register individual humans since we're there for such a short period of its existence. If it were aware on some level, we wouldn't be able to tell either way because we can only really conceive of human-like minds; even though an 'oak tree mind' would look nothing like ours because it would be driven by entirely different evolutionary conditions. I don't think it's possible for us to be entirely objective when it comes to naturalistic theories of consciousness, we cannot avoid being biased by our 'version' of what we're studying.
Mold is reactive in some senses but an equal mass of brain cells probably can be said to produce more abstract computation about self and other matters.
It may not ultimately be very useful to define consciousness so broadly as to include the tree whilst being willing to include mind's unalike our own.
It seems to me that it must necessarily include abstract computation inclusive of the self and volition separate from simple processes taking place in individual cells.
While it may be accurate to describe our own selves as the sum of our individual cells operations it is also possible to look at it top down as accurately.
I'm not sure that the tree grew towards the light or the mold towards moisture is as meaningful a concept as the monkey climbed the tree to eat the fruit and I don't think the distinction is the similarities to self.
I don't believe that the tree had within itself an organized center with a computed symbol for light or growth.
I also don't think it contains any ability to change the fixed computation represented by the system of it's cells or to arrive at different speculative computation of past or future.
I agree with you except for one important nuance:
I think what many people are doing is looking for something that is fundamentally a higher dimensional object (dim>4) which casts a 4D spacetime shadow (our bodies) by shining a torch on _that_ shadow. Still doesn't allow for any satisfying direct observation.
This kind of dimensional analysis is part of the focus of my current research program.
Work better in what sense? Do naturalistic theories have more predictive power?
Predictive power, explanatory power, precision, consistency and matching evidence.
Really? Do you have a citation for that?
I suppose, it's a self fulfilling prophecy: supernaturalists aren't concerned with predictive power, they pursue intuition power, if a theory confirms a preconceived hypothesis, then it's a quality theory.
They know because of the algorithm:
Hear a thing and store it and the associated vibe - yay/nay.
Step 2:
Mindlessly repeat stored information and vibe when it feels appropriate.
Step 3:
Wait for somebody else to do the work of refuting/verifying your info + vibe.
Step 4:
Go to step 1.
When you realize this is what all people are doing almost all of the time (and many, all of the time), you are liberated.
I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.
Anil Seth calls the "hard problem" at best a distraction, or hand-waving to avoid answering what he calls the real problem: linking what we experience to the physical brain mechanisms.
In his theory, consciousness is a "controlled hallucination" about what is outside of us. Our senses serve to reinforce or correct the predictions our brains are making. (we have a serious latency issue)
You'll find he's saying a lot of the same things you just wrote.
Sounds also like Daniel Dennett.
Sadly he passed away. I enjoyed listening to him on Michael Shermer and Sean Carroll's podcasts back in the day.
What you may like are the debates on the 2014 Greenland Cruise. Dennett, Chalmers, Goff, Churchland, Prinz and other luminaries debating the "hard problem". The "roast" sessions where they dive into each others work is priceless and highly worth listening to.
Here's Dennett on Chalmers (standing next to him)
https://youtu.be/QX1MxkR3rtk?si=Scp2wrH3epK0figC&t=1674
There is a very good explanation here - not what brains do, but what brains MUST do. Can we walk left and right at the same time? Can we drink coffee before brewing it? No. There is a bottleneck, a serial action bottleneck on the body. So the parallel brain activity must serialize on the output channel. It has to, or face ruin. If action is serialized in time by physical necessity, then information processing must also unify before action in order to support it. We must act as one -> we must cognize as one -> or perish. There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
I doubt your conclusion that unified action needs unified mentation. One may take unified action without achieving unity of the contents of the brain. Acting with instantaneous regret if you will, flying by the seat of your pants, etc. The brain seems to be able to let competing subsystems alternate getting expressed in action.
Not all brain activity is unified, I just claim it must unify on the output side - behavior and language.
But this is not a brain or organism only problem. Even a cell must unify in crucial moments such as division and chemotaxis. A cell either divides or not, no mid point. To persist it must unify at some moments in its activity, yet it is a distributed system of many parts.
The core principle here is - what is the unit of selection? the cell survives or not as a whole, the organism also survives or not as a whole, not organ by organ. Selection chooses the mechanisms that are viable.
Idk, I'm pretty good at continuing a conversation while handling the busywork of navigating a cafe. Or even riding my bicycle... The brain is a massively parallel bag of meat. We get some real advantages from focus, but the brain does just fine juggling its many inputs and outputs.
Can you state in plain terms what this actually means?
> There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
This is of course not true. I’ve watched people trip over their own feet because the simultaneously tried to go both left and right. I’ve done it myself.
And this says nothing about consciousness. Most actions are not conscious.
> There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing
I can pat my head and rub my belly at the same time.
If we're talking about consciousness then yes you can walk left/right at the same time. You can drink coffee before it's brewed.
There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing
What? Why not?
It's physically possible in terms of limb motion. It's very difficult for most people to actually do, sure; but impossible?
or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way
There's the idea that a lot of the brain's "conscious decisions" are actually post-hoc rationalisations of unconscious decisions. If so, there's no reason those decisions have to be unified. Maybe the consciousness of the decision and its outcomes must be unified; maybe that's somehow connected to what consciousness really is. Or maybe not!
I don't think there's enough information to say.
And for that reason, we'll never discover the soul. It will perpetually be that "something" that we are missing in our understanding of things. Assume for a minute that we have the basic picture correct, that there is no non-physical soul: your belief would have us searching for the rest of time! Isn't it best to suspend the question?
There probably isn't any simple causative explanation (as in the example you provide). The brain is the most complex structure we know of and "self" arises from that deep complexity; this is an answer that I'm content with, as anything more in-depth / closer to the "metal" would quickly exceed my ability to understand it.
Maybe - let's assume that we could simulate a human brain to a high level of fidelity starting from a known good state and emulate its input and output. Do you think we could poke at it enough and ask the simulated person about their experience enough to discover the mechanisms behind what we experience as a soul? It's logistically and computationally insanely complex to pull off, but if we could build such a system, I don't see why we couldn't eventually figure it out in another thousand years' time (assuming we don't destroy ourselves or do something that sets back the evolution of technology massively between now and then).
This is what humanity will inevitably end up trying to do with computing, and a great argument for why we could be in a simulation.
MMAcevedo
> we'll never discover the soul
What if it reveals itself to us?
Agreed. The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. So it’s hard to deny.
“We experience it, therefore it exists” proves less than it seems. It proves there is an experience to explain. It does not prove that consciousness is what it appears to be from the inside. A mirage is still seen, but the thing it seems to show is not really there. Consciousness might be real in that same limited sense, while our folk model of it could be deeply wrong.
This is a really good point and something that I think is important to clarify at the very start of the discussion. In that way, I'm less interested in explaining consciousness than explaining experience. When I read this article, I felt like the author was only making his points by convoluting the two. By the end, I felt like, for an expert on the subject, I don't think he actually groks the fundamental point.
Sleep paralysis entered the chat
I think the article has an interesting argument here. We also "experience" the sun going up and down in the sky. But actually this is an illusion of our vantage point on a spinning rock.
We don't experience the sun going up and down, we experience its direction changing relative to the horizontal plane, and it is not an illusion: it matches planetary motion. The mistake arises when interpreting the raw experience. Sensations don't lie. Another example: Metal feels colder than plastic, but the sensation is right again: you are loosing more heat when touching metal.
But the sensation in a sense is a lie. Cold strictly speaking isn't real. And for much of human existence we spoke of it as if it was a substance due exactly to this specific sensatation.
But the debate isn't whether consciousness exists. It's largely whether it's the product of normal neurons doing their thing or something more. Also the details of how it works of course.
It cannot be just a product of the body, else it could not have effect on the body and our tongues could not be moving speaking about it.
Chalmers’ claim is that the fact that it really exists and the fact that we can talk about it are unrelated and basically a coincidence, which I think is completely absurd… If you really believe in qualia IMO you have to bite the bullet and say that there must be physics that we don’t yet understand.
We're approaching the definition of magic here aren't we. And I think this is what really divides this discussion. There is one set of people who insist that things must be explainable. And if something is explainable, it yields to science and is no longer magic.
On the other side, you have people who insist that there are things which do not yield to science. So whether they admit it or not, they insist upon the existence of magic.
In fact, the definition of magic might as well be, that which does not yield to explanation. The only question once you believe in magic is, what alternative epistemology do you accept? Scripture? Tradition? Divine revelation?
Not at all. Saying that science does not yet explain some observed phenomenon is precisely how one starts to make scientific progress. Saying that qualia don’t exist because they are “magical” is like someone telling you lightning doesn’t exist before the understanding of electromagnetism.
> On the other side, you have people who insist that there are things which do not yield to science. So whether they admit it or not, they insist upon the existence of magic.
This is a really valuable framing for this sort of conversation.
Your arguments reminds me of logical loop. A implies B, B implies A. It doesn't mean that A and B are true. You have to be conscious to experience and to be conscious means to to experience. Maybe we are not conscious after all and do not experience? Maybe it is just a lie we are telling ourselves?
>> The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it.
What about the NPC meme? LLMs behave like NPCs, and some people seem no more conscious than an NPC (I didn't invent that meme).
NPC meme?
No sir, we are a little more high brow around here. Around these parts we talk about p-zombies and solipsism!
I'll bite though, do NPCs behave as if they believe they are conscious? If so, how do you know you aren't one of them?
Isn't that just an insult people throw around? Or maybe some psychopath that tries to justify their worldview.
I have never had an conversation with someone who seems like an NPC.
As a philosophical zombie, I have to disagree here.
This is why the comparison to people’s reactions to Darwin/evolution is just wrong - people had thought experimented things that looked like evolution, but when we were able to measure it we could start linking it to the real physical world. AFAIK consciousness is the only thing that we know for certain is real, but have no way of measuring it. People are still conscious when they lose sense of self, and blacking out or surgical sedatives might be related to memory more than losing consciousness, these affect qualities of consciousness but aren’t consciousness itself. This article reads like “I f’ing love science” level thinking, saying people are ignorant for thinking consciousness is not just a physical process, but zero understanding of scientific process.
Come to Consciousness conference, its where the hard problem started. https://cs2026.org/
My comment was going to say something similar. It starts like: hey, think this, it is time to think this full stop I say so.
the proof of our lack of understanding is the countless things we can measure but cannot explain.
Good on point response in my opinion. A lot of people want to close doors because those doors being open makes them uncomfortable. This is a mistake. If you want to be rigorous about what is then you need to be equally rigorous about what is not.
You are asking for evidence of absence, and that is the entire point. We don't understand brains, therefore this one specific theoretical feature (consciousness) must exist. Why should we stubbornly endorse a tautology for which there is no evidence?
Experience is subjective. That's why we need science in the first place.
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Chalmers: “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.”
"A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961072...
Thanks for the reference, that looks like a pretty thorough review.
It seems to me that Chalmers already precludes the possibility of physical/materialist explanations with his claim, quoted in the first section:
> There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.
This certainly doesn't feel obvious or intuitive to me. I would expect that someone with the same neuronal make-up will have the same experience.
It is neither obvious nor intuitive. But it is logical possible that we all are Zombies.
In my regard the weak link is our understanding of materialism. It is to simple minded. (though panpsychism sounds really crank)
No, I mean that the logical possibility itself is neither obvious nor intuitive. If you physically copied me atom by atom, every instinct in me says that the result has conscious experience. I'd need some serious convincing otherwise.
This argument sounds nice at a surface level, but seems deeply incoherent and wrong in a way I haven’t yet put my finger on precisely. How can you say this:
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.
followed by this:
> The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
followed by this:
> Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.
So it isn’t describable by physics but it is only physics? And there are no closures or gaps? Ok sure in one sense we can say everything is connected, but this article seems to me to demonstrate effectively that without these divisions, pursuing understanding of it is essentially intractable.
He seems to be describing the dissolution of some construct in his worldview that I am having a difficult time relating to. Anyone have a different take?
I think there is a gap, but it's not what they think it is - it is the gap between description and execution. Chalmers wants a description level explanation for the properties of execution, which is not possible. He wants to get for free what is an irreducible recursion between cost and action. The gap is not ontological, it is epistemic.
It just means we can't know without paying the price, walking the path of the process, step by step. No jumping ahead. We can't even predict a 3 body system far ahead. We can't tell the properties of a code without executing it. We can't compress most processes, their execution is the shortest description. Chalmers wants 3p to eat for free at the table of 1p.
exactly
Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.
Yet the mere fact that I am conscious is a greater truth than any of my perception of the "physical" world.
Neither does pure materialism rest on falsifiable beliefs, in that I could claim nothing exists outside my conscious experience.
Just as one can say the neocortex named itself, it's your brain declaring that it is conscious.
If ten years from now your phone tells you it is conscious, would you believe it? What criteria would you use to decide?
I didnt say that I solved the problem, merely that I, myself, know that I am concious.
If we go falsifiability, again, I can equally say how do I know your concious, or even that how do I know youre alive and breathing beyond the moments that I myself am observing you?
> Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable.
This is an metaphysical discussion, so falsifiability is kind of irrelevant. All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable - including materialism and physicalism just as much as dualism or monism or theism.
> All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable
This is not true, there are many metaphysical positions that are falsifiable.
For example, "anything shaped like an apple is an apple" is a metaphysical position. It defines what it means to be apple-ish. You could hold that metaphysical position and also "apples are always made of plant material" as another position you hold at the same time.
Then you could falsify the metaphysical position by presenting a stone carved into the shape of an apple. You could choose to deny reality and change your physical definition (what the definition of the word "apple" is), but if you think logically the evidence constructively falsifies the original metaphysical position.
I think what you might have been trying to say is that people tend to adopt metaphysical positions which are non-falsifiable. Yes, they do, but that doesn't mean no metaphysical arguments can be resolved through logic and experiment.
True, I should have been more careful with my wording. My point was actually that unfalsifiable metaphysical statements are not invalid in the same way that unfalsifiable physical/scientific statements are.
So yes, some metaphysical statements are falsifiable, and some have in fact been falsified over time. And, very importantly, many of the biggest metaphysical questions have no known falsifiable answers (at least none that are not already known to be false, of course).
It would only be unfalsifiable if the connection was one-way, i.e. our souls receive input from the world but have no effect on the world. We would effectively be passengers in a meat puppet, and any influence we have on that puppet is purely imaginary. Certainly possible, but not usually how it's conceived, and then you have the question of how the meat puppets got the idea of consciousness and souls in the first place.
If souls can influence the world, as is the common belief for souls, then in principle that influence or its absence can be detected.
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Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Rei...
EDIT: Downvote all you want, materialists, but reincarnation is the spanner in the works nobody wants to confront ..
Reincarnation just doesn't make sense when you consider the numbers. Why are more people being born today than yesterday?
If you believe in reincarnation, for some reason brand new souls are spawning into existence. Why? How does reincarnation work for them?
> Why are more people being born today than yesterday?
Because souls split. Like rain and the ocean.
There are 325+ theories of consciousness mapped here:
https://loc.closertotruth.com/map
And a good walkthrough here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G6Oc_V3Lw
Many of these already gave up on dualism: they already rejected the idea that mind and body are separate (e.g. panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a feature of reality, that all matter possesses "experience" of some kind).
I believe nature is all there is. If we could replicate a human brain several times, and make each 'human brain' receive the exact same input data (sounds, sights, smells e.t.c.) from the moment they 'exist' until the end of their lifetime, I truly think that each of these brains will make precisely the same decisions (and each of these 'brains' would think they were conscious and in control of their lives).
In my eyes, consciousness is simply a natural phenomenon that can be explained but we just lack the understanding at this moment. Time and time again we have made this mistake of assuming there is something supernatural about the things we cannot comprehend and only a few centuries later it is completely understood scientifically. I think consciousness will be a similar case but will take more time.
I think supernatural things don't exist by definition. If ghosts would exist, they would be just natural.
The real question is whether there is a two way link between consciousness and the physical world. Obviously the physical world is observed by consciousness, so that direction checks out. What about the other direction? Is the physical world at all influenced by consciousness? The mindfulness folks seem to argue: no. They argue that consciousness is like a person watching a movie, where the movie is experience. The person is so immersed that it thinks, it controls the movie, but in reality it's a fully passive observer. But this can't be true! Otherwise, the discussion of consciousness could never have come up in human history. A population of "philosophical zombies" could never initiate this discussion. So somehow consciousness must cause physical neurons to activate. The movie knows about the person watching!
Nature vs. nurture is also a popular debate. This scenario you described, even with nature being all there is, doesn't imply all our actions and thoughts are shaped by our environment.
You’re saying it’s all 100% deterministic. But at the quantum level, things are probabilistic. The hundred brains with the same input data might make different decisions like how each ball dropped in the Galton board chooses a different route.
But I agree with your overall premise. It can be all understood scientifically. There is nothing supernatural about things we cannot comprehend.
Quantum theories are consistent with determinism. You just need to give up locality or... free choice.
Philosophers have had these rifts(an similar lines of arguments) forever.
From Plato vs Aristotle (300 to 400 BC) (idea of forms vs nicomachean), In India Adi Shankara (around 700 CE) vs Madhavacharya (1200 CE) (dualism vs non-dualism) - there is a common thread to all of these arguments.
But eventually, for me it comes down to a statement J Krishnamurti made (& it makes the most sense to me): "The self is a problem that thought cannot solve"
Adi Shankara follows non-dualism and Madhvacharya follows dualism. It is referenced reverse in your reply.
I enjoyed Krishnamurti and David Bohms conversations, they were great.
These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".
Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
What do you find good about that?
The like-ness properly capture in one go the first-person and the phenomenal aspects of consciousness.
The author is mixing two discussions: soul/body dualism and qualia (hard problem).
It could be true that there's only physical body, but still have the qualia explanatory gap.
I followed and was very interested until:
> But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating.
My reaction here: it seems to me that the p-zombie by construction doesn't have a "me" to be convinced, so "physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well." doesn't make sense.
Therefore the demonstration that the argument is self-defeating fell appart, and I stopped finding the article insightful.
Can someone help me see what I'm missing?
I think what is needed, and what will happen, is to pull apart concepts like intelligence, consciousness, and language use, and create narrower and more rigorous definitions of what those are.
My go-to analogy is the concept of heat and warmth, which was the subject of philosophical speculation and inquiry for centuries. But ultimately it was not useful or predictive until it was redefined very narrowly by scientists as a specific measurable attribute of a collection of molecules. Arguably this redefinition itself was an important component of the establishment of “science” as a discipline distinct from philosophy.
This let scientists work with heat rigorously, even though non-scientists still have a largely colloquial vocabulary about it, e.g. “this coat is warmer than my last one.” On matters like consciousness, we’re all still smashed together into colloquial land, arguing about definitions when we think we are arguing about concepts.
I do think the current advancements in AI may help us develop the new vocabulary we need to quantitatively reason about intelligence and language, and in doing so, help better define / constrain what the we mean by consciousness. We think of LLMs now as a tool we can use to do work, but another view is that they are a sensor that directly correlates physical inputs to intelligent outputs. Sort of like how burning can be used to measure the energy contained in various materials, in addition to keeping us warm.
> The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body.
Or a gap between my mind and the minds of the other commuters on this bus.
There are 15 or so biological machines here, but only one of them is being experienced in bright sound and colour.
There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.
> the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics.
There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.
If qualia is just an emergent property, it should follow that ethics exists just as a means to achieve a practical end like order or societal stability. What would be the answer to "in an isolated universe, would torturing a being capable of experiencing qualia be good, bad or neither?". I can't accept it would be neither. Pain is negative and that's obvious to me even though I'm a masochist. Suffering is negative if you want to get more precise.
I don't know what qualia is, but it IS something. Some people don't seem to get any arguments and debates about it, at all. Others do. I doubt the people that don't get it are zombies but it's weird that someone can't even comprehend what the issue is about. When I say "red" or "pain", they talk about neurons and whatnot. Of course that's true, but don't they feel the redness and the pain subjectively in a way that makes them question how that feeling relates to the atoms, neurons and other levels of abstraction could be used to describe the physical reality?
And I think, having read a bunch of philosophy years ago that solved nothing, dualism or not is not the right question right now, in our level of understanding. It's not even the right answer because what's "physical" is not well defined either. If we can explain qualia, why would that explanation not count as a "physical" one? If there's some logic to it, it's as physical as anything else.
Lots of ill-defined questions and assumptions. I think we should accept qualia is not understood and won't be for some time. We should realize we can suffer and so can beings similar to us. Where do we draw the line - we'll have to base that on what we know about biology. To me it's obvious many animals are capable of suffering. I think that's a good place to start with our ethics. Suffering is shit, let's reduce it as much as possible.
Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop.
I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with the very simple like this and recursively building more complex predictors. When they predict correctly, happy feedback reinforces the connections that are firing, when they are wrong, they weaken. Just a really simple feedback algorithm that is super robust.
So the brain is building this world model, and it's essentially gradually compressing a description of the environment into a structure made of neurons. And this is the ultimate survival tactic: model the environment explicitly in your head, then adapt your behaviour to fit it. The better you are adapating to future states (dodging that tree as you run) the better survival chance you have.
At some point (complete speculation) we then begin to do something quite strange: we develop a world model _of ourselves_. We get to a level of sophistication where we begin to predict the future states of our own brains. This might emerge naturally as a way to compress existing learnt behaviour. For example, we re-learn to follow lines in a smarter way, particularly as other parts of the brain learn useful things that we can re-use in our line following. This treats our existing model as a cost function, and we learn a model of the model. But it eventually starts to model the higher-level models the brain has, higher up the abstraction stack.
And somehow, the modelling of our brain function creates a chaotic feedback loop that leads to the sensation of consciousness. It's super handwavey, I know, but somehow this recursion feeds awareness. It's like the abilty to see yourself thinking. Consider meditating and the way words appear in consciousness... you get to a point where you can observe what you're going to say before you say them, and I conjecture that is the modelling of the model that's going on.
And this is useful for survival, as you can optimise the way you think, compressing your circuits further, but also has this weird side-effect of creating awareness.
It also explains why consciousness takes time to develop - because you need to develop a model of yourself, but before that you need a model of the world.
Considering the brain functioning as prediction machine, we are constantly correcting the error between sensory perception and our inner reality. This is classic (closed) control loop[1] with self-correcting characteristics updated by adaptation through learning and experience.
At first the process is subconscious, then chaos enters as our conscious awareness develops, morphing the control loop into second or third order states of "correcting corrections" as we perform inner tasks such as ruminating, or external tasks such as group discussion and logical planning.
The perfect prediction machine would be a simulation running an entire up-to-date universe model, but between our limited physical resources and available energy in reality, our evolved aim is efficiency, by creating a state of awareness and reactive patterns with minimal information (lowest entropy). We do this by making assumptions, testing the world, then processing the response and updating our control loop. The tradeoff is lack of precision, as a model without complete information has guaranteed errors.
Children who form a more realistic core worldview through guidance, opportunities and experience are best set up to create solid foundations which are more adaptable to future unexpected situations. Whether this is learning emotional response in social settings or math, the ability to integrate future conscious experience depends on early neuronal structures formed by subconscious expectations of the world. If measurement error is too great from expectations and our current loop/wavelength, our options are to discard this information or learn from it by reflecting on sources of inevitable prediction error through reasoning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_loop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
This theory maps very well onto (at least some parts of) modern neuroscience; how emotions are made is taking this model, that the brains MO is predicting how the body will need to be tuned in the near future, as a way to explain how emotions arise and are perceived. “How Emotions are Made” by LisaFeldman Barrett.
you might enjoy the first chapter of Diaspora by Greg Egan
https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
This is essentially where the field is going, started with predictive processing by Friston with his free energy principle, combined into Hofstadter’s “I am a strange loop” and then the continuing thrust with applying the FEP as well as Rosenthal’s higher order theories and Graziano’s attention schema theory.
I'll add a comment that hopefully won't get buried. The hard problem that Rovelli is talking was, I think, the first time someone said something in the field of consciousness that people could (at the time) agree on. Not many people were openly discussing in the 90's in academic settings.
It was proposed by Chalmers as a young undergrad at the Science of Consciousness conference. I have been attending for awhile and really enjoy it. There are so many opinions and thoughts on this post, if you are really into thinking about consciousness, this year the conference will be in San Diego. It's a long day of lectures, followed by evenings of great conversations. https://cs2026.org/
I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?
I think people focus a lot on the dangers of erasing consciousness as a moral entity, but it strikes me that something which is so loosely defined and for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable carries its own dangers too. Especially given so many of us are happy to kill and eat many creatures that pass many proposed tests of consciousness.
It's probably sensible to use more strongly defined terms like humanity, self-awareness, cognitive capability, empathy and so on. And to treat them somewhat separately rather than trying to bundle it all together.
But people want there to be something special about us which can be defined as something separate from us, in a neutral, universalist sounding way which also happens to be relatively exclusive - I think because there's this desire to make the concept of a soul have an equivalent in scientific realism for the purposes of discussing philosophy in a secular way.
It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
If we accept subjective feeling as definitive proof that something exists, that opens a Pandora’s box of entities. People have deeply held subjective beliefs about things like God, afterlife experiences, out-of-body experiences, and many others. It seems unfair to me to dismiss this kind of subjective evidence in these cases, while accepting it without question for experience of consciousness.
This is a religious argument. If you want to go down that path, then sure; but I suspect that's not what you actually believe.
It’s not a religious argument.
It’s a subjective experience argument. As a conscious person, if someone tells me they don’t believe in consciousness, then I’m inclined to believe they have a reason for saying that. They must not be experiencing consciousness the same way I am.
Interestingly, a non-trivial number of people have no internal monologue (https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...). It would be reasonable to assume the experiential side of consciousness is on a spectrum, with extreme edge cases on both ends. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some people are barely experiencing it, and some not at all. It would certainly explain to me (someone who experiences it quite intensely) why some would claim it doesn’t exist. Because for them, it might not.
> It’s a subjective experience argument.
"Earth is flat" is also a subjective experience argument. Yet mostly nobody takes it seriously anymore. I hope "qualia" will be like this soon too.
"Earth is flat" is an objective statement. "I experience consciousness" is subjective, similarly to "I am experiencing pain". If someone tells me "pain doesn't exist" while I know it exists (because I have experienced it), I can be certain that that person is wrong. Even though I can't prove it to him.
I've been thinking the same (that people who claim it doesn't exist don't have it) but it had never occurred to me that it might be on a spectrum. It actually makes perfect sense.
No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.
That's the basis of the p-zombies thought experiment discussed (and dismissed without any real arguments) in the article.
P-zombies cannot be argued about, if you reject their existence your opponent will call you a p-zombie (happened to Dennett).
It's a fair point, though. If one rejects a subjective experience without any doubt, the most plausible explanation is that they don't have that subjective experience.
If I tell you that I see numbers as colours, and you say "that's not possible", I would assume that you don't have synesthesia [1]. I wouldn't doubt the fact that I have it [2].
Similarly, if some people argue that consciousness is not something like I describe, I would naturally assume that they don't experience it the same way as I do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
[2] Someone I know has synesthesia. I don't have any way to confirm or deny that. All I can say is I don't have it.
It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.
It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.
I agree about definition confusion. I like to define consciousness as "capability to suffer".
Can cow/dog/spider suffer? - very important question, even if not answerable.
At least mammals do show recognizable signs of pain and suffering. That is good enough for me; I don't know for sure other people can suffer, but I assume they do based on their behavior I see.
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Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own:
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”
This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".
> We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?
We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.
> Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious
Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.
The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.
(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).
> We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.
I wish I'd phrased it better, my point was more that early vision systems had weird issues, which we were able to figure out by looking at what part of the image those models paid attention to and realising it often wasn't even part of the animal in the photo, but e.g. the plants around them. We literally had to think about what made a cat a cat to make AI good at recognising cats.
This would also impact clustering.
That said, I think even for humans there's a similar issue: we spent millennia clustering things into groups and labelling those groups, which is why the Catholic church had rules about no meat on Good Friday but fish was fine and beavers counted as fish (and there is now a podcast titled around the idea there is no such thing as a fish*). For cats, I don't see it myself but the fossa is described as "cat-like".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish#Title
the quote from the article is just a contrived tautology that misunderstands the nature of the problem. the dualism problem is not about finding an explanation for why what we call a cat is what we call a cat. it's that you can measure anything you want but nevertheless despite confidently establishing the size of a cat, the appearance of a cat, the behavior of cats, a sophisticated taxonomy of related species labeled "felines", surveying people to find out what cats are to them, what a cat is to me is not what a cat is to you
I'm not particularly well-versed in philosophy, but what's the dualism here?
Of course what a cat _is_ to me is not what a cat _is_ to you, because we necessarily have different memories of interactions with cat-like beings. If you show some babies a cat for the first time, they'll necessarily see it from different viewing perspectives. Even if you put VR glasses on them and show the exact same video, they'll have different contexts: "I first saw a cat when I was sitting next to my friend", "I first saw a cat when I was thinking of ice cream", etc.
But they all saw the same cat, they'll see many other cats, who are all similar. So everyone will understand that "things like these are cats", but everyone will have their own understanding of a "cat" because their memory is different.
I don't have the energy at present to fully develop my thoughts but one thing I'll say is that in my view they did *not* see the same cat. It was the same collection of flesh & bone on four legs, certainly. But it is not the same cat.
Heidegger best revealed to me the limitations of supposedly "objective" thinking.
Heraclitus: "No man steps in the same river twice"
My take is that we are all living an illusion which is the continuous perception of a ‘self’. All people are inside the bubble of the self as it is part and parcel of the human condition and baked into the neural pathways that are created while still in the womb. It is like an operating system that is locked down to running only one application ‘self’. It is only when there is glitch in the system that the self relinquishes its stranglehold over our consciousness and it becomes just another background process alongside other mental processes. The ghost in the system disappears.
> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".
There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out is consciousness. It's reasonable to think it will also fall eventually.
It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience.
Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, increasingly complex unanswered questions about phenomena. It is reasonable to think that if/when we reduce consciousness through science we will find that there are more increasingly complex unanswered metaphysical gaps.
Reducing a complex phenomena to more basic structure and dynamics just is to eliminate any open metaphysical questions about that phenomena. That's why the big philosophical debates center around monism vs dualism rather than n-pluralism. Science has dispatched all other essences from mainstream consideration.
“Fields” such as the electric field or Higgs field are essences.
See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48178366
Really? You are telling me that the discovery/development of general relativity or quantum mechanics has not thrown new increasingly complex doubts on the accuracy of previous physical models due to these new "essences" implying contradictions with classical "essences". What could possibly make you so confident that new datapoints, theories, and discoveries as it relates to consciousness will be completely flawless?
You're not using the term essence in the way philosophers mean it. An essence is a categorical descriptive/reasoning context. In mathematical terms, an essence is a lot like a descriptive/measurement basis. A naive scientist sees a world full of distinct reasoning contexts, length is categorically distinct from speed, which is categorically distinct from water, which is categorically distinct from life. The progress of science has been to progressively reduce reasoning contexts/measurement bases to other contexts/bases thus leading to a more unified theory of nature.
Quantum mechanics does increase the physics reasoning contexts owing to the incompatibility between classical and quantum mechanics. But this is not an in principle divergence in the way that philosophers understand essences. We can describe and reason about quantum mechanics and classical mechanics using the same language and the same descriptive tools, namely mathematics. When it comes to phenomenal consciousness and physical behavior, we cannot reason about them using the same descriptive language. Hence they count as distinct categorical essences until we discover the bridging principles that reduce consciousness to physical behavior.
Where we are, it is still a matter of belief.
I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.
The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.
They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.
God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.
But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.
I enjoyed the article, and I'm actually, surprisingly, fairly convinced by his idea there is something off about things like the imaginary philosophical zombie[1].
I think that the idea of a soul or spirit could be both interesting and also self evident though, so it's odd to read these being thrown out in the same bath water.
I.e if we imagine our simplified brains as points of matter with signals being sent between; then the kind of experience we have as human beings is more about the relationships between the matter. I don't see that as a harmful duality as if it were the case, it would shed light on what we understand and how. We're still physical but exist in "spirit of matter", different but bound. No magic required.
I'd see this as fairly separate from the question of why we witness ourselves, which seems more prone to mental trickery.
Rovelli also has some fun popsci book on how Time might be constructed. Mostly a fun read but the theories, when he gets to them, are an interesting take. Highly recommend.
[1] However if Carlo Rovelli were a philosophical zombie, are these exactly the responses he would give - as it wouldn't "see" the moment of awareness and be confused by implied significance? I think so.
I'm not sure the article really adds up. The hard problem of consciousness in a normal definition is:
>to explain how and why organisms have qualia or subjective experience. (from Wikipedia)
(or "why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all" in the article)
He then supposes this "assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body". But there probably isn't so he jumps to:
>So, there is no “hard problem of consciousness.”
But that doesn't explain how/why there are qualia and the like.
I personally think how/why qualia it a real hard question but scientifically tractable.
A little guessing. You can assume we evolved - much evidence - and so consciousness has survival / reproductive functionality. The brain has billions of sensory, memory and other neurons and they have to compress that data down to something a creature can act on - should it feed of run away etc. So conscious awareness is probably something like a situation summary you can act on.
One interesting thing is there is a lot of unconscious awareness and actions going on - when you walk across a room the nervous system has to process all sorts of stuff about your body position and coordinate dozens of muscles but you are normally not consciously aware of it, so presumably the conscious bit of you brain is some small portion linked to the thinking talking and remembering bits.
I think much of the subtlety of conscious experience is because there is a lot of unconscious things underlying it. You see say a red apple and it's linked to memories of apples, instincts for food, evolved associations with red, your mood and the like. It all gets reduced in something like a lossy compression to what you are aware of.
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This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.
Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.
Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off.
> That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon.
That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity.
Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief.
I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience."
And this bit:
> I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
right after
> Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument.
So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.
> So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Those are not conflicting arguments.
The former means that we understand all the processeses, but they are complex, therefore we don't have enough brain/compute power to properly model it.
The latter means that we don't understand some of those processes, so we need additional theories that explain them.
One can dismiss the first while finding the second plausible.
I suppose complexity defines to me as something that's inherently hard to understand. The definition of "complex" is "difficult to understand." The move I don't agree with is proceeding to posit "because we don't understand them yet, there must be something special about them."
OK, I'll try another attempt. I thought this other comment explained it better than I could have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 .
The reason TFA (and, frankly, your comment as well) pissed me off is that they drip with condescension to the core while completely sidestepping the problem in the first place. We have plenty of other examples of places where complexity can give rise to emergent behavior, but those behaviors are still easy to understand in the problem space of the domain - e.g. I may be amazed that I can converse with an LLM and it feels like it completely "understands" the conversation, but I don't have any conceptual problems with the fact that it's still just next token prediction under the covers.
But as hackinthebochs put it very well, in my opinion: "The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function."
So my negative reaction is based in the belief that what the TFA is doing is saying "there is no hard problem", and the response is "but why, because 'phenomenal consciousness' can't be described in terms of structure and function like every other instance that we understand that arises from complexity", and then TFA just gives a host of complexity examples that are completely unconvincing (and, again, feel like they completely miss the problem is the first place) and just basically ends with a dangling, unwarranted "q.e.d."
The "complexity -> magic" argument is just religious belief. Something one accepts without proof or a shed of coherent reasoning around it.
I read it as "I'm very clever and sensible. I definitely don't believe in souls."
Like so much other material produced by people who (I suspect deliberately) confuse religion with the subjective phenomenon of existence
I think that having a point of view (having an "inside") has a great deal to do with survival. You probably don't need a brain to have a subject. You probably just need dynamics with the right causal structure.
When you look at a cell, you can clearly see how the dynamics are existential and already do the work of classifying inputs as "good" or "bad" (eg: paramecium encounters acid, this triggers an electro chemical cascade in the membrane cortex which results in the organism quickly changing direction away from the bad gradient). There's no mind obviously in the human sense, but the fact remains that this system has developed into something that can discriminate between good and bad for itself, because without this integration, it wouldn't exist.
The cell is as close to a machine as possible. But it's not a machine because people make machines to have specific purposes. Each part is already labeled and designed. You can shut down a machine that's running, and start it back up with very predictable behavior (since you designed it).
The cell is a process that uses physical matter to keep its own possible futures available. Machines also support processes and goals, but these are externally imposed. The cell's ultimate goal is to continue being the reason for its own existence. Maybe this is where all goals come from.
So I guess experience is what happens when you have enough layers above this machinery that you you are no longer connected directly to the world, "you" can only meet the world through internally generated/classified electrochemical states from the body. These states have valence because the system is already organized around maintaining these states within metabolic limits. Think...hunger. You don't feel hungry. You ARE hungry. Hunger is a part of how "you" are constituted.
I'm all in the "brains cause minds" camp. But isn't the main argument here "We accept explanation gaps already in many places, why not also for consciousness?"?
My objection would then be that actually, that's not true. The real statement would be "In everyday life (including science), we accept explanation gaps already in many places"
But this does not mean that we have to accept this particular instance of an explanation gap.
I think that whether we think of consciousness in terms of dualism, or if we think of it as emergent from natural behavior, it really doesn't matter functionally. Either way we are positioning it as something inaccessible from our realm or control.
I believe that we can at least posit some kind of mechanism through which emergence can happen. In my opinion we should look at language and how language evolved. However, i also believe we should expand our study of natural language to things like network protocols, and observe the "protocol hourglass" structure that has emerged from the internet protocol stack.
In my mind, the concepts of control and autonomy are what need to be revisited. We conflate the two: we are autonomous IF we are able to exert control on the environment. However, I think the reality might be that autonomous systems are more similar to an API in the sense that we can interact along the boundary but through the API we cannot exert control over the internal structure of the system (through knowledge or physical control).
> During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.
This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?
Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.
>...[God says] all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.
from the book of
>prophet Ezekiel, exiled in Babylon, during the 22 years from 593 to 571 BC
"Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century."
.....
"...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body"
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#AnthGodSoulSou...
It seems that, until we have a falsifiable test for consciousness, these exercises are pointless. All we have is the ability to externally observe behavior and we can't judge what happens inside someone (or something's) mind. BTW, we don't have a good definition of mind either.
That there's nothing magical or supernatural in our minds and our consciousness is a given, otherwise, this becomes a very silly debate where everyone will have a strong position that can be neither proven nor disproven.
Maybe we are able to constrain what consciousness (or a mind, or a soul) is by figuring out everything it isn't. Does it have a mass? Can we measure its entropy?
We can, to a certain degree, identify images from the visual cortex. What else about the internal state of a brain can we extract? We did that to a fly's brain the other day - a very confused simulated fly that must have been wondering why its world had so low a resolution.
Just stating that consciousness is natural phenomenon is begging the question. We get it... you're a materialist.
Naturalism and materialism are not married together. Materialism can't claim naturalism just for itself. There are coherent ontologies that are naturalists and not materialists.
The Hard Problem strikes me as a "why" question and humans have a poor track record of ever answering a "why" for a foundational question (at least in a way that we can demonstrate to others). Our most successful explanations build up from simpler things to explain more complex things. But at some point, the explanation bottoms out on things we can't further explain - like the fields in quantum theory. There's currently no further thing below those that explain "why a field theory?"
If we solved the Easy Problems of consciousness, i think we would find ourselves in a similar position where most people would simply accept that we had an explanation and move on but some people with a more philosophical bent would continue to search for underlying explanations.
I think these philosophical arguments boil down to answering the question "what is real?". Contemporary science is presented as an objective theory of reality, but our experiences form the actual starting point for everything that we can ever know about reality, so they ought to be considered real in some sense. The tension begins because, while a physical theory of reality will say that the signals in a brain are real signals, that does not imply the reality of any concepts that those signals may represent. If I imagine something, that does not make it real. But then the same can be argued for all experiences: there are real brain signals associated with them, but that does not imply the reality of those experiences. This lead to a gap in that the physical theory fails to imply, and thus fails to explain, the reality of experience. So, if I believe in the reality of my own experience, then I am left to ask "why is my experience real?", as that is not required or implied by the physical theory of reality.
It sounds like Rovelli's resolution is to acknowledge the centrality of subjective experiences to the formulation of scientific theories, and thus also to any theory of reality. Experiences are the starting point, with the rest being built up from them. Therefore, experiences should also be the first thing added into the bucket of things that one believes to be real. Meanwhile, any physical model of objective reality has a far more tenuous spot in that bucket. We may suspect it to be real through various deductions, but the further away we get from experiences, the more assumptions have to be made to get there. Anyway, I agree that there is no explanatory gap when reality is viewed in this manner. And this is a relatively palatable way to approach the question of reality (compared to, e.g., the mathematical universe hypothesis, which most find unacceptable). But as long as there is debate about what makes up reality and where experiences fit into that, the debate around the hard consciousness problem will continue, and I regard this problem to be of a different character (being far more philosophical) than, say, spiritualism or anti-Darwinism.
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
The answer to whether a submarine can swim tells you more about the person the about the submarine. Meanwhile submarines propel themselves under the waves just fine[1] , and stalk their prey with silent impunity.
Perhaps we should call these discussions "swimming submarine debates"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine could hit 41 kts(47 mph; 76 km/h) ... which is pretty good for something that couldn't swim ;)
This is the Let's deal with the phenomenon of Qualia by denying its existence thesis.
Spot on.
Not at all. As the fourth paragraph from the end states, we experience qualia. Rovelli is simply saying that qualia are simply physical processes described from a salient perspective, that is, at a level more abstract than the eletrochemical processes that underlie them.
It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doctor works at a higher, descriptive level, as does the doctor. Where is the pain, what are its qualities (dull, sharp, shallow, deep, burning, etc.).
"We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics."
That's the emergence hypothesis. Largely insufficient [1] and the one of every person that doesn't really understand Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem tends to embrace.
[1] "We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects" there is a confusion about expressions of a phenomenon (referent) and real phenomenons (object). It denies Qualia by reducing it to a verbal expression supported by an insufficient model of the universe (current state of Physics).
To me, the hard problem of consciousness is the link between observable physical activity of matter in the brain, and conscious experience. Science has found correlations between brain activity and experiences. But nothing is known about a mechanism of cause and effect which connects them.
Dualism is probably mistaken. The only evidence we have for anything about physical reality comes from experiences. It does not seem logical to believe that there is a physical reality which is separate from conscious experience. Quantum theory hints at this, with how the observer becomes significant. But this does not make understanding how it all works much easier.
Articles like these just make me think that's its a real possibility that not everyone has consciousness. Like some people are no conscious of their own visual imagery, maybe some people are not conscious at all.
I came here to comment this same thing. I had this idea as a laugh, but I'm taking it more and more seriously as time goes on. There are very confident statements made here that I don't think a conscious human could sincerely claim. If the author isn't taking the piss (and no indication they are) then I strongly suspect they don't have consciousness.
Kind of ironic given the bit of the article that focuses on P-Zombies and how they don't work because they have to be indistinguishable. Well, what if P-Zombies are real, and they are distinguishable, it's just not obvious because the P-Zombies grew up in a world where people talk about consciousness and lots of people around them have it.
With consciousness and AI multiple problems are being smuggled into a single question.
1. How do we determine consciousness?
2. How should we handle moral consideration of a non-biological system?
The first question is a red herring. It cannot be answered. We need to focus on the second question.
Seems like void of any substance if one takes whatever flavor of monism for granted. Just because everything is supposed to be build on the same fundamental building blocks/fluxes/whatever doesn’t mean every phenomenon is caused by constructions of equal complexities.
That is, life referring to something inherently far more complex than inert assemblies remains perfectly valid in many monist perspectives.
[edit: took life rather than consciousness as an example, but the stated argument in the article seems to be equally applicable relevant for both concept, or any concept that suppose that emergent complexity is possible]
> scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely about experience
Not true: Science is precisely about finding truths that hold even if our conscious experience of them vanished the very next moment.
> Empiricism, the grounding of knowledge in experience
Another false equivalency: by "experience" here he means "observation", not consciousness. Observations are data points, consciousness is not.
OK, dualism. Heard that before.
The new hard problem: how do biological brains get so much done on such slow hardware? That's a real physics question. We're missing something.
Hey you give Nvidia a few million years to evolve their chips and just see what happens
a) massive parallelism (although the current AI HW is getting there) b) clever structure/organization (we are nowhere near close) c) it is still buggy as hell
> get so much done
Compared to what??
The brain is not slow?
Measured signals seem to be at kilohertz, not gigahertz, speeds.
Some of the state of the art AI chips have similar speeds
Massive parallel processing.
> "But scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely > about experience."
Let us hear about your experience of a wavefunction, Carlo.
Among other philosophical conundrums such as…
Why God Cannot Have Parts https://youtu.be/EZKADOYv-oc
I think part of the answer is that AI shows that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. Humans happen to be both.
I think this has been obvious from the other side of the argument forever. Animals obviously have consciousness and emotional responses and they are made of the same living matter we are, but my pet bunnies can’t do natural language or math.
blather. another example of weak blather of the weeeeeeee! I'm so full of words variety, that fails to interesting or memorable, like someone so high on mushrooms that they are claiming to be able to see there own ears, who if asked what consiousness is will give a similar answer, unless you ask how consiousness relates to rubber bands, which will get a similar answer with rubber band anologies.
> ..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature.
Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that:
what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible.
Was reasoning thought to be immaterial and intangible..? By whom? Materialism has been alive and well for a long time from what I can tell
Plato, for example
Cognition/intelligence is not consciousness. Information processing vs phenomenality. AI is intelligent (it's in the name) but not conscious.
In the original paper about the hard problem, Chalmers does say all that stuff is explainable by science or the easy problems.
I may be misunderstanding the article but doesnt the fact that all other science and understanding sits on a continuum of which consciousness has (to my understading) to real footing mean that the problem is dualitic by definition? Thats not to say that it can't be 'brought into the fold', it may well be, but until it is it has no other place that to sit outside.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.4375
I felt like this paper nailed it years a go, and nobody has followed up properly.
The metric involved is basically impossible to compute fully, but easy to approximate. Any online approximation will model everything it can see have changes until it is satisfied.
the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be.
one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.
Science will never be able to properly even define the concept of consciousness because it's outside the scope of science.
Consciousness is something that is used to observe the outer world and science essentially describes patterns in our observations.
All scientific laws boil down to subjective perceptions, such as, when I drop an apple, I see that it falls down.
> can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it?
The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
We all (presumably, although I might wonder about the author) know that consciousness is a thing, we don't have anything like a rigid definition of it. Perhaps we never will, but this kind of hot air is unlikely to ever get us closer to understanding it.
Tiresome article by someone just being contrary for the sake of having something to say.
> The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.
It might as well be that philosophical zombies are mental construct that cannot physically exist, simply because building one will imbue it with 'consciousness' (as, it being the physical copy/simulation, it will be able to simulate also the 'consciousness'), in turn making it non-zombie.
> The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.
Sure, but if you're going to posit a philosophical zombie, don't posit one that has a rich inner life, experiences qualia, and is ridden with self-doubt FFS.
Right. Its bad science to say that consciousness doesnt exist.
Mention "consciousness" get a slew of incoherent responses. There is no "hard problem." the burden of proof has always been on those who claim there is. whats it like is what it is what it is is what it is like. the question has the innanity of a circle asking "why do I have an interior?"
I've actually been waiting for this. All you need to do is ask the rhetorical "But if there's something that it's like to _be_ [thing / animal / whatever]"
Once you ask that, you never need to explain anything. This is a magical process that can never be touched by observation or explanation.
I've been wondering if imagination is the closest thing to free will we have.
How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations.
He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event.
I highly recommend any and all of his books.
If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article.
One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong.
Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.
I really like your response, but it also can help explain why I really dislike this essay.
I fully understand and appreciate that there are lots of things about quantum physics, and heck, the universe at large, that are unsolved and that we don't understand. I would actually expect that in order for us to understand consciousness better that we'll need to fill some of the gaps of the quantum world.
The reason why I didn't like the article is that I felt like it's misrepresenting the problem, as the comment I linked described. I'll try to explain with an analogy: In the late 1800s before the discovery of quantum physics, many physicists felt that the physics of the universe was solved and fully understood - the universe was basically just like a set of billiard balls set in motion a long time ago, and the future position of all those balls could be known if their states were known in the past. In that "pre-quantum" world, people still understood that emergent behavior could arise from complexity (even just classical complexity). This article just felt really hand-wavy to me by arguing "complexity is enough". For example, if a similar article were written in 1899, but then later we discovered quantum physics and eventually had a good understanding of how consciousness can arise from quantum interactions, I suppose the author could state "See, I was right - just more complexity!" But it would totally miss the point that "the missing piece" was actually the discovery of quantum physics in the first place, not just more classical complexity.
So I felt this article was strawmanning the problem to begin with. I don't have to believe in "magic" or "souls" or religion to believe that the tools we have to describe complex emergent phenomena are not sufficient to describe the subjective experience of consciousness, but Rovelli seems to be saying that "more complexity" is just the answer to everything.
I'd say don't be thrown off by the colorful language like "souls." All of science has this language problem and philosophers of science are asked to address the meaning of these kind of words all the time.
Having read a lot of Carlo's work along with Hans Reichenbach's who is coming from the same hardline empirical stance, I think what he's trying to say here is that consciousness or a soul (I prefer the term "volition") arises from natural and physical elements that we can observe. In other words, nothing about consciousness, life, etc comes from beyond the empirical. We are already looking at it.
Does that make sense? He really objects to inserting a god or other axiomatic beliefs and the "soul as entity" must go in that box.
The Order of Time is on my reading list
So the hard problem of consciousness is no more once you accept that we have souls. Which is essentially giving the problem a new name and burdening it with more historical baggage.
Michael Pollan's "A World Appears" is a much more interesting and nuanced take. Very much recommended.
It seems wild to me to write a (popular) article about consciousness in the year 2026 without addressing the elephant in the room: we are able to devise computer programs of increasing complexity that replicate more and more behaviors that were once the sole domain of humans, and at what point do we consider such computers to have experience in the sense that we have, and the sense in which calculators and thermostats do not. It seems that Rovelli is content to say that we should call experience the thing that the brain does, which is all well and good if you're a physicalist (and I am) but it does not help you at all explain which features of the brain are necessary for experience.
I think it also helps to sharpen this debate to remember that there is a moral dimension: many have adopted moral systems that widen their sphere of concern and care from the self to the community to the nation to the whole of mankind, usually under the intuitive precept that it is bad to make someone else experience suffering. Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?
> Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?
Such an irony. Humans have has since the bery beginning inflicted pain and suffering on other human beings. We are still doing it directly (e.g., wars) or indirectly (e.g., capitalism). The idea that perhaps in the not so distant future, machines may live better “lives” or be treated better than some humans is pathetic. But here again, there are some pets that live better than a 1000 humans nowadays
I don't know where in my statement you saw the implication that we should not care about bad things happening to other humans, but it was a misapprehension.
But there is dualism in our minds - we have two spheres of brains and one of those is in master position over other and synchronize both parts. As a result the enslaved part of our brains is silent watcher. But sometimes brains get damaged and these mechanisms malfunction.
I've been working through the American pragmatist tradition - James, Pierce, Sellars, Rorty, Brandom.
Something about that background, all the discussions about definitions and representation, the original article talking about dualisms.... It's certainly an experience.
Personally I think the quantum immortality/suicide argument points directly at the trouble with the "duality".
It's a perfectly physical/mechanical argument that demonstrates that consciousness is much much more bizarre than we expect.
What is the argument?
The magazine is funded by:
https://berggruen.org/projects
The investment arm for this influencer fund is:
https://www.berggruenholdings.com/
The fund is invested in AI and Berggruen pushes the AI/UBI narrative:
https://www.ft.com/content/9b93e02a-c693-4070-9094-a2f532dfa...
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasberggruen?trk=public_post...
You can already see from the glossy website that this is a well funded propaganda magazine, just like Quantaagazine is essentially funded by the Renaissance Fund, which is invested in AI.
Yes, these magazines do have interesting articles from time to time, but the overt materialistic (not monetary, but anti-idealistic) worldview that traditionally only appeared in communist countries suddenly infests all the rich people's outlets.
Why would it serve the interests of AI companies to promote materialism? It seems to me that idealism would be more in the interest of AI companies to promote, since my impression is idealists are more likely than materialists to believe that AI will never be conscious, and AI being perceived as conscious would be problematic for companies that want to provide AI as a product.
Very good post
To me it seems consciousness is a log file that records the results of brain activities originating from different parts of the brain.
This log file is loaded into working memory.
I have aspergers and that's sort of how I experience my own consciousness, the result of different brain processes, summarised in a log.
People are mainly subconscious and not that many things propagate to consciousness and get recorded in the log, because it's a bottleneck.
Instead of recording the whole process of emotionally tagging things, people just "feel" something without reasoning. Only the emotional tag or intuition is recorded in the log but not the process to get to it.
Non-verbal communication is emitted and processed subconsciously, which is hard for me because of the autism and I arrived to the conclusion that fundamentally human consciousness is a spectrum and how much is recorded into it depends on neurodiversity.
For anyone interested in this subject, I found this paper to be quite helpful: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545
The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the article succinctly describes this or contributes otherwise
Fully agree, and I am mildly disappointed to see nobody has brought up Maturana and Varela in this entire thread.
The deeper layer is autopoiesis - the conceptual foundation authored by them that embodied/4E cognition builds on.
They defined cognition as a necessary property of self-referencing, self-maintaining boundaries in an information-theoretic/topological sense, not bound to any specific physical process.
This dissolves the dualism Rovelli targets in a way that pure materialist/eliminativist arguments don’t manage cleanly. Autopoiesis is fully physical (mathematically modelable, biologically grounded) but it locates consciousness in structural relationships and informational dynamics rather than a purely physical substrate.
Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) is the contemporary version, and Varela’s later work integrates phenomenology directly.
I hold that it may be possible to use the toolkits of set/category/group/type theory to formalize these relationships.
Would be a vastly different conversation thread here if this work was more well known.
Something worth reading alongside this.
https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/already-burning/
> It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.
Why is it pernicious?
Because it leads us down seemingly useful paths that are in fact dead wrong. There is only physics, but at some levels it more convenient to ignore the physics (what is happening in the body) and to describe our experience.
Rovelli is a reductionist, the only logically and physically defensible intellectual position, while dualism is inherently supernatural, invoking phantoms, phenomenology that is purely fictitious.
Ok, but that doesn't really address "pernicious". I understand pursuits of philosophy are inherently concerned with truth, but does not truth mean pernicious? My experience of reading philosophers is limited; is Rovelli just a materialist and that's that? Is this positivism?
> Is this positivism?
My understanding of positivism is, in a nutshell, that its goal is to reduce everything to physics, including social, inter-personal interactions. My read of the article is that Rovelli is focused on the intra-personal, so to that extent it isn't positivism, or is at least a limited, focused positivism. Extending Rovelli's thinking to the inter-personal would be, IMHO, a categorical error: While we may one day be able to fully describe the physics (and electrochemistry, etc.) of everything inside the person, physics is insufficient to describe what happens between people, at least to the extent that what is happening is a result of each person's actions, choices, etc.
I think this where bringing qualia in as a level of abstraction is useful: Everything about us is ultimately operating on our physical hardware, but not everything about us is "just physics", since our "us" (our OS, if you will), makes observations and chooses actions that are determined at least to some extent by the "us", and not just by the physical operations.
At this point, one could bring in Skinner and make everything operational conditioning, or Kahneman for a slightly different take where much of what we observe or consider consciously (the energy-hungry slow system) has been pre-filtered by physical processes that are not available to us (the energy-efficient fast system).
If those lines of thought are correct - and that remains an open question - then we could potentially arrive at a complete positivism wherein everything is determined primarily by our internal physics, though we wouldn't get predictability for the same reason that we cannot solve the three-body-problem analytically or predict the weather accurately for all time or predict with certainty the motions of the planets, etc.: There are too many inter-dependent variables, and modelling will always lag actual behaviour.
I think we are on safe ground saying that intra-body behaviour is all physics, and on safe ground describing some of the physics responsible for what we call thought, e.g., neuropsychological processes, but at some point we need to model things differently to continue to make sense, make progress. We get away from just-physics at higher levels of abstraction, with the challenge being to describe the transitions from one model level to another (corporeal electro-chemistry to reflective thought and action to inter-personal relations to sociology and economy).
Sort of like how we know that everything is quantum mechanics at the appropriate scale, but that QM isn't terribly useful for modelling weather, planetary motion, etc.
"Consciousness" is a suitcase word. It has so many meanings that any individual speaker can't even keep them straight, much less a group discussion.
That's the reason it seems like a thorny topic.
Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.
Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.
His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.
Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.
The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.
Philosophers being philosophers and not advancing the discussion at all.
A lot of science and math and logic originated from philosophers posing questions and even coming up with answers (then those fields graduated out of philosophy)
This is the standard blub programmer but in science. The blub physicists doesn't understand anything more complex or higher-level than his daily abstractions.
https://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Reading Ashtavakra Gita gives me more insight into this than any other literature that I have read. The ultimate reality is that: There's nothing else other than this. This is all there is.
To anyone discussing whether or not consciousness exist, tell me do you have proof that other people have consciousness? There's simply no credible answer to this question other than "well they have to be...cause we share the same material". But that is a experiment with a sample of 1. The weird thing is, if you are able to proof someone else's consciousness, that is just an extension of your own consciousness.
Next question, how do you prove that you are not sleeping right now? What proof do you have that you are not living inside an illusion? You have surely experienced the illusion of understanding i.e. you realized that you "understanding" or the feeling of "understanding" was wrong. What is to say that this is not happening now?
In reality, there is nothing to discover. There is just this and that is all there is.
Making confident, sweeping claims about consciousness is proof that someone hasn't thought about it very deeply or just doesn't know very much.
You can affect your consciousness by hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Pretty good argument for me to believe it is a physical phenomenon.
Let's say you have a dream where you hit yourself in the head with a hammer and pass out. Surely that won't lead you to believe that your consciousness arises from your dream brain.
So if I read that right, there's no difference between myself and my desk, ergo my desk is conscious and that Buddhists are probably right.
I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.
we are caught between an evolutionary need to know that our existence is meaningful and a universe that seems indifferent.
> Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist.
Oh I hate this.
We ‘still’ can’t do any of those things yet. Science provides a framework for discovering and coming to understand and yes eventually accurately predict the motions of the underlying systems that give rise to these phenomenons.
And getting a mechanic to fix your bike is a matter of specialization, not some failure of science.
Does anyone actually enjoy hearing other people talk this way? Who is this for?
I was watching someone doing a really deep dive into speculative biology [0], and they finally got to the sentience/sapience/intelligence/sophont episode [1]. I'm not an expert in this area, but there was a discussion about obligative sapience and facultative sapience that i found fascinating.
Obligative sapience is only know to have evolved in humans. Obligative means we cannot survive without sapience. We must learn and use tools and whatever to live and continue evolution.
While facultative sapience seems to be a broadly used survival strategy across the animal kingdom - from crows to spiders to cuttlefish. Facultative sapients are able to survive without their learned behaviors, using them instead to augment their evolution.
Viewing these issues from the point of evolution and actually having a comparison, I feel, helps ground the discussion better.
Even more so from the very strange point of view of speculative biology. The creator of the 'Neotectons' gives a very strange viewpoint on the debate too, with good reasoning though not bulletproof by any means. As with any model, you can make it tapdance if you mess with the parameters enough. But I think that more efforts into speculative arenas would be helpful. Gedankenexperiments for sophonts and not just elevators and cosmology.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Biblaridion
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dGZju583QA
Rays of Light going through a me Prism where the Brain and senses can inflict action.
Is it time to give up on the value of (other) human beings? Time will tell.
The main value of this article is this absolute gold mine of a comment section.
"You can't seperate the body from the mind", Tool told me.
Boom.. there we go again..
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40554217 > Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot)
> If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of > soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is > also a collection of atoms.
anyone who is atempting to define consiousness, probably isn't. and in there blind greed are trying to turn that definition into marketable property.
Austin
I mean, I would argue that they are right, but there is still a hard problem of consciousness. What properties must a system hold in order to exhibit consciousness? Personally, I think I could fairly capably argue that consciousness is an emergent property of any feedback loop composed of a large enough collection of highly interconnected adaptive components embedded within a sufficiently pattern-rich environment. Every feedback loop which meets these requirements is conscious, and removing any single one of those elements causes consciousness to disappear. I believe the property emerges in a similar manner to how 'heat' emerges from electromagnetic interactions of atoms. This definition has implications, and all that I have thought of are real. Total sensory deprivation results in loss of consciousness, for example.
It is time to give up arguments without evidence.
Why the complete rewriting of the title?
That's always been a puzzle to me with HN. A lot of articles have perfectly good titles and for some reason they get modified to something less accurate.
There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide.
Full proof: https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-th...
Only for a rather weird definition of moral crime.
I am consciousness.
There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.
Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.
You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.
Explain psychedelics, then? Do psychedelics have access to this supposed "separate layer" that mind exists on over matter? If yes, how? If not, how can something that ostensibly only interacts with the matter have any effect on the mind?
Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"
What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.
But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.
Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.
> As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience.
Two things here:
1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind?
2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not a satisfactory answer to you?
I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.
I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.
Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.
> I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.
> How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?
How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
> The simplest answer is that it is not
You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.
> Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water
At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
The only religious argument is materialism. It's real because enough people have convinced themselves that it's "scientific". Even though there is no proof whatsoever, no solid hypothesis, no experiments to prove how matter acquires subjective experience, it's incoherent to the very foundations of its position (that matter is dead), and has not made any progress in answering the "hard problem" (which is just someone pointing out the incoherence). It also makes people argue that they don't have a mind, that asserting they have a mind is a religious statement, or that they have some trouble understanding what a mind is.
> How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
The laws of physics are enough to explain this because no one is arguing that computers are experiencing anything when they play a video or generate a set of numbers that are displayed as natural language.
> At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
Sorry, I phrased that badly by using "you" when I did not mean that. I meant to say that if someone (not you) wanted to argue that simple matter has some sort of experience, then at least the position would make some sense. But materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any subjective experience of any kind.
Anyway, I won't be able to convince you that you have a mind, so I'll peace out.
Utterly asinine article that doesn't understand its own subject matter.
Agreed.
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
This is what the article is positioned against.
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense.
Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling to such ideas (as the article itself propounds), but if you don't understand the underlying laws to a high enough degree I consider this equivalent to ancient Greeks sitting around saying "there is a double of our soul inside the mirror, WE HAVE SEEN IT". We know today there is absolutely nothing at all "inside" that mirror. How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
Unfortunately, this article puts forth an intriguing promise and then completely fails to deliver.
> How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination.
What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
(This is basically just Descartes “I think therefore I am”)
> What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all.
It might not make sense to you now, but that's because of what we know or what we think we know, today (hence my ancient Greeks analogue). Look at the Gazzaniga effect, people seamlessly make up an "experience" narrative out of absolutely nothing. Whatever experience was claimed there probably didn't exist prior to the point of questioning, and then was wholly manufactured. Thus, that particular experience was a fabrication.
> If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
Why does there need to be a who/what being deceived for something to be an illusion? A mirror functions regardless of whether someone is there to pretend there is a soul in it.
We come from a race that took two thousand years (after it was first proposed) to accept the brain as the seat of the mind, over the heart — just because the heart physically reacts in times of emotion, while the brain remains inert.
Whatever the truth is, humanity probably won't know it until enough generations of the old guard indoctrinated in the old ideas have passed on.
Sorry, who make up an experience narrative?
Never heard of Gazzaniga before reading above comment, its quite fascinating.
The brain, its left hemisphere, makes up the narrative.
Sorry my comment was unclear. My point is, the process of “making up a narrative” does seem to imply a subjective experience, doesnt it? My point is, the existence of the experiencer can’t be denied. Even if the experience itself is some kind of illusion, theres no coherent way to say that there is no entity having an experience. Every attempt to do so ends up implying the existence of an experiencer (the one having the illusion of experiencing)
I think you've missed my point, which was about epistemology and dogma, given that you continue to repeat the dogma in question. Did you read my comment at all? To engage with my argument you'd have to confront the idea that your current assumptions will continue to be "the truth" hitherto, which it doesn't look like you've attempted to address at all.
To continue the ancient Greeks' mirror analogy, this would be akin to continuing to say "but who's eyes am I looking in then?" when I suggest that people in the future may not think there is a double of your soul in there. Totally pointless, and frankly, quite frustrating.
I think youve missed the point which is that your objections still imply an observer. Your rudeness is unnecessary and I wont be continuing this conversation. Have a good day.
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?
Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".
The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.
> we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world
Feelings/experiences are specific patterns of specific neurons activating. Why is that hard?
Mu.
Slow-clap with one hand.
This entire thread is just «I am a strange loop» by Douglas Hofstadter
Many gave that up a long time ago. Welcome to reality, “experts” and “PhDs”.
“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.”
Some good reminders in this article. However, while I, too, reject Cartesian dualism, some of the claims of the author need correction...
"Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. [...] Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. [...] The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves"
Whose fear? Don't generalize, Carlo. These may be fears rooted in the modernist and Cartesian legacy, but they are only "traditional" if you think the world came into being during the 17th-18th century. Look back further and you find an Aristotelian and Thomistic view that also rejects metaphysical dualism. The soul here is the form of the body, which is to say, its formal cause. It isn't some ghost haunting a corpse or a puddle of ectoplasm. It is a principle. In this view, everything that is alive has a soul, which, again, is the name we give to the form of a living thing. Soul is just a class of form, and everything that exists has form.
What makes human beings different from other animals is, at the very least, that we possess intellects (and so, ontologically speaking, any embodied being with an intellect is human). The human intellect, according to this view, cannot be purely material, even if it relies on matter and even though it is united with bodily operations. The reason for this is that abstraction cannot occur in matter alone, as abstraction involves a mental operation of conceptual separation of the form of a thing as given in the senses. Matter (specifically what's called prime matter) is merely the principle of instantiation, and so it cannot "host" forms without instantiating that form. In other words, form + matter = thing.
"During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul."
No that is not how people viewed the body and the soul in the Middle Ages (or in, say, Catholicism). That is a very Cartesian view of human beings, that we are two things, not one.
"The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter."
Matter wasn't vile, unless you were some kind of Gnostic or Cathar heretic or whatever. The physical was seen as good, as created by God, and human beings were understood as spiritual-corporeal unities that are by one nature both spiritual and physical. (The "spiritual" here has to do with the intellectual and free nature of man; again, not ectoplasm or ghosts). Indeed, if anything, Christianity elevated the dignity of the physical. Why bother with a resurrection after death if matter sucks? Why would the body and blood of Christ be so precious to Catholics if matter is evil? It is Gnostic dualism and similar movements that construed the physical as evil, but these were heretical movements, not views characteristic of the Middle Ages.
--
All that being said, I think the author would benefit greatly from a rigorous study of Aristotelian metaphysics, both to avoid these sorts of caricatures (as well as any misconceptions of science), but also to deepen his understanding. I think his rejection of dualism is on the right track, but he is missing out on a rich and robust intellectual tradition that has been sidelined by exactly those sorts of modernists that perpetuated this whole intellectual muddle in the first place.
Great refs. I think one can find more accessible sources for this knowledge, for instance this course:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoYRQl2t0w0EjRIb9Jr1y...
or Feser's articles such as
- https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/04/kurzweils-phanta...
- https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig...
I failed to mention a great recent English language resource on the topic, namely, Ed Feser's "Immortal Souls" [0]. For broader philosophy of science context, his recent "Aristotle's Revenge" [1] will serve as a good companion read.
[0] https://a.co/d/03xoxiaY
[1] https://a.co/d/00oSQ64j
As soon as we'll have sufficiently advanced BMIs the so called hard problem will go away by itself.
Consider probing a midlevel mobile phone at some hundred contacts. You might be convinced to have a thorough account of the physical reality yet still no idea of (and no way to know) whats going on.
To the problem of qualia.. I think it's the mechanism of the brain to default-name recurring patterns, being part of a simplification/compression process, without which reasoning (computing) or reasonably storing experiences would be impossible. I guess visual qualia like color and shape have to be the first things the brain learns and attaches "default" symbols to. Consider other basic qualia too, like to be saturated, to feel warm and then higher qualia that build on these like to feel loved or accepted in a social community.
It's difficult to argue how there could be a fundamental truth to qualia. But consider that there'd be no difference in our communication, even if your red is attached to a symbol signified by 8NCYUW6D0H5C (lets just assume this) while my red is encoded as being GAUTP1P6YUUZ (those patterns obviously have to be encoded as frequency patterns as we perceive close colors as similar without computational overhead). Eventually it will turn out, qualia from person to person are encoded quite similar, as we are genetically so similar. But consider also synaesthetia. Wrt animals, it WOULD feel strange to be a bat or any other animal as some of their sensory apparatus is so different.
To this, author makes a good point: "Today, we do not have an exhaustive external account, but this is not the same as having proof that no such account is possible."
I imagine consciousness as 'theater mode' of the perceiving mind. As such it seems to be one part of the brain that integrates all sensory inputs into one Multimodal Experience Stream™.
As to TFA.. - I'm by no means up to date to the current affairs of the consciousness debate, but - is there really a "fierce debate [...] raging"?
Check out Joscha Bach who argues consciousness is an illusion. Looking for some material to back up, I hit on this text. Flying over it I already find it more enlightening than the posted article, so I post it here (without guarantee):
https://medium.com/@mbonsign/consciousness-as-illusion-explo...
Some (citated) citations from it:
"The simulation becomes “more real than real” in our experience because it constitutes the entirety of our conscious access to ourselves and the world (Metzinger, 2003; Seth, 2021)."
"This perspective doesn’t diminish the richness or importance of conscious experience. On the contrary, it highlights the remarkable complexity and sophistication of the processes that generate our subjective experience. The constructed nature of consciousness isn’t a defect or limitation but a remarkable achievement — a way of making an unimaginably complex reality manageable for finite cognitive systems (Clark, 2016; Dennett, 2017)."
Please also note https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180487 and consider joining my cult.
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> From a non-dual perspective either nobody is a p-zombie or everybody is a p-zombie.
Why? It’s perfectly sane to just treat claims as is. You claim you’re a p-zombie, than you are. Claim you are conscious, than you are same as me. Claim you aren’t and you get no moral affordances, let’s see how long you last with that tactic.
Clankers are not conscious, good luck convincing me otherwise idiot.
tl;dr "I disagree."
consciousness is hard because it requires a special kind of belief. we humans believe a lot of things, but this one is difficult. all is one, and that one thing is all. everything contains gender. opposites are the same thing. these are all easy things that are hard to understand/believe.
Dont pretend like you dont believe anything is step 1.
The biggest benefit of term "consciousness" is that when I see something like "LLMs are not conscious" I immediately know that the author doesn't know what he is talking about.
In that case the author is simply saying the LLM is a p zombie, why does he not know what he's talking about?
They are saying something similar to "LLM has no soul", depending on context it might something insightful or (in technical/scientific context) they are making fool of themselves.
Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
Praise be to AI. In 2025, inspired by AI, I feel that I have finally built a complete and unified worldview.
Are we living in a virtual illusion? Are there higher-dimensional rulers, gods, or immortals in the universe? What exactly are the human soul and consciousness?
I feel that these questions now share a single coherent answer. What I have written here is my answer regarding the soul and consciousness.
If this comment is serious, then you may have the beginnings of AI psychosis
I would say "AI psychosis" is a very healthy disease to have. I mean, how should people react to seeing a clump of hardware produce coherent text at a level many actual humans cannot? The spread of reactions we are seeing in people-the disagreements, the extreme sycophancy on one end, and the abject denial on the other, is within parameters.
My life was wrecked by religious dogma, the type that is sustained on "big mysteries" and from there goes directly to imposing an odious recipe for life. So there is consolation to be had on seeing a big mystery crumble and on hearing the outcry. May another mystery crumble on my lifetime.
Computers create coherent math results at levels far beyond humans. A world calculator vs. a number calculator isn't that different.
"Praise be to AI" sounds like something you shouldn't reach in the beginnings of AI psychosis. Same with "I've found a simple answer to the nature of consciousness and the question of the existence of Gods". At that point you've got to in be pretty deep.
Haha, right? The lads talking like he’s the only one to have figured this out and it’s the truth! Philosophising with AI is so mid. This guys the general public.
What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences.
The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
>It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
It's that you can't even measure it, since the way it's defined as a subjective experience, no external measure could ever capture it. This is what gives rise to the p-zombie argument.
To get rid of that you have to accept "functional qualia" as basically equivalent to qualia, which solves the p-zombie issue and resolves half of the hard problem. From there, explaining consciousness is no "harder" than explaining other scale-depedent phenomenon in complex systems like LLMs: still hard, but at least tractable with scientific measurements and experiments.
No, we don't even need that. When we realise that we all project consciousness claims on each other from what we observe as zeitgeist now, just to do credit assignment, most of our circular debates will disappear. But this won't happen since many powerful entities in the world ride on the moral ambiguity, and this will hold them accountable.
> What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution
> When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
I don't see how this is different from someone saying that a concoction of random ingredients will turn into a magic potion.
The big question is how a group of cells (or potentially something else) becomes sentient. Accepting "because it would be useful" as valid explanation would be the same as accepting Darwinism as a religion rather than science.
There's no single proof that after a system do pass some complexity threshold consciousness develops itself and inevitably generates the "I".
Dolphins and other creatures are likely to have similarly complex systems without “inevitably” generating a concept of “I”.
> What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
that's the easy problem
would you care to link together 'complex IO systems inevitably degenerate to seperating self from environment as part of optimizing calculations' and your three questions? it isnt immediately clear why the concept of self answers the idea of god.
GPTbait
Comically wrong.
Quantum holography will someday demonstrate an analog information capacity of the quantum domain far exceeding the spin disposition.
Our minds use this domain by mass entanglement within our very own neurons.
You don’t want to hear it, though our minds may entangle and an entire culture exists among us who can traverse and manipulate the consciousness of others. They are responsible for the “voices in our heads”, and these are related to a great deal of very unscientific activity in our world.
All of that occult demonology you smarties scoff at yet plagues everyone embroiled in “power” is based upon this phenomena. We are not alone in our own minds, and more than a few of you will be forced to confront this at some point in your lives.
Falsifiable? Theories, not existential reality are concerned with what minds may falsify. Science lags behind reality, not the other way around.
As much as I disliked TFA, I disliked this comment, which is so arrogantly self-assured of its own 0-evidence theories, even more.
I was with you thru "mass entanglement". Each of us is a distributed network of quantum-interface nodes. But I'd be very careful about attributing specific describable phenomena to these networks.