A conscious brain that advertises itself with communication certainly makes matters easier for us, however we can make reasonable inferences about consciousness in people and animals based on sophisticated behavior, not just communication.
And if there is consciousness bound up in, say, a toenail, and it's not doing anything or communicating anything, not even doing some complicated information processing that it's keeping to itself, it's true that we might very well never discover it. But it's also true that we wouldn't have much reason for believing in any such form of consciousness given that it's completely unobservable.
>Also, to be clear here—since this conflation derails just about every discussion of consciousness
It sounds like you've got a dog in this one. That's fine; I do too. But I wouldn't say it's necessarily a conflation- some people's inclination to resolve the hard problem is to argue that it is best resolved, in some way or another, by mapping subjectivity onto biology. That's not enough, necessarily, you'll want some good philosophical reasons for thinking that that kind of explanation is capable of doing enough to give a satisfactory account of the hard problem. And that's certainly a matter of debate. But I wouldn't say it's a conflation, necessarily.
>In a similar manner I believe the 'hard problem' of consciousness is getting at what it means to be a part of the fabric of the universe, and the laws of physics are expressed through that medium, but no specific laws create it.
This sounds like an attempt to smuggle a preferred answer into the definition of the problem. It may be "about" some universal medium in which consciouness and lays of physics are equal participants, if yours is the right answer. But I think it's enough to say that what makes the hard problem a hard problem is the need to explain qualia, and getting it through to people that they need to take qualia seriously, and not just talk about physical correlations.
The reason I see is roughly as follows: it also exists in the part of us which is able to communicate, and the conditions for it being there do not appear related the anatomical functions (e.g. cognition and communication) of that other area—so that the problem becomes more a question of demonstrating why we should assume that it does not exist in the parts which don't have communication capabilities. In other words, if all the parts which are able to communicate find it present and yet it is not due to the communication capability itself—why assume its not present rather than just not communicated in other areas? (And to clarify, I believe the above would be nonsense for the non-Hard Problem which is clearly related to cognition—but I'm only speaking of The Hard Problem.)
> But I wouldn't say it's necessarily a conflation
I think we're talking about different things here. I am specifically talking about people conflating the Hard Problem of consciousness with the non-Hard Problem of consciousness. Or do you mean to say that the two problems are the same and that the designation of 'Hard Problem' as something separate is vacuous?
> This sounds like an attempt to smuggle a preferred answer into the definition of the problem.
I agree it sounds that way, and I'm open to further argument that that's the case—but I'm pretty sure it's not. Instead, I think if you follow the problem of trying to define qualia far enough, you end up running into my fabric of the universe situation—or at least the distinction I make between the rules of monopoly versus the substrate in which the physical incarnation of monopoly exists. I believe that substrate issue is in the definition of the hard problem, though you can probably find phrasings of it in which its absent.
Anyway, I appreciated your reply and would be happy to discuss further.
People can give after-the-fact subjective reports of what, if anything, they were experiencing in non-communicative states (for lack of a better term). They can tell us that something was "going on" in their head while they were dreaming, or that they don't recall experiencing anything while being in a coma or being "dead" for a few minutes before being resuscitated. We seem to agree that this is the convenient version of consciousness that people are able to communicate about. And we can look at what brain states match up with these reports -- reports of hard consciousness -- and find that certain brain configurations and activities seem to always be there when hard consciousness is there.
But perhaps, you might say, a person who doesn't recall any experiences during a coma actually had experiences then, too. But just doesn't know it and/or weren't able to communicate about it.
So on the one hand, the kinds of consciousness a person is able to communicate about is corroborated by some sort of interesting brain activity. And the other kind of consciousness that they can't communicate about, the kind posed by a philosopher, isn't corroborated by anything. That starts to look like a "consciousness of the gaps" problem.
And this is without even taking into account aforementioned things like sophisticated behavior and other biological clues which you say are "just" the non-hard problem. There again, I think that these are important evidence, and that excluding them is borrowing from a conclusion to pay for an argument.
It's also more elegant from the perspective of simple explanation. The amount of explanatory debt one incurs by taking on the construction project of a parallel, universe-spanning medium inhabited by consciousness is enormous, and there's significant risk that the investment won't pay off.
>I think we're talking about different things here. I am specifically talking about people conflating the Hard Problem of consciousness with the non-Hard Problem of consciousness. Or do you mean to say that the two problems are the same and that the designation of 'Hard Problem' as something separate is vacuous?
The hard problem is real in that it demands an explanation that is more than just citing brain activity or waving it away as an illusion. But the notion that physical stuff is automatically about something other than the hard problem is baking your conclusion into the definition of the problem. There are certainly all kinds of non-hard things physics/biology explains, but they may yet explain hard things too, provided a compelling enough argument can be made.
>Instead, I think if you follow the problem of trying to define qualia far enough, you end up running into my fabric of the universe situation
My problem with talking this way is that, if I were to do the same thing, I would end up saying that following the problem of qualia far enough leads to somethingorother about circuits of synapse firing and its intimate connection to experiences, thus the problem is "really" about those things, and someone talking about a universal medium shared by consciousness and physics but independent from them is talking about the wrong thing.
But in a way I think you are right,because I think at the end of the day an adequate answer does have to be about finding some ontological level, some "medium", on which consciousness and physics can be understood to be continuous with each other. I just happen to think that that medium is physics, and that we will have to get comfortable with the idea that there are robustly physical answers to questions of what are qualia and what is consciousness. I.e. the idea that what manifests itself as experiences are at some raw level, sheer, nakedly physical events witnessed by other physical events which we call brain activity.
Could you clarify what you mean by that? Physics is branch of knowledge, a collection of descriptions of regularities in material structures evolving in time. I don't see how a collection of descriptions can be the medium in which subjectivity/qualia exist. See what I mean?
Or you mean what's referred to in those descriptions? If so, I see a difficulty in it because you just get back to the same subjectivity/qualia problem. I mean, what is being referred to in those descriptions? Our starting point for what physics is talking about is subjectivity—the only thing we have direct empirical contact with. Then we make abstractions on top of it so that various parts are grouped into 'objects' etc. (that grouping is largely subconscious), and then physics comes into play in giving descriptions of regularities in the time evolution of categories of those objects. But none of that deals with what the objects being discussed are, it just just talks about how a selection of characteristics which happen to be useful to use change in time.
I know some people believe the best we can do is say that what something is is the collection of things we say about it. So, the things being referred to in physics are the regularities in certain of their attributes, e.g. the measurements we make of their mass and velocity, and the forces being applied to them or which they are applying etc.
Personally that sounds like a cop-out, though granted, it's at least an attempt at a pragmatic cop-out: after all, what's the point in entertaining the idea that there's more to the thing if we know we can never access it/talk about it. But here's the value: if you just admit the boundaries to your knowledge, your taking a more realistic account of things (the alternative of pretending the boundaries aren't there can only lead to mistakes). In that case, we have not discovered what the things are which are referred to by physics, we have just charted regularities in certain attributes we care about (it's also important to note that we invented those attributes, and which set of attributes we deem to be the intrinsic/essential characteristics have a degree of arbitrariness to them since multiple equivalent formulations exist—e.g. reformulations of Newtonian mechanics which give the same outputs for the same inputs but in which the notion of 'force' does not exist, or relativistic/quantum mechanics of course, though that's moving beyond strict reformulation).
Edit: I clarified a number of things on re-reading a few minutes after posting!
A cop-out would be blithely insisting qualia don't exist (like some people in this thread are doing), or insisting that one or another philosophical explanation is forbidden "by definition." And in my opinion, saying it's "emergent" would be a cop-out because often "emergence" just serves to label a phenomena without explaining it.
By contrast, saying that qualia are nakedly physical is to say that they are something, and to say that we are witnessing raw physical events in a direct way is to at least aspire (successfully, I would hope) to give some tangible account of what it is for a mind to have qualia in a way that respects the first person perspective. That could be wrong or confused or unpersuasive in any number of ways. But it's at least something more than a cop-out.
There is more to it than that, and I'm happy to give my best shot at taking that starting point, and applying some philosophical duct-tape to those starting pieces to try to show what it would mean to say qualia are literally physical, and what kind of explanation gives them their due as "real" while still tying them to the physical world.
But that may be a long conversation, and I am humble enough to know I won't be able to settle one of the oldest philosophical issues in a hacker news thread. So I would like to at least point to literature that drives my intuitions on the subject.
Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett, to at least pump the intuition that we should not merely regard a physicalist account of conscious as a legitimate answer to the hard problem, but as the leading candidate for explanation, maybe even the only game in town. Caveat being that he does insist that we should deny qualia altogether in the end, which I think is a cop-out. But he brings the ball to the 1 yard line.
Godel Escher Bach & I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, to drive home that a key aspect of consciousness is the ability for a system (be it a brain or computer) to interpret the medium that it itself is a part of. Hofstadter I think has the idea that brings it into the end zone, but wouldn't be able to get to the 1-yard line by himself.
"The Intertwining—The Chiasm" by Maurice-Merleau Ponty, who gives a powerful argument that turns the tables against the subject/object distinction. Killer quote: "What is this talisman of color, this singular virtue of the visible that makes it, held at the end of the gaze, nonetheless much more than a correlative of my vision, such that it imposes my vision upon me as a continuation of its own sovereign existence?"
I didn't get to everything, but I wanted to put enough on the table to make this a satisfactory end point to the conversation if need be.
One thing to consider with that is that only the brain is able to give answers about consciousness—i.e. it's producer of verbal content and thought,' so there could be no communication of it if something like consciousness were going on at other loci in the body. To get a better feel for how something like that might happen, I'd highly recommend checking out some research on split brain patients who's corpus callosums (callosi?) have been severed (this connects the two brain hemispheres). One of my favorite examples: split brain patient shown an instruction to go out through the front door only to one eye (each eye is connected to the opposite brain hemisphere)—specifically it's shown to the eye which connects it to the hemisphere not used for speaking. The split brain patient will get up and follow the instruction, walking toward the door. Then the researcher asks the patient, "what are you doing?" and cognitive dissonance resolves itself into some plausible but essentially bullshit answer like, "I was, umm, going home to get a Coke..." If you'd like to hear more, check out [0]
Also, to be clear here—since this conflation derails just about every discussion of consciousness—the article is talking about the 'hard problem' of consciousness. So, the issue at hand is immediate subjective experience, not a self-reflective mechanism (simple versions of that could readily be coded up).
> If consciousness exists in this universe then it must be explained by the laws and constants of this universe.
If our universe is likened to a board game with some finite set of rules, e.g. Monopoly, the 'physics' of this universe is fully determined by the rules of the game (even if there are non-deterministic aspects where you have to e.g. roll dice). The non-hard problem of consciousness is a question in this realm, like "can I sell one of my properties to another player?"; the hard problem is necessarily outside the scope of the rules; it's a question more like, "what is the molecular composition of a 'Chance' card?". The rules of Monopoly do not cover this. In a similar manner I believe the 'hard problem' of consciousness is getting at what it means to be a part of the fabric of the universe, and the laws of physics are expressed through that medium, but no specific laws create it.
[0] Social Brain, Michael S. Gazzaniga
edit: I wrote 'not used for language' previously and changed it to 'not used for speaking,' which is an important distinction.