Unlike turbulence, I only have one case where I have ever seen this consciousness which I am trying to explain as an epiphenomenon, namely my own. All others consciousness (if they even exist which I can't prove directly) are not remotely observed in the same way, they are self reported by other people.
So you have the question of why I can only directly perceive that emergent property in exactly one brain and not others.
Likewise you'd have to explain why the emergent property is apparently continuous through my whole lifetime over which my brain changes enormously.
Finally you'd have to deal with the hypothetical case where I am duplicated molecule for molecule and then ask which consciousness would I have direct access to, the duplicate or the original.
So while dualism is obviously patently absurd, the idea of consciousness as epiphenomenon, while promising, needs work too.
Removing the continuity assumption, perhaps even time, kind resolves the duplicate question: both copies (if conscious) should have a memory of conscious you and experience their consciousness being a continuation of that, while you, now you, are as removed from those future copies, as you are from me.
One question, that seems tied to consciousness, is what is "now"? Are there objective reasons to believe in the existence of a canonical "now" existing independent of conscious experience? If not then there really is no point in distinguishing either momental or continuous experiences as special in any way. Perhaps consciousness just emerges as an interpretation of a single state connecting past and future by memory and anticipation, it's simply appears continuous like the series of images at the top of the article appears to be.
What I perceive as a continuous consciousness is really just a memory of other "I"s who were caused by this brain in the past, left a memory of introspection and then dissipated to be replaced by an new one.
This view has many advantages: it solves the problem of time you elude to, it answers the problem of other minds and the problem of my childhood self. The only problem I can not see solved is the hypothetical molecular level duplicate I mentioned above.
>So you have the question of why I can only directly perceive that emergent property in exactly one brain and not others
You are the thing carrying around that brain and sense organs, and the plumbing thereof. This is a unique situation, hence the uniqueness.
> Likewise you'd have to explain why the emergent property is apparently continuous through my whole lifetime over which my brain changes enormously.
Emergent phenomenon can be very robust, such as Jupiter's spot which was observed 340 years ago, or the common orbital plane of the solar system, which is billions of years old.
Also, your consciousness is not continuous. You turn (at least some of) it off when you go to sleep. Very curious! It's at least robustly bistable!
> Finally you'd have to deal with the hypothetical case where I am duplicated molecule for molecule and then ask which consciousness would I have direct access to, the duplicate or the original.
This seems very simple too. There are two copies of you at the instant of duplication, which diverge from that moment on. You1 would have access to the consciousness of You1's nervous system and You2 that created by You2's nervous system. This question is only difficult if you insist on something other than the bodies being involved.
I put you in a duplication chamber. In front of you is a card with the letter "A"
In a neighboring identical empty chamber is card with a "B" on it.
You close your eyes and I pull a big steam-punk lever and an exact copy of you is made in chamber B
When you open your eyes, what letter do you see and why?
But the original observer that was put into the duplication chamber, would maintain their letter A
To say somehow the different history of the atoms in the original brain vs the atoms in duplicate is somehow relevant to the emergent property would be a very odd claim: we don't take into account the prior history of the atoms in turbulent flow for example, just what the are doing right now.
Or for clarity, if I gradually replaced every molecule in your brain with another identical one, the emergent "you" would not be affected. So, if it weren't already obvious, it clearly can not be dependent on the particular atoms that make you up.
And by the way, if your brain at 10 years old and 90 years old, in spite of being very different structurally, still give rise to your same "you", the copy would not even have to be very good.
It is a fun problem I must say.
In terms of "me", there would be two individual instances of me that open their eyes and either see A or B. The "original" is determined by you the question-asker, and the fact that that "original" walked into chamber A. Because that "original" walked into chamber A, that "original" would see the letter A, whereas the clone would see the letter B. Its possible that the "original" was, at time of cloning, completely recreated/rearranged. However, that "original" would retain the A designation/"originality" because to an observer, someone walked into a chamber with no other exits, and exited out the same chamber, that someone is the same person.
You are as much what others think of you as what you think of yourself, in this case.
(Btw, the videogame _Soma_ goes over your exact scenario)
Put another way, using our current knowledge of physics and chemistry, we can, on a high level anyway, account for every item in the cause and effect chain from the photons hitting the retina to the arm that a person raises to shade his eyes. There is no room to insert anything into that causal chain let alone something so massively influential that it causes all the body actions that we consider driven by conscious choice. Thus whatever is going on must be made from very ordinary matter.
It's this very fact that makes it such a fun puzzle to look at, very ordinary mater maybe doing something (causing consciousness) that is wildly unexpected.
It denies the most fundamental fact of human experience, the existence of that experience itself.
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness?l...
Basically, if none of the aspects of consciousness that make it important or special in our eyes turn out to be true, I think that denying its existence is actually a less misleading way to correct the record than trying to completely change our intuitive understanding of whatever it is we actually have.
Your eye is really more like a flashlight in the dark. And it interprets things way to much (see optical illusions.)
It's easy to dismiss these problems, because you are rarely are in situations where the difference matters. This is no coincidence, since people rarely construct things that our eyes can't process. For example, fluorescent lights are actually turning ON and OFF constantly, but we just happen to not be able to see that. There really is no color purple, we just think it exists.
But it's quite easy to mess people up. See "rotating tunnel illusion", or the experiment where subjects fail to notice they are now giving directions to a different person, or the experiment where people fail to notice a guy in a gorilla suit (!) when given a simple task.
So the upshot is "vision is nothing like you think it is". Maybe we should have different words for the way a computers see things (a lot more reality based) vs the way humans see things (with all their foibles.) Ditto for Consciousness.
How does "saying no to consciousness" deny "the existence of the human experience"? If you were talking about brain denial, then I would have to agree. It seems fully possible for the brain to continue to do interesting things even if "consciousness" turns out to be false. Thankfully it's nonfalsifiable apparently....
Some people try to define "consciousness" as something other than "subjective experience" but doing so is really just evading the "hard question".
It would be analogous to telling a physicist trying to provide an explanation for why objects fall to the ground that it might simply turn out to be false that objects fall to the ground at all. That doesn't make sense, because the exploration started with an observable phenomenon.
It is false. Gravity is not about "ground" nor does it require that everything fall to the ground, indeed there seem to be forces on objects stronger than the force of gravity. The ability to falsify concepts is critically important in many branches of epistemology.
The same applies to eliminitavists. They aren't denying that something happens that feels to you like experience, they are suggesting, however, that it may not be the thing that you think it is. They'll often point to people's own misunderstandings of their consciousness as examples that we can, in fact, actually be wrong about our own first person experiences. One example of this is the fact that we think we experience full field colour vision. In practice we have colour vision only in a narrow field in the center of our full visual field. You can perform experiments on yourself to demonstrate that this is in fact true. Another example is the sense of continuity to consciousness, which again, can be demonstrated to actually be false. If our "consciousness" is sufficiently different in reality from what we normally presume to be consciousness then, in some real sense, consciousness as we commonly think of it indeed doesn't exist. That doesn't mean there is nothing, just that calling it consciousness with all the associations that implies is perhaps sufficiently misleading as to be wrong.
The question is why the experience is triggered. Why does moving atoms at specific positions trigger the perception of color or pain? Current physics doesn't have an answer for that, even in theory, assuming we can see exactly what happens in the brain.
For example, in order to understand why atoms moving in certain ways produce a taste, do you need the explanation to trigger some experience or memory of a taste? If so, you will never understand.
Or do you expect the answer to be short? What if qualia tend to be as complex as the brains that experience them (for holistic reasons), so the proof for our own qualia spans trillions of pages? I think that's actually quite probable, but you'll never understand in that case either.
The space of naturalistic explanations of things is humongous and we're already mass producing objects so complex no single individual could hope to understand every aspect of them. If you're going to start with "moving atoms at specific positions" in order to understand a defining aspect of a system made out of hundreds of billions of complex switches connected in obscure ways, let me tell you that you're going to need several Libraries of Congress before you're done.
On the other hand, I don't understand all the details of what goes into a Macbook Pro, from network protocols to graphics rendering, but I have a basic high level understanding of how the things it does are possible, and it doesn't take a Library of Congress to explain that. My high level knowledge of how atoms move provide sufficient assurance and understanding of how a Macbook Pro experience is created. That is simply not true for qualia.
I don't think it does per se. In a world where computers didn't exist you would probably not be able to say whether a MacBook Pro is a thing that could possibly exist or not just from fundamental knowledge of physics. If I gave you the most low-level possible description of physics, it'd probably take you some time to figure out whether it supports solid macroscopic objects. If I just give you the rules to the Game of Life cellular automaton, it's far from obvious that it supports replicators, let alone that it's Turing complete.
Most of these things are only obvious in hindsight, and the understanding is made easier by the lack of cognitive dissonance: we know we made them using certain principles, so of course it works.
> That is simply not true for qualia.
I don't know about that. My own high level knowledge of physics does provide me with sufficient assurance and understanding of how qualia happens. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I do feel like I understand it: what defines or distinguishes, say, my qualia of red, is how it primes my brain into thinking about red things, how it changes my mood, how it behaves relative to every other concept, which makes it about as complex as my entire brain would be. I also imagine that there is a continuum of "qualia" such that basically any physical system has some, but they are so trivial we don't make the connection.
Again, that could be nonsense, but it makes perfect sense to me -- about as much as a MacBook does. The hard problem that you see flat out does not exist to me, and presumably the reason is that we are satisfied by different explanations.
Over here it seems like you're defining consciousness by its relation to other objects. In other words, you're reducing consciousness to its visible outputs, such as behaviour, mood, etc. If that's all consciousness is, I fully agree with you that we have sufficient knowledge of physics to explain it. But that's not what I'm referring to. When I talk about consciousness, I'm referring to something that is completely independent of its outputs. Is it not conceivable that a man who is missing both his arms and legs, mute, blind, and deaf, can still have a conscious ego? So what is that experience? This is the question which has no parallel in our knowledge of how atoms move.
The brain has many internal inputs and outputs, even more of them than external ones. Even if you imagine a completely isolated brain that can't see, hear or move, it's still exchanging signals internally. For instance, such a brain could fabricate a dream world, create (possibly nonsensical) images to feed to its visual cortex directly, and so on. Its conscious experience would be whatever it builds for itself, operating through these internal input and output channels, shaped by random noise and whatever memories it may have of real things. It's what dreaming is, basically. That is consistent with my view.
If, on the other hand, you ask me to imagine a mute, blind, deaf, paralyzed man who also has his brain cut up in such a way that it can't talk to itself, then no, I do not think that it is conceivable that the man has a conscious ego.
A brain is made out of billions of neurons, each of which has its own inputs and outputs, and so does each part of each neuron, down to the atomic level. Every physical entity is a kind of IO machine, so in a sense, any physical definition I may give of qualia will reduce to IO patterns. That is, however, missing the bigger picture, which is the structure of the system: how the information flows within it, and how certain conditions modify that flow. That's where the meat is.
In my mind, consciousness and qualia are structural properties. When experiencing a qualia, the information flows in a particular way in your brain, like a mode of operation, and that's what the qualia is.
I think of it this way: you experience "anger" when your brain is put in an "anger mode", which taints everything it sees or does -- anger is not an "input" or an "output", it is a "mode" that your whole brain is in. It makes you "different", although not in a way that makes you lose your sense of self (well, usually). And in a lesser way, when you see red, your brain enters a "red mode", when you eat nougat it is put in a "nougat mode", and when you think about red or nougat your brain also enters a "recall" version of red or nougat mode that has similar properties.
So what happens is that your brain can enter billions of subtly different "modes" that correspond to different stimuli (real or not). Each of these "modes" makes you think a bit differently, in a way that's adapted to the stimuli you received. These are the "experiences" it can have: they are not inputs or outputs, they are ways of thinking, triggered by stimuli or memories or sometimes random noise.
I guess I would say a qualia is a bit like a protein fold, it's a functional reconfiguration.
The 2 big discrepancies I see are this: 1. We have the subjective perception of free will: I can choose to write these sentences or not. Where does that intention originate? If our consciousness is just neuronal computation, then it is completely deterministic or probabilistic. That is entirely contradictory of most people's experience, because we can choose what we want to do, and do things that strongly contradict our "mood". Some people can even go further to consciously modify their brain states. If you claim that is also just a product of complex structural properties, you get into an infinitely regressing claim.
2. Despite being able to create incredibly complex connected structures, arguably even more complicated than a single person's brain, such as the Internet, we have no evidence of such an entity having a subjective feeling of consciousness. There is simply no parallel in our current knowledge for how subjective experience can arise from system configurations. You seem to be simply assuming that an experience is such a configuration, but we have no evidence of that. If such a configuration could be consciousness itself, then we have examples of other entities which are connected in similarly complex ways, yet we don't believe they are concious. This argument is explained here: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...
Now, this "free will" only corresponds to epistemic non-determinism about ourselves: "for all we know", we can do X, and we can also do Y, because if we knew we couldn't, we wouldn't be evaluating these possibilities. So in a sense, it is our self-model that has free will: it is the model that we imagine in various circumstances, but the model isn't the real thing. So our mistake is to assume that this property of the model is also a property of the real thing, i.e. that our epistemic uncertainty translates into some kind of metaphysical non-determinism.
I would expect that any decision system that can construct hypotheticals about itself would have an impression of free will, or a qualia of free will. They may not necessarily be able to express it, or to feel it as vividly as we do, but they would have it.
2. I know the point you are trying to make, but where you see a reductio ad absurdum I just see a lack of imagination. Our usual understanding of consciousness is very, very, very deeply anthropomorphic. Neither the Internet nor the USA are systems that have a human or animal consciousness, that much is clear. "But what about consciousness in general?" Man, I'm sorry to be blunt here, but you wouldn't know it even if it hit you in the face. We're human. We have human consciousness. Our idea of consciousness outside of the exact thing that we have is: fuck. all.
We can start with Leibniz's thought experiment they mention in the article, where a gigantic brain is built out of gears and pipes. Or the similar thought experiment about the "China brain" which emulates a human brain by using one person to emulate each neuron. To me, it is clear that both of these things would, in fact, be conscious. I see no good reason to think otherwise and I am perfectly content biting that bullet. I have zero reservations, even intuitively.
Now, regarding something like an "USA consciousness". Personally, I do not think this is bizarre. It's only bizarre under an anthropomorphic view of consciousness, or to put it in an other way, it's only bizarre if you believe that conscious entities ought to be relatable (an absurd expectation). But if you use the criteria I've given, you can find several things that would correspond to "USA's qualia". For example, 9/11 caused large structural changes that you could interpret as the USA feeling a qualia of fear and/or anger. A new episode of Game of Thrones may also be a qualia of sorts. Makes perfect sense to me.
Perhaps that's not evidence to you, but I don't know what more you'd expect. I think you conflate consciousness with human consciousness, so you only perceive consciousness when it's similar enough to your own. If I may indulge in a silly (but, I think, accurate) comparison, it's a bit like a shoemaker conflating craftsmanship with shoemaking, and then saying there is no evidence that a boatsman is a craftsman, because they've never seen them make shoes.
I'll settle for that.
It's analogous to: What is Artificial Intelligence? AS is what computers can't do yet.
Edit red to add: to put it another way, consciousness is that part of brain activity the text books don't have a chapter on.
We can only point to what consciousness is not.
What's problematic about the "say no to consciousness" case? It seems to be based on their preference for other descriptions of human brain activity, especially when the alternative description (consciousness) has been so ambiguous, vague and unhelpful.
> You cannot describe first-hand facts using only third-hand facts. This is the core philosophical dilemma in the hard problem of consciousness.
from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12381348
(or more accurately, I think third-hand factual systems could probably posit first-hand facts-- but be unable to assert validity or something. I am not a philosopher.)