Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction. We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but they are too complex for us to reason in such terms.

With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block. For me, the only coherent way to be an emergentist on consciousness is to also be a panpsychist: everything is conscious to a degree, it's just a brute fact of nature (such as, let's say, the fundamental forces).

Maybe this is the case, but I would not bet on that.

Consciousness is a phonomenon unlike any other, in the sense that scientist who study it are studying it from the inside. Science is something that happens 100% within human consciousness. This is why I suspect that it is a phenomenon that is beyond the reach of science. It could even be impossible to explain. There is no reason to assume that we can solve all mysteries.

Why can't they point to "interactions of neurons"?

You can point to a protein being expressed by DNA, and then understand how many protein molecules amount to cells, then tissues, then organs. There is a first principle guiding you all the way, even though the complexity is staggering.

There is no such first principle with interactions of neurons, in the sense that we know of no quality or property of a neuron that could amount to the phenomena "consciousness", in the same way that individual transactions amount to a stock market.

Without this first principle, it's just magical thinking disguised in scientific language.

Consciousness is a computation, and neurons are certainly capable of elementary computation.

So the building block has been pointed at (neurons), and its property given (computation). Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?

I have no problem with agreeing that computation can emerge from neurons. For example, one can show how different neural configurations correspond to logic gates, persistent memory (this requires recurrence) and so on. This is precisely what I mean by valid emergentist models. No magic steps, just complexity.

The problem is that you start by stating that "consciousness is a computation", but I don't know if this is true, and neither do you.

> Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?

My problem is that your hypothesis that "consciousness is a computation" is not testable, and so it does not count as a scientific theory (according to the standard Popperian falsifiability criterion).

Unless/until we have a scientific instrument that measures consciousness, we are just assuming things. I assume that other humans are conscious (by analogy), but I don't know it to be true in a scientific sense.

So it's not a matter of what I believe or not, it's a matter of what science can investigate or not. So far, it looks like the phenomenon of consciousness is beyond its grasp.

When you said

> With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block.

...it sounded like there were no plausible candidates. If computation is a candidate, then it's certainly something they can point at (with the caveat that it's only a candidate and not currently testable). I think if instead you had written something along those lines and avoided the words "not capable of", then hoseja and I wouldn't have reacted.

> Consciousness is a computation

This is begging the question. Consciousness is the sheer seeming-ness of my experience. Perhaps it is reducible to computation, perhaps not, but this is precisely what is under contention.

Because then you could also point to 'interactions of transistors' and claim that a computer can be conscious. But this claim has been refuted already.

Why not? You just don't nearly have enough transistors and connections.

Because no matter how advanced of a computer hardware/software you build, you will not have a 'mind' in it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Do individual cells understand Chinese? What a flawed argument, it doesn't at all address the proposition that consciousness is an emergent property of computation. The guy would, stuck in his room for thousands of years, provide unknowingly the computational fabric for the a potential consciousness of the AI.

No, individual cells don't understand Chinese. Neither would individual transistors if strong AI was possible. But that's not what the argument is about. The argument refutes the notion that you could have a complex (in terms of both hardware and software) system that implements an actual mind. This complex system could act exactly has a real mind on the outside, but would have no semantic parsing (i.e. understanding) on the inside.

Science does take place within consciousness, but also outside of it, since there are discreet conscious entities that can be studied.

There is only one conscious entity that you have direct experience of, which is yourself, and as far as you are concerned, all of science is contained within your conscious experience.

You (and also me) reason by analogy, and we assume consciousness in other beings, but we cannot directly observe it or measure it, in the sense that we can measure all the things on which we can do empirical investigations (e.g. an electrical field of a weight).

So maybe science takes place in multiple consciousnesses (this is what I believe, but I can't prove it), but I don't see how it could take place outside of consciousness.

Why wouldn't you bet on panspsychism ?

It's really just a personal intuition. I don't have any good argument or explanation to offer...

For what it's worth, I do feel that panpsychism was my "natural" belief when I was a kid, until the adults told me it was crazy to believe in that. I still don't think it's crazy, and there are some people who I respect a lot who believe in panpsychism.

Emergentism doesn’t explain qualia. You won’t be able to explain the difference between green and magenta to a blind person.

From an emergentist perspective there is nothing to explain - qualia are an illusion created by having a certain level of complexity in the stimuli fed into a brain.

Emergentism has a lot of easy outs once the initial assumption - that it is possible for the self to be an illusion of complexity - is made. If that is palatable then any niggle can be explained away as just part of the illusion.

And that initial assumption is a profoundly personal one, the only consciousness anyone has experience with is their own. Even if we share some initial spark of consciousness across humans there is pretty solid evidence that everyone has a different experience of reality (eg, synesthesia) that make arguing from qualia very hard. It is difficult to see how it isn't just a leap of faith either way. If it is possible, then it is basically certain. If it is impossible, then that is the end of it. Either way we can perfectly account for our experiences.

A humourous interpretation is maybe I'm a philosophical zombie where my consciousness is an emergent soup and you are a genuine consciousness with all sorts of special experiences. That really muddles the water over what the argument is even about; I would reasonably and rationally never be convinced that consciousness existed. All the evidence for the argument would be inaccessible to me but you couldn't exactly dismiss me as not being equal to yourself because you don't have evidence either way either.

That sounds plausible. Another issue I have with emergentism and other functionalist theories is that they don’t seem to account for the persistence of identity across consciousness discontinuities. Your consciousness sometimes vanishes the re-emerges as yourself. Where (or when) is your mind during the leap? Does it perform discrete time travel?

Why does it have to be somewhere?

It doesn’t (it could do a discrete leap forward in time). Still, why do I wake up as myself every morning? One of the papers linked in this thread discusses (lack of) object permanence from a QM perspective, I’d like to understand how subject permanence works as well, and functionalism does’t handle that well.

Why do waves split and gather again ?

These Socratic games are fun, and I guess I get where you’re coming from. .. but that doesn’t really answer my question regarding subject persistence and the subjective continuity of identity. What emerges tomorrow when I wake up could be another me, like one can argue that a new wave forms after the split.

Most of the atoms in our bodies are replaced on a regular basis (5 years on average) - are we another person then ?

The ship of Theseus doesn’t help your cause here. I’m not the same person I was 5 seconds ago. The self is obviously mutable, which kind of makes sense as long as there is a continuity of consciousness.

What puzzles me is the persistence of identity across interruptions of consciousness, even though your brain can be mutated while you are not there.

The only mostly permanent thing in the brain is neuronal DNA since most neurons don’t undergo mitosis.

IIRC consciousness is about a regime of brainwaves, while memories (and therefore "continuity" of consciousness) are about the actual neuronal connections, and so "survive" sleep ? (Though sleep is also known to be used to integrate new memories, so in that sense a (slightly) different person wakes up each time.)

I've been researching and thinking about consciousness (and specifically the hard problem) for a while now, and while the whole discussion is interesting, it seems to me that invoking qualia as evidence for the existence of the hard problem (or for there being something "to explain") doesn't really make much sense. Its perfectly plausible, if not likelly, that qualia is also part of the emergent phenomenon . I'm saying this more so to hear what your (or anybody else's) thoughts here are - why would qualia lie "above" or be "unexplainable" by materialism alone?

I don't see how it's perfectly plausible. In fact I see no reason to think it's plausible at all.

What does qualia (plural, btw) "are part of the emergent phenomenon" mean in practice? That just seems to be begging the question.

If you want to explain qualia, you have to do two things. The first is explain the nature of the experiencing entity. This means defining the precise mechanism by which subjective states are experienced by the entity instead of simply existing as objective state correlates. This in turn means explaining the nature of all of subjective experience.

The second is to explain the precise mechanism by which external inputs and internal states generate the experiences the entity has.

Most of the "Well it's obvious and there's no problem here" positions rely on the fallacy that defining a complicated-enough objective correlate - such as the detailed state of a computer with some form of introspection - solves the problem.

It doesn't. In fact it doesn't even begin to understand the problem. It's simply a statement of hope and faith with no empirical support that a complicated-enough state with enough introspection will somehow cross the border from automatic operation to sentient experience, just because it will, obviously.

> mechanism by which subjective states are experienced by the entity

Why are you implying some kind of mental entity that "does the experiencing"?

The crazy thing is that qualia is materialism. This computer you're typing on is a real thing that's also your qualia. The real failure is to say that qualia is a separate thing that doesn't matter in "materialism".

Under materialism, there's a hypothetical "real computer" that is the cause of your computer-qualia, but they are not identical.

Isn't it that, for a blind person, qualia such as green or magenta doesn't emerge?

That's similar to my pet theory, except I don't think it will emerge "naturally" from current AI architectures. I think it is an emergent property from various interconnected, competing networks. For consciousness to emerge, it would require a feedback architecture where multiple RNNs not only operate on the same inputs, but on each other's outputs as well.

At least that's my thinking. It's not my area at all.

Much of the philosophizing about consciousness is complicated by attempts to preserve a role for something other than an information theoretic entity operating on an electrochemical substrate. The attempts are motivated by a desire to have something that might last beyond the death of the substrate - something akin to a "soul" in Western Christian religion.