I can assure you that Philosophy of Mind is part of the curriculum. About a third of my dissertation deals with Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle, and others.

The general consensus among my peers is that philosophy is an essential part of scientific inquiry. Studying philosophy of mind is regarded as the only way to ensure the empirical questions we're asking even make sense, or that our discoveries are non-trivial.

It bears repeating: the cognitive neuroscientists I frequented have a deep respect and genuine interest in philosophy.

[0] Specifically: I presented evidence that attention was a causal mechanism in conscious access. We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention.

That's cool! Can you say more about how the experiment worked?

During my Ph.D, I would often spot this on my way to the lab. I would be seated in the subway early in the morning, and suddenly realize that the name of a station had just been announced, but that I hadn't heard it. Then, it was suddenly like I had heard it -- as if the trace sensory signal in auditory cortex had been isolated and amplified by my attentional system, before it fully dissipated.

It was (and still is) super cool.

I use similar techniques (plus muscle memory, visual, etc.) as a short term memory scratch pad - especially when highly sleep deprived.

Here's a pure psychophysics study we performed. It gets at the essence of the mechanism without forcing you to wade through pages of fMRI-related esoterica.

I'm happy to answer any questions :)

I've had a tiny bit of experience dealing with the visual system in a related but distant field (the feedback loops of visual accommodation and vergence and conflicts that can emerge with stereoscopic 3d - and I wish I had understood and done actually insightful things..). This left me wondering about the important place of vision-based experiments in the theories of perception as well as consciousness. What are your thoughts about that subject? For example, would similar research be doable with other senses just as well, or is that something that we have a harder time grasping or even formulating (due to a certain bias towards vision) ?

edit: I've read the other comment about the double-take so in this case there seems to be some ways to test that out on other senses, but my question still holds when talking about the overall field and the prevalence of vision in this kind fo research

Yes, very much so! I believe there is less bias towards vision than you think. Once you have a paradigm that works in vision, replicating it in other sensory modalities is generally low-hanging fruit for subsequent publication. I didn't get the sense that consciousness research was terribly biased towards vision. The fields of audition and haptics are alive and thriving.

Here's an experiment I did with MEG in the auditory domain:

http://www.unicog.org/publications/Marti%20Thibault%20Dehaen...

So your point is far from crazy. However, there is sufficient multi-modal evidence that I don't think our current theories of access consciousness are mere visual artifacts.

If I'm being facetious, I don't :P

More seriously, my reading of Chalmers is not that neural correlates of consciousness don't exist per se, it's rather that

1. So-called "access consciousness" (i.e. consciousness in the sense of "I am conscious of X") is distinct from phenomenological consciousness (contrary to what Dennett thinks).

2. Further, access consciousness has very little to do with phenomenological consciousness, to the point that calling it "consciousness" is a misnomer.

3. Therefore, neural correlates of access consciousness will never give us insight into phenomenology.

I think my position is that of most people in the field. I'm agnostic. Or more exactly, damned if I know what I think about that. I find it hard to believe -- as Dennett claims -- that once we've explained everything about neural correlates of (access) consciousness, that there will be nothing left to explain. I also find it hard to believe Chalmers' story that neural correlates have nothing to teach us about about phenomenology. But my arguments ultimately appeal to an interpretation of scientific data in the context of my own experience, so it's really a gut feeling of "neither seems quite right".

Given this, my stance is basically "I don't research hard problems; I research easy problems". Access consciousness -- whatever that is -- is interesting and useful to study. I choose that.

(N.B.: most of this should be written in the past tense, as I have now moved to a different field!)

Ok, so you have a "Zombie" that has all the behaviors and physiological processes associated with access, but no qualia.

In principle, we might learn everything there is to know about access and still have no insight into qualia. Have I summarized that correctly?

Assuming so, my position with respect to "why study neural correlates" is:

1. Access (whatever that is), is still interesting and worth studying, if only to find out what it actually is, and even if it's "just" working memory or attention.

2. At the very least, we will have succeeded in distinguishing access from phenomenology. Our common human understanding of (phenomenal) consciousness will have advanced insofar as we will understand it to exclude access and all its second-order effects.

3. It remains to be proven that there is something more to explain than "just" the physiology and intentionality of brain processes with respect to access. If there is, Chalmers might be right. If not, the point goes to Dennett -- and think about the implications!

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble...

Where? In the USA? Indubitably.

In France? Definitely not.

So Dennett, Hofstadter, Edelman et al, while really smart, will never get an inch closer to a true explanation.

The mechanism by which general anesthetics temporarily and partially/fully disables consciousness should provide a nice hint in which direction a true explanation should go.

There is no doubt imo that the theory will be based on quantum mechanics. Roger Penrose goes even a step further and states that the theory needs a non-computational component. (see Orch Or : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti... )

In any case, I'm still waiting on an Einsteinian admission from most scientists that it is "their biggest mistake" to consider that a "warm, wet and noisy" environment like the brain cannot host the necessary quantum phenomena. In the current state of affairs, they have been proven wrong already.

Eesh, this again ...

There has never been a proposed (serious, testable, much less supported) mechanism by which quantum mechanics could explain consciousness. This argument always boils down to "phenomenology happens in the mysterious place". Quantum mechanics is the 21st century pituitary gland.

>In any case, I'm still waiting on an Einsteinian admission from most scientists that it is "their biggest mistake" to consider that a "warm, wet and noisy" environment like the brain cannot host the necessary quantum phenomena. In the current state of affairs, they have been proven wrong already.

We are all convinced that quantum-mechanical phenomena can take place in microtubules. That debate is settled, but here's the thing: that was never really the issue. The issue was -- again -- that none of these theories explain how phenomenology emerges from quantum mechanics. All they say is "it does".

EDIT:

>People like Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle were/are stuck in the framework that tries to explain (while it provides no explanation at all) consciousness as an emergent property of a complex enough computation (by neurons).

This, however, is a statement on which we agree. This is why most consciousness researchers set their sites lower: they aim to explain access consciousness, and take no position on phenomenology. In other words, we're displaying humility by asserting knowledge of the easy problem, not the hard one.

Yes, the HN crowd surely loves to downvote these type of posts. You're the compassionate scientist who has seen this layman's argument too many times. The brain is mysterious, consciousness is mysterious, QM is mysterious, bingo, QM will explain consciousness. Well, that's not what I, as a layman, meant. What I meant was Orch-OR and it is at least a good starting point.

>That debate is settled, but here's the thing: that was never really the issue.

It's still an issue but not in the way you see it. Behavior of microtubules is subject to phenomena like quantum coherence. Microtubules help move mitochondria in the axons. Mitochondria in the axons help suppress or enhance neurotransmitter release. So qm phenomena have a direct effect on the formation of thought. Please let me know If i'm talking nonsense :).

>In other words, we're displaying humility by asserting knowledge of the easy problem, not the hard one.

You've given up already. I believe we can find a plausible explanation for consciousness. The mainstream theory is an absolute non-explanation, and a dead-end.

Very well, I shall look again, but color me (extremely) skeptical. Are you able to propose a mechanism by which quantum mechanics can explain qualia?

I have yet to see even a partial mechanism. The issue is that qualia specifically involves something non-mechanistic. You would have to first qualify what the substance of qualia is (it's ontology ... and good luck with that!), how it emerges from quantum-mechanical phenomena, and whence it comes (where is the stuff of qualia when it's not manifesting?).

Again, I don't (yet?) see how any mechanistic explanation can explain this.

>Please let me know If i'm talking nonsense :).

It's not nonsense per se, but none of it addresses the key criticism. You must explain how that causal chain (microtubules -> mitochondria -> neurotransmitter) produces qualia.

Your argument is effectively that microtubules can influence the creation of thought. Great! So can neurons! So can drugs! So can a blow to the head! Why insist on microtubules?? Why not elsewhere?

>You've given up already.

I've also given up on proving the existence of God!

Less facetiously: phenomenology has the advantage of being self-evident. We're all pretty much convinced that it exists, contrary to God. Given that, and given the advances in materialist philosophy, it's not prima facie crazy to suspect that phenomenology is a physical process, and therefore amenable to scientific explanation. In this, you have a point.

However, I don't think science (or philosophy for that matter) currently has the ability to propose an explanation for how some process p implements qualia. We don't even know what such a theory would look like. As such, the quantum-mechanical argument really does seem like the pituitary gland of the 21st century.

>The mainstream theory is an absolute non-explanation

Which mainstream theory? Are you referring to access consciousness? If so, then you are basing your argument on a false premnise, namely that these scientists are investigating the same thing as you. They are not. They are interested in another thing we call consciousness, which may or may not be related to the phenomenological consciousness that you are interested in. It's still an interesting question.

If you're referring to mainstream theory of phenomenology (e.g. sensorimotor theory), it is at the very least no more absurd than quantum-mechanical theories.

>Yes, the HN crowd surely loves to downvote these type of posts.

Respectfully, have you considered the possibility that your ideas just don't add up? I mean no disrespect, and again will take another look (links welcome), but I notice that you have not addressed the central question of how a mechanism (let alone yours, specifically) can produce a qualia. I suspect this is what motivates the downvotes.

That's awesome, thank you! Ultimately it's beneficial to keep an open mind on things about which one is skeptical or even convinced the idea is rubbish (well, some are of course).

>Are you able to propose a mechanism by which quantum mechanics can explain qualia? Again, I don't (yet?) see how any mechanistic explanation can explain this.

No, I'm not that smart, by far (hehe). You're way too far up the explanatory hierarchy. A starting point are rather the laws of nature, of which Roger Penrose makes a good point that they are not enough understood to make inroads to an understanding of consciousness. At the beginning, consciousness and qualia must be based upon something mechanistic. Penrose argues that QM is incomplete (a non-computational component most likely), I would add that not only GR and QM should be unified (we need to find out where both are wrong), but the triad of Information theory (which I consider the most fundamental), GR and QM should be unified. Maybe this would leed us to conclude (proto-)consciousness is pervasively embedded at the most fundamental level of nature. I think it must be. So why wouldn't a rock be conscious? Maybe because its composition and arrangement of atoms doesn't allow it to be a facilitator to quantum information processing like neurons. Maybe neurons - in their composition and arrangement of atoms and biochemical state and interconnectedness - are especially apt acting as a facilitator harboring microtubules that store and process qubits. In any case, i haven't and can't answer your question, sorry.

>I've also given up on proving the existence of God!

I agree the non-existence of god can't be proven, and is not provable even in theory. But I've worked around it by arguing that the soul can't exist, considering the theory of evolution. At what point of the evolution exactly would god have turned us human by magically inserting a soul? And if this principal instrument of god doesn't exist, maybe the idea of god is also a bit nonsensical. Good enough for me! (And as I always joke, Thumbs up if you believe you have a soul).

>However, I don't think science (or philosophy for that matter) currently has the ability to propose an explanation for how some process p implements qualia.

Agree completely on that one.

>QM argument really does seem like the pituitary gland of the 21st century.

Eesh, not that again ... :)

>Respectfully, have you considered the possibility that your ideas just don't add up?

I actually consider this the most likely possibility, yes.

>(links welcome)

Already mentioned in my original post. Enjoy diving deep in the rabbit hole of Orch OR! If you got heaps of time, watch a few youtube videos of Penrose (and Hammeroff) explaining the concept. It's really inspiring watching the most eminent scientist currently on the planet (imsvho).

Yes. Our experience of (or as) consciousness may be biased by having a brain. Consciousness may not require thought or senses in the way that we know it. They key is in the observer, and the observer effect that makes the brain aware of the observer (giving rise to self awareness).

Consciousness cannot be proven, but it does affect the conscious being, so there are potential observable effects that might differentiate conscious existence from non-conscious existence (assuming it exists).

A rock may be conscious and the consciousness would observe being stone. Thought may not necessarily be a requirement for consciousness. It would not think that it is stone, it would not have any memories, it might not feel anything. It might be a rather dull consciousness, or perhaps it observes the forces that hold the rock together. Perhaps it experiences the forces on the rock as an 'otherworldly' sense that we cannot imagine. But it would not think about it, nor remember it, those are functions of the brain.

Or perhaps its rock shape is its memory.

Physical storage.

Why? You've presented no argument! This is just a declaration of faith!

>So why wouldn't a rock be conscious?

Indeed why not, but then again why would it be? This position is called panpsychism. It is hardly new, and hardly specific to QM. If you want to posit consciousness as a fundamental natural force, we need to be able to predict and measure it in all things, including rocks.

>Maybe because its composition and arrangement of atoms doesn't allow it to be a facilitator to quantum information processing like neurons.

Perhaps. Or perhaps a rock doesn't integrate information as much as a brain? That's what Giulio Tononi thinks [0], and at least his panpsychic theory has managed to collect some evidence (n.b. it suffers from exactly the same problem as QM with respect to mechanism).

Even if we buy the panpsychic argument (after all, why not!), you have made no argument for quantum mechanics as opposed to information-integration, or indeed anything else! None! Zero! Panpsychism does not imply quantum mechanics!

>In any case, i haven't and can't answer your question, sorry.

I appreciate the concession, but I'm afraid I must now insist upon a subsequent one. You must concede that your only reason for thinking QM is involved is because you don't see a reason why it wouldn't be. That's a bad reason.

>I actually consider this the most likely possibility, yes.

That contradicts your insistence of QM as the likely candidate for phenomenological consciousness. Either you think that assertion has merit, or you think it doesn't. Which is it?

>Already mentioned in my original post.

Yes, I was asking for things I might not already be familiar with. Am I to conclude that this theory hasn't made any progress in 15 years?

[0] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.34...

Not good enough for free will, which needs true unknownability, like in, we don't know whether Schrödinger's cat is dead or alive, until we look.

Your theory adds zero explanatory power.

Ironically, you're opining on the scientist of opining on consciousness without having read philosophy, without having read the scientist.

Actually, now that I think about this, I'd extend it to just about everyone, not just academics/engineers/etc. Imagine two people working on a plumbing problem. An hour into it, Bob waltzes in, looks at it, and says, "did you try __?" The two people who have actually been working on it roll their eyes and mutter, "yes, Bob, we've been working on it."

Sometimes Bob will get lucky and notice something they didn't, because they're too deep in the weeds, but I think people dramatically overestimate how likely this is.

Usually the only time I'm actually helpful in situations like that is if I have esoteric knowledge or experience that is uncommon and directly related to the problem at hand - "Oh, I ran into this 3 years ago, here's what we did to solve it". Your peers have already tried the obvious things.

Another rule of thumb to notice when this is happening is the word just. "Why don't you just..." is a belittling thing to say, as if they hadn't already thought of the obvious. Better is "why didn't X work"?

For instance, I don't see a good reason why having consciousness of X is in any way fundamentally different, than having an ability to play StarCraft at MMR Y this instant in time. IMHO, conceptually they are the same and the only difference is the game being measured.

Info asymmetry in society will keep growing as Info keeps growing. On the other hand that 6 inch chimp brain we have, has no way to keep up no matter what tech is produced within our lifetimes.

So only thing worth doing is point people at things you know and keep walking, sort of like two ants passing each other in the universe.

The Oracle of Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest of Greeks; and Socrates took this as approval of his agnosticism which was the starting point of his philosophy: ‘One thing only I know’, he said, ‘and that is that I know nothing’. Philosophy begins when one begins to doubt — when one begins to question the accepted wisdom of tradition. Particularly the one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms.

Puzzled by the priestess of Delphi’s statement, Socrates felt obliged to seek the meaning of her remark. By questioning others who had a reputation for wisdom, he came to see that he was wiser than they, because unlike them he did not claim to know what he did not know.

Ok maybe they didn't know. Or maybe it's science's job to methodically confirm knowledge, that has so far been rather anecdotal, and scientists can pat themselves on the back for it, why not.

But it somewhat annoyed me to read that book anyway. They just made it sound like some breakthrough research, which I think it wasn't.

Aristotle described matter as being made up of atoms, and he's first-order-approximation correct, but his mechanistic details of how they worked were extremely wrong. Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" proof rests extremely heavily on an assertion he makes earlier in the Discourse where he combats the hypothesis that he's just a brain in a jar being fed lies by an evil demon by asserting that the God that would allow that reality would be a really shitty god, so he dismisses it out of hand. It's through scientific investigation that we came to discover which parts of Aristotle's philosophy matched reality and which can be discarded (and we lack the scientific insight, as of yet, to have strong evidence for or against that evil-demon brain-in-a-jar hypothesis. ;) ).

There are a thousand, thousand algebras that are internally-consistent but ultimately uninteresting because they map to nothing we observe in the universe, and then there's linear algebra. There are a thousand, thousand philosophies that are internally-consistent hot garbage, and then there's Jung. To say "Jung described this, why did it take science so long to discover it?" is like saying "Complex wave functions already describe quantum mechanics; why did it take physicists so long to realize that?"

Now, what philosophy does gift us with (if it's grounded in strong logical consistency) is a roadmap of where to look next if we notice that things in reality do align to the postulates, because the philosopher has already imagined, in vivid detail, the consequences of those assertions. And that is extremely cool.

Science works in the same way. Rather the whole theory must correlate with reality.

More to the point, most of what you hold dear is precisely philosophical in nature. Let us list but two, which I draw directly from your comment:

1. The value of putting a man on the moon

2. The superior (epistemological!) quality of scientific knowledge.

That last one bears repeating. The entire reason you think that you think science is better than philosophy is because of a philosophical stance. You are manifestly an empiricist, albeit one who does not understand empiricism and its rational context very well.

Respectfully, I leave you with the following quote by Gordan Fee:

    Before you can say, ‘I disagree,’ you must be able to say, ‘I understand.’
    It is axiomatic that before you level criticism you should be able to state
    an author’s position in terms that he or she would find acceptable.
 

And your entire reply rests on misreading of my comment; note that I said "a problem" not "all problems". There are many problems that philosophists have made absolutely no progress on in centuries or millenia because on those narrow questions the dialog is horribly imprecise and does not give rise to reproducible, testable things.

Almost everyone who replied to me assumed that I meant all of philosophy is useless from basically missing the "a" word in my comment.

Nevertheless, it makes your comparison with "putting a man on the moon" very puzzling. Why not compare this great achievement of science with a great achievement of philosophy?

Moreover, you place science and philosophy in opposition with each other, yet science is exactly a subset of philosophy. And while you might point to the higher epistemological quality of empiricism (as opposed to, say, metaphysics), you would have to concede that science is also tackling easier questions by a significant margin, precisely because they can be apprehended through epistemologically-objective observation.

Given the above, the charitable interpretation remains ignorance. One might even qualify it as "galling".

Also there is a larger conversation to be had, because we're really talking about Western philosophy in context. Buddhist philosophy has all kinds of things to say about what the mind is and isn't, but we don't carry that in our traditions because a lot of Buddhism completely nullifies our Western consumerism culture, and that's uncomfortable. So...

We could start with Aristotelian logic, and the idea that falsehood can lead to truth, but not vice versa. A formal definition of "true" and "false", and their semantic properties is the basis of literally all formal thinking. It should be noted propositional logic was incorporated into mathematics much later, and that this idea is inescapable in all intellectual pursuits. You can invalidate political, metaphysical, scientific and mathematical assertions on the basis of logic.

We might also point to platonic forms, which provide the basis for all engineering and scientific modeling. It is the very concept that you are appealing to every time you add an error term to a model. Until we started seeing the world in these terms, we couldn't even express the engineering requirements and scientific questions needed to get to the moon. What do you mean by "the Saturn V fuselage is a circle of X centimeters in diameter, give or take Ɛ ... ?"

If you prefer something more modern, we could point to Gilbert Ryle's demonstration that Cartesian dualism is founded on fallacious reasoning. The guy rigorously demonstrated why mind-body separation was a logical contradiction, thereby showing that science could meaningfully study the mind. On that basis, we are now able to communicate with locked-in patients using brain imaging that recognizes the neural signature of consciousness.

Have you ever wondered what your political values are based upon? It's all but certain that you were educated and shaped by culture and institutions that explicitly espouse the ideas of John Stuart Mill.

I do see the trap you're laying, however. You're going to either (a) claim that one doesn't really need the first three ideas to pursue science effectively or (b) claim that ideas such as Mill's are epistemologically subjective and therefore of lesser value than going to the moon.

For (a), the onus would be on you to show how logical reasoning, the specification of systems (surveying, architecture, mechanics, etc.) can be expressed absent form (and you will note that human inventions absent the notion of form were not the product of specification).

For (b), you will have to concede that epistemologically-subjective problems are much more challenging than their objective counterparts, and that science is -- in this respect -- playing in easy mode. It's easy to spot errors and come to a consensus when the bridge falls over. It's harder to spot glaring problems in e.g. a political theory. More importantly, perhaps, you'll have to appeal to philosophy to convince us of the inferiority of such ideas. Along the way, you will appeal to a number of great ideas, including Aristotelian logic (ideally).

If you want to claim that empiricism should trump all other modes of knowledge when it is applicable, and that empiricism is therefore better than the other modes of knowledge ... nice try! How, pray, might we determine when empiricism is applicable? How can empiricism be more important or "better" (whatever that means) than the very things it depends upon?

>Also there is a larger conversation to be had, because we're really talking about Western philosophy in context.

Indeed we are, but I hardly see the relevance. We are talking about Wester philosophy because the two are very different beasts. What we refer to as "(mostly) Western philosophy" is unique in its emphasis on the analytical method, and on uninterrupted chains of propositional logic. There is no equivalent movement in the East. The phrase "Eastern philosophy" uses the word "philosophy" in a very different sense. These thinkers are absolute treasures as well, but their methods are different: the emphasis is on holistic meaning, and (arguably, since there is an equivalent tradition in the West, in many ways) something we could label as "spirituality". If you want an easy/popular example (albeit only loosely related to philosophy), try comparing how Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz think about war. The method is very distinct.

>Buddhist philosophy has all kinds of things to say about what the mind is and isn't, but we don't carry that in our traditions because a lot of Buddhism completely nullifies our Western consumerism culture, and that's uncomfortable. So...

So... what? It's an interesting question, but it has nothing to do with the value of Western philosophy itself. The irony is that the very thing you decry -- consumerism -- has its roots in liberalism, ergo in Jon Stuart Mill!

Are you referring to the (deep!) spiritual wisdom in Buddhism? Western philosophy is perfectly equipped to discuss these questions as well! There is nothing uncomfortable, here! Have you read even one medieval philosopher? Start with Thomas Aquinas! You seem like a logical positivist, so perhaps you would enjoy an attempt at a formal, axiomatic proof of metaphysical phenomena? If so, you should read Liebniez's Monadology -- it's not easy reading, but it's great!

In the same way that Sun Tzu and Clauewitz differ in their methodology, so to do Acquinas and Liebniez differ from the Buddha. Yet there is overlap in their conclusions, and unique insights on their side as well!

It seems like you're falling into the trap of exoticism. If you spent even a fraction of the time you (apparently) dedicate to informing yourself on Eastern philosophy reading great Western philosophers, you would discover a treasure-trove that is on par with what the East has produced, and wonderfully original and unique.

>You're right, I probably don't know enough philosophy (but then again, who does...).

I don't even know where to begin with this one. Many people know a great deal about philosophy, just as many people know a great deal about science. We call the former "philosophers" and the latter "scientists".

P.S.: I'm not even a goddamn philosopher. I'm a scientist.

I do think people's critiques of philosophy stem from a need to be pragmatic, which ironically is itself a philosophy. It's difficult to reconcile the lagged "observable usefulness" of philosophy with its actual usefulness.

That which is useful is generally ignored as its been so ingrained in the psyche and that which is seen to not be useful is usually controversial and hasn't made itself to be the "norm" as of yet.

Thank you! I must admit I find the disparagement of philosophy tiring and irritating, especially when it comes from people (self-proclaimed empiricists) who really ought to know better. I am happy to hear my frustration has not gotten in the way of an interesting discussion :)

>It's difficult to reconcile the lagged "observable usefulness" of philosophy with its actual usefulness.

I don't think there is a lag in usefulness (observed or otherwise), when one knows what philosophy is, and appreciates the deep dependencies between it and its sub-disciplines.

Rather, I think people confuse usefulness with certainty. By that logic, I could discount the whole field of science on the basis of the inferential leap. Although science is an iterative process, we cannot be certain that it must converge on truth (though I think it probably does). Given that, the mathematician could look down his nose at science and say "Ha! These fools can't even prove anything!", and in so doing be just as much of a fool as the scientist dismissing the philosopher.

(For the avoidance of doubt: I understand you are not such a person!)

One thing I liked about the author was the acknowledgment that Freud made mistakes, but shouldn't be 100% dismissed either. I like relating this to modern atom theory. How vital is the understanding of electrons to atoms these days? It's borderline impossible to imagine how atoms work without knowing anything about electrons.

Dalton developed modern atom theory in 1804. Electrons weren't discovered until the 1890s. 90 years of people probably saying, "it's impossible to get tangible results from testing atoms". Freud's theories are almost 100 years old now. We've come a long way... but how more advanced is atomic theory an extra 100 years after electrons were discovered? We are still stupid when it comes to psychology, thus unable to really make tangible results... yet. The faster that concept is respected, I truly think the faster advancements can be made because people won't get hung up on bad pop science declarations from innocent studies that are doing to their best to just discover some grain of truth.

Again, he wasn't perfect by any stretch, but his work and push of psychoanalysis is the seed to our current forms of therapy. Yes, modern therapy still isnt perfect for war and trauma induced PTSD but holy shit it's better than cranking up the voltmeter on someone, pumping them full of cocaine and tobacco and snakeoil, or just locking them up in a padded room. This doesn't include some of the archaic religious torture practices some places of the world still utilize to this day.

The dude was on the right track compared to the rest of his time. Give credit where credit is due. It's not like you invented the transistor. We all stand on someone else's shoulders. Hindsight is a whole hell of a lot easier than foresight.

Again, we dont think Dalton set us back in atomic theory since he was the pioneer. Why the hate for any other pioneer then?

For instance, Plato and other Ancient Greek philosophers theorized about the basic building blocks of matter—what their shapes and natures were. That question has become one of physics.

That’s why philosophy is referred to as the Mother of the Sciences.

This hardly makes philosophy worthy of your description as lacking “tangible results.”

Someone should probably let you know that science is a subset of philosophy (or "philosophism" as you seem to think it's called).

So, I just fundamentally disagree that Philosophy contains everything that has something to do with thinking or believing stuff. It's an oversimplification to the point of being vacuously true.

Not really. To use your analogy a bit, the GGP was basically rejecting human language in favor of English on account of it being so wonderful that English-speakers visited the moon. It's nonsense. If you reject philosophy, you reject science.

It doesn't take that much charity to interpret that what the original poster was saying as, "I reject the subset of philosophy that is not science, on the grounds that the subset which is science has all of the value," a legitimate position at least which is not tautologically false. I guess the reason why one thing being good could make another thing bad would be that time spent using nonscientific philosophical techniques to answer questions incurs an opportunity cost, that you are not using scientific techniques to answer them. Or even that trying to answer questions that scientific techniques can't solve incurs an opportunity cost, that you could be answering other questions that you had a chance at solving. (That would be a consistent belief if you thought that nonscientific thought couldn't make progress on questions, even if you conceded that scientific techniques could not make progress on all questions.)

I think the original post has shown your reinterpretation is probably too charitable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26345215

It's a pretty classic case of celebrating science without really acknowledging or understanding its foundations and dependencies.

Why is it that we need to constantly go here with accusations of ignorance? Do we really need to do that all the time? Somehow philosophy contains everything, all the time. You're ignorant! No you're ignorant! My thing contains your thing! No, my thing contains your thing!

Read my comment again. Why do some philosophical problems get turned over and over for centuries with no progress and yet the empiricism of Science has absolutely revolutionized human life? Why should we be so afraid of some neuroscientist who hasn't read Searle? I mean, isn't he going to just stumble on it again? If it's true, then they would, right?

Are all philosophical questions resolvable by Science? I think no. But there are so many questions that I feel are poorly informed by a cloistered set of Philosophical priests who speak another language they made up. Frankly, I don't feel bad when they are "galled" that a scientist takes a new look at a problem they've made no progress on.

Honestly.

It is not solutions what Philosophers seek. Mostly they pose questions.

The problem with Science is that it just answers them. And Scientist deem that sufficient.

The hard thing is to tackle questions which have only personal answers. Universal ones are easy.

My first thought was about the Timaeus (geometrical structures of matter/elements), but I haven't read any treatments about Plato's theory of forms and the development of mathematics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Plat...

Same for anyone: from Plato to Descartes to Hume to Nietzsche to Husserl.

Like Vizzini in the Princes Bride: "Plato, Aristotle... Morons".

It is so easy to mistake science for wisdom.

Chalmers: philosophical zombies

As you say, these topics have been carefully studies for thousands of years but these two have done a lot to muddy the waters with confusing arguments, and I don't blame anyone for disregarding them.

Philosophical zombies are a bit more interesting. However it flirts a bit too much with dualism in assuming something indistinguishable from a human can lack some "qualia" that a real human has. A more useful perspective would be from a human brain simulation angle.

This is called the systems response to the Chinese Room Argument. [0]

Searle's response [0] goes something like this:

You're missing the point. Suppose the man in the room memorised the program, so that he could answer the questions himself with no need of external aids. Now, the man and the system are the same, and yet by your account, the man doesn't speak Chinese, but the system does.

Personally I find the whole argument to bear no clear connection to the questions of consciousness. The question of whether a system consciously understands a problem is muddled, as it isn't clear a priori that problem-solving competence has any connection to consciousness. To use Dennett's term, a system can be competent without comprehension. A pocket calculator is quite unable to explain what it's doing, but is able to perform superhuman number-crunching. The argument may succeed in tying the reader in a knot, but I figure that's just because most people haven't thought much about what conscious comprehension really means.

Another problem with the Chinese Room Argument is that, if it really holds up, it ought to hold up just as well against the human species itself. If you're going to attack the idea that consciousness can arise from non-conscious components, where does that leave us?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Systems_and_virtu...

It fails to demonstrate anything interesting about consciousness. It certainly doesn't demonstrate that computer systems can never be conscious in the way we can. Nothing in the argument applies any more or less to neurons than to transistors.

If a person is manually executing an algorithm (the memorised Chinese Room algorithm, or naive matrix multiplication, or whatever), then we could distinguish between the algorithm and the person executing it. In that sense there are two computation streams at work. That doesn't show that a second consciousness has been brought into being, though. I wouldn't conclude that there are two 'minds'.

Your comparison to virtual machines is a good one, it's one that Dennett uses.

If the executed algorithm is consciousness, then a second consciousness has been brought into being, same as for first consciousness.

A lot hinges on If the executed algorithm is consciousness.

I can see the sense in that argument though, in that the 'first consciousness' is acting as the computational substrate for the 'second consciousness', the way the physical action of neurons acts as our computational substrate. I'm not convinced this maps to using a card system to have a conversation in a foreign language. It doesn't seem self-evident that doing so should be considered enough to demonstrate consciousness, it's only enough to demonstrate than the algorithm is effective in having a conversation.

It's not self-evidently the equivalent of an accurate real-time computer simulation of a specific person, for instance. I think you can make a strong case that such a system would amount to a conscious person and should be treated as such. (It would follow from this that shutting down a holodeck simulation of someone is morally fraught.) The only alternative would be to morally privilege neuron-based architectures over transistor-based architectures, which seems like an uphill philosophical battle.

I don't put much stock in the question of whether the card-based algorithm 'understands' the conversation it is having. Is it competent? Yes. Is it conscious? I'm not convinced it is. Asking whether it understands is to conflate these two questions.

>It's not self-evidently the equivalent of an accurate real-time computer simulation of a specific person, for instance. I think you can make a strong case that such a system would amount to a conscious person and should be treated as such.

This was touched recently in art. If you're interested, it's "Sword art online Alicization". The shutdown problem is applicable to AI too. What's new is that the life of virtual people is shown at length and discussed questions as to what identity those people should have, what worldview, religion, philosophy, pride, dignity, justice.

I'm not sure that's the case. Simple chat programs can do a pretty good job simulating a human interlocutor. For a 'full' simulation, which we need by definition, we'd need something much more sophisticated (able to reason about all sorts of abstract and concrete things), but conceivably the solution might be very different from brain-simulation.

The thought experiment can easily be adjusted to close the door on my objection here: rather than a man in a room with an enormous card index, we have a pretty accurate real-time computer simulation of some specific person. That way the computational problem is defined to be equivalent to something we consider conscious. Laboriously computing that simulation by hand (presumably not in real time but instead over millennia) would change the substrate, but not the computational problem. If we're ok with there being an outer host consciousness and an inner hosted consciousness, the thought experiment poses no problem.

Of course, this isn't the position I started at, but it makes some sense that the real meaning of the thought experiment change as we adjust the simulated process. If our man were looking up the best moves to play tic-tac-toe, it would be plainly obvious that we're looking at competence without comprehension. If he's instead simulating the full workings of a human brain, the situation is different. The foreign language problem is somewhere between these extremes.

> It's a good part about artificial algorithms that they are transparent and we can show that they aren't only effective in conversation, but have everything to be had behind that conversation. It's due to the latter. Simply put, the algorithm isn't GPT, but AGI.

I'm not sure I quite follow you here. I agree that the depth and detail of the simulation is an important factor.

> What's new is that the life of virtual people is shown at length and discussed questions as to what identity those people should have, what worldview, religion, philosophy, pride, dignity, justice.

In contrast to Ex Machina that had the computer as a sociopathic villain with only surface level feigning of normal human emotion and motivation.

While we're vaguely on the topic, homomorphic crypto also puts a spin on things. We know it's possible for a host computer to be entirely 'unaware' of what's going on in the VM that it's running, in a cryptographic sense. Related to this, I've long thought that there's a sticky 'interpretation problem' with consciousness (perhaps philosophers have another term for it) that people rarely talk about.

If you run a brain simulator inside a homomorphically encrypted system, such that no one else will ever know what you're running in there, does that impact whether we treat it as conscious? Part of it is that the simulated brain isn't hooked up to any real-world sensors or actuators, but that's just like any old brain in a jar. Philosophically pedestrian. This goes far beyond that. Someone could inspect the physical computer, and they'd have no idea what was really running on it. They'd just see a pseudorandom stream of states. If there's consciousness inside the VM, it's only there with respect to the homomorphic crypto key!

If we allow that to count as consciousness, we've opened the door to all sorts of computations counting as consciousness, if only we knew the key. We can take this further: we can always invent a correspondence such that any sequence of states maps to a computation stream that we would identify as yielding consciousness. This looks like some kind of absurd endgame of panpsychism, but here we are.

Is there an alternative? I'm increasingly of the opinion that it seems like a non-starter to try to deny that transistor-based computers could ever be the substrate of consciousness. Short of that, where else is there to go?

</sidetrack>

But the entropy of the encryption key is the degree to which the consciousness is "hidden". This entropy is still massively lower than the entropy of the matter that makes up a brain. If we have some way to demonstrate the encrypted system is computing the mind program, say, by interacting with its input/output, then we can in theory demonstrate the system is conscious. The fact that the encrypted system's operation maps to a mind program with entropy equal to the key, rather than equal to the entropy of the bits in the mind program entails that the encrypted system intrinsically encodes the mind program. If the mapping were equivalent to just mapping the states of an arbitrary system to the mind program, the entropy would be equal to the much greater bits in the program. Comparing the entropy is the key differentiator.

Seems fair.

> But the entropy of the encryption key is the degree to which the consciousness is "hidden". This entropy is still massively lower than the entropy of the matter that makes up a brain.

Sure, there are far more possible states for a brain, than possible 4096-bit keys (for example).

> If we have some way to demonstrate the encrypted system is computing the mind program, say, by interacting with its input/output, then we can in theory demonstrate the system is conscious.

Right, although if we further adjust the thought experiment we run into a sort of 'systems argument' problem.

Suppose the homomorphically encrypted system uses an encrypted channel to communicate with actuators, such that a decrypter module is needed to connect it up. (We need not encrypt the channels from the sensors.) In that case, the homomorphically encrypted brain simulator plus the decrypter module, adds up to what we call a conscious system. On its own, the homomorphically encrypted brain simulator does nothing of interest, or at least, appears to do nothing of interest.

> The fact that the encrypted system's operation maps to a mind program with entropy equal to the key, rather than equal to the entropy of the bits in the mind program entails that the encrypted system intrinsically encodes the mind program.

That's what we'd typically expect of a cryptographic system, but now we have a sliding scale. What if the key were so large that it outweighed the state-space of the machine itself? Do we conclude that the length of the key determines how conscious the system is?

We could say that the contribution of homomorphic crypto is just that it permits us to use vastly smaller (pardon the oxymoron) keys to scramble states and their progressions.

What if we define another cryptographic scheme such that the correspondence formerly represented by a very long key, is instead represented by just a few bits? (Finally a way to tie philosophy of mind to Kolmogorov complexity!) Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point about entropy here?

But the entropy considerations are just a practical way for us to identify computational systems with certainty. It isn't an identity criteria. Consider your homomorphically encrypted program where the key is longer than the state space for that program. Presumably we cannot tell this encrypted program apart from some random set of operations that computes nothing (I doubt this is true in practice, but lets go with it). How can we say this program is in fact computing something? The assumption that the program is homomorphically encrypted also says there is a magic string of bits that unlocks its activity. Further, this magic string is independent (i.e. has zero mutual information) with the program in question. Essentially the key is random and so it cannot provide any information about the program itself. So when the key is combined with the encryption scheme to produce the decrypted program, we know that the program was embedded in the encrypted system the whole time, not added by the application of the key.

The key point is that information doesn't just pop into existence, information requires upfront payment in (computational) entropy, a computation-like process that does something like guess-and-check over the state space of the information. If ever you have a string of information, you either got it from somewhere else or you did guess-and-check over the state space. In the case of the homomorphic encryption, we know the key is independent of the program and so the key does not secretly contain the program. Thus the program must already exist in the behavior of the encrypted system.

We don't know the key but we know it exists by assumption. "Exists" here just means the upfront computational cost has already been paid for the relation between the hidden program, the encrypted system and the decryption key. Indeed, we can in theory recover the encrypted program with comparatively zero computational work by using the key. This is in contrast to recovering the mind program from, say, the dynamics of my wall. No upfront computational cost has been paid and so I have to search the entire state space to find a mapping between the wall and the mind program. Thus the wall provides no information about the mind program, i.e. it is not computing the mind program.

>The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters.

Does not compute. :)

The Chinese room argument, as I understand it, is not about whether the human understands Chinese. The question is whether the room understands Chinese.

Personally I place the rejection of functionalism on basically the same level as the acceptance of dualism. I don't know what precisely has happened to make most serious researchers reject dualism, but perhaps non-functionalism will run the same course.

I really don't understand why people have such a hard time with this argument. Seems like there's some unaddressed materialist/eliminativist prejudice underneath it all.

The program isn't doing anything because it's just a bunch of symbols. You need something to "animate" the program, but that something need not comprehend the symbols it is given (hence the whole idea of an effective method). (Actually, Searle goes further when he describes computation as observer relative, and I would extend this to programs. That is, there is not an objective fact of the matter that a computer is a computer and that it is computing. If you looked at it, there's nothing in what's going on that says "oh, yeah, this machine is adding numbers". Kripke also gets into this with his "quaddition" argument.)

When you understand Chinese, reading a symbol or legal string of symbols leads your mind to form conceptual content with some intentionality or signification. We can have other thoughts in response and this can lead to the production of signs with some other signification. The program lacks this semantic component and merely performs what amounts to a syntactic translation of the input signs into output signs. This process is entirely stripped of any semantic element. And that's the point. Computers are highly systematized patterns of convention that permit the simulation of some of what we would typically expect of human beings or maybe some other animal, but strictly speaking, they don't even compute anything, much less understand.

Also your assumption of the program not forming any conceptual content, will depend on what exactly the program is doing. The Chinese room says it's carrying out a conversation in a manner indistinguishable from a human, but that could mean anything from running a very fancy GPT-3 to running a whole-brain simulation of a Chinese person.

In either case, the human running the program is a distraction. You might as well ask if the pencil or the book he's using to compute the instructions understands Chinese. If the program was running on a CPU, it'd be the same thing - the CPU doesn't understand Chinese, the program does.

But the symbols aren't the interesting piece of a sequence of computation, but rather the structure being instantiated. There is a map/territory ambiguity here. The symbols are just placeholders into an abstract structure that describes the dynamics of some system. When the structure is reified, i.e. made actual by being implemented in a system, then it is the structure that has causal efficacy in the world and it is that which we interact with. Dismissing the idea of an implemented program understanding Chinese because "the program doesn't understand the symbols" is confusing the map for the territory.

>Searle goes further when he describes computation as observer relative, and I would extend this to programs.

I totally disagree. If I have a program that inverts an arbitrary matrix, this is not a function I project onto the program. This function is intrinsic to the sequence of operations it carries out. An intelligent alien studying the operation of the program would be able to figure out its function given enough time and effort.

>The program lacks this semantic component and merely performs what amounts to a syntactic translation of the input signs into output signs. This process is entirely stripped of any semantic element.

The CPU is performing syntactic translation, but the structure being implemented is an existing thing beyond CPU operations. And this is the misdirection in the Chinese room argument. To ask if the man understands Chinese is just to ask the wrong question.

You mean you're an eliminativist?