You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them.
In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps:
1) I am not like a block of steel, but I don't know why.
2) I am not like a block of steel, but I know why ("religion")
3) I am like a block of steel, neither are conscious (no incongruity/consciousness is an illusion)
4) I am like a block of steel, both are conscious ("it from bit"/Chalmers's universal conciousness)
Of course this implies the existence of a 5th and 6th camp that believes the block of steel is conscious, but we are not. I find these camps throw the best parties.
I think it's the same with the brain. Why is there consciousness in this brain and not in a rock? Well because the brain is set up to perform a complicated "calculation" and the rock is not. Just like the program's behaviour only exists as an emergent property of the computer's physical state, so does consciousness arise as an emergent property from the brain's physical state.
EDIT: to clarify this is why it is justified to say there is not a problem, but I do not personally find it satisfying
With the browser example, at no level of abstraction does there exist any ambiguity. "Emergent" in that framing simply means we can explain abstracted behaviors in terms of other abstractions. But if you wanted you could drill down to the particle physics and have a complete, rational explanation of the system.
Not so with consciousness, and thus the "hard problem"
Well, the list of differences between the two is enormous. As the article discusses, some of those differences include embodiment, emotions and moods. So perhaps the “hard problem” is not a philosophical one but a question of detailed knowledge: if we had the ability to drill down to the underlying particle physics of bodies, emotions and moods, plus all the other things that comprise our animal natures, then perhaps the problem would be solved.
To put this another way: perhaps the issue with many approaches to understanding consciousness is that it assumes our animal nature doesn’t matter and that conscious minds can exist abstractly, or even be modelled in silicon. But maybe they can’t be, and so for us to truly understand consciousness we will need to truly understand the body, which we are very far away from.
To sum this up: consciousness, in this view, is not an emergent property of complex systems. Rather it is a fundamental property of animals.
(It also helps that I know how to program computers and don't view that activity as bringing consciousness in the world. I have children, however, so it turns out that I am — with some help — also able to bring consciousness into the world. The former activity I am both able to do and fully understand, while the latter I am clearly able to do, but don't at all understand.)
I recognize this point of view isn't popular among a lot of technical folks. I get it, I was there once too, but I've come around to a new appreciation for our animal nature. This question — how do you know what is conscious? — is very similar to questions like, "how do you know that that dog is afraid?" The short answer to that question is, "because we are kin". Which is an explanation I find much more rich and satisfying than reductionism.
At best, you can put forward a thought experiment that starts with, "Suppose there are beings which are not animals but which are nonetheless conscious." I'm questioning the premise of that thought experiment, however, because so far as we can tell, there is no such thing.
In other words, computers are not conscious because they are not animals.
This may seem like circular reasoning, but not if you take the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of animals as opposed to an emergent property of complex systems.
This creates a blind spot where an area of non-knowledge is assumed to be known about, and rejected out of hand. I have to point out that taking the view that consciousness is a property of animals does not exclude non-animals having it.
Even then, there will be a tussle over the exact line of what qualifies as an animal for the purpose of consciousness, resulting in the need to answer the same generalizations (e.g. intention, mood, emotion) that would allow yet undiscovered but plausible forms of life to qualify as conscious.
I’ve long been of the common-in-tech-circles belief that at some point in the future we will be able to create intelligent, conscious machines. Where my view on this fascinating issue is shifting is that I’m much less convinced that our animal nature is immaterial to this task.
In any case this has been a fascinating and insightful conversation and I appreciate the opportunity to have it with you and the other commenters here.
How is a world where your will is decided by quarks randomly zagging instead of zigging any more open to free will than a deterministic world?
If after the transition is complete we determine/decide they aren't conscious, then we have to argue about at what point the 'hybrid' brain ceases to manifest consciousness, and why. Maybe the organic parts would start to change their prior functionality in response to the synthesized parts... but that would suggest we just didn't have a complete enough model of the neuron and we're back to square one. Once that model is complete, there should by definition be no problem, unless you want to argue it can never be complete, for which you then need evidence to convince everyone.
I say it's worth continued study.
Most, if not all, animals are much more complex than computers.
Or at the very least, it's a fundamental property of the particular kinds of physical systems that animals happen to be, and without understand what that is, we have no hope of replicating consciousness in any non-animal.
This makes sense to me, because consciousness seems to be a question related to brains, which are part of animals, so a really great way to confuse yourself would be to abstract the entire question of consciousness away from the life sciences and then wonder why you're so confused.
Yes, exactly. Which is a direct challenge to transhumanism because it means that maybe it actually won't be possible to achieve immortality via brain upload, or build general AI (without first solving the life science "problem", i.e. building an artificial body), and so on.
Doubtful since the medium of our thought is clear to us but impossible to share and difficult to describe.
It is but a first step, and particle physics/C is the lowest level, we have to understand the complex code written with them and the emergent phenomena.
Would a computer form with enough time and without consciousness from random interactions and the precise laws of the universe?
As an aside, I think you have to be a bit arrogant or closed minded to assert that they actually can see the problem. I really don't think my wife is lying or being nefarious when she says she doesn't see a problem. I trust her and others when they say they don't see a problem.
Earlier, in the cell that avoids the chemical.
I guess I'm siding with group 4, but just saying that quantity has a quality all its own. Or that universal consciousness doesn't have to be spooky.
Consider consciousness. Everyone can accept that it exists. But what is consciousness? Is it really just an emergent property of brain-body activity? Or is it something more? How can an emergent property of a complex system create semi-stable behaviors and self-awareness? What controls consciousness?
IMO, consciousness is just an emergent property of brain-body activity (mostly brain). More recent studies of animal behavior have shown that consciousness is not a binary -- you have it or you don't -- thing. It is a gradient. Different animals possess different levels of cognitive ability, consciousness, self-awareness, social-awareness, etc. In short, there is (again IMO) nothing special about human consciousness: I submit that any sufficiently complex trainable associative-memory neural network (like a biological brain) will possess some level of consciousness as an emergent property. Just like any sufficiently large atmospheric + geological environment will possess weather.
Thus, there is no problem to understand (or not understand).
As an aside, are humans even "fully self-aware"? How would we know if we're not? What does that even really mean?
If p-zombies could exist as complex systems without consciousness, then there would be a problem. But it's not so obvious that their existence is a possibility - or even, as Chalmers puts it, that they are "conceivable". To me, the leap of faith involved in the "hard problem" is really this first one.
This is begging the question of p-zombie existence. Searle and Chalmers both think it's possible for arbitrarily complex systems to exist without qualia. But given that qualia is unmeasurable, there's no way to know for sure.
That's why I consider the statement of the problem to be faith-based. It is possible that consciousness is an emergent property, and qualia is experienced by every sufficiently-complex system. Declaring that p-zombies are conceivable requires assuming that this is not so.
What the Chinese Room may really be telling us is that machine consciousness might be as far from us as usable ML was to 1970's AI researchers, or at least much farther than we think. And, on top of that, if and when it does appear, it won't look human. It won't even look like an animal because it isn't one.
I don't think that something feeling weird justifies violation of Occam's Razor of the same scale as making up souls, gods, etc.
You can talk about the emulated CPU. Its state: its 8-bit register values, the contents of its 2KB of RAM, what 6502-architecture code it's currently running. Its concept of time: how many clock cycles it spends doing what, at an assumed fixed number of nanoseconds per clock cycle. Its inputs and outputs: controller button presses, video out.
Or you can talk about the PC's CPU. Its 64-bit register values, the contents of its gigabytes of RAM, what x86-architecture code it's currently running. Its own clock cycles, its own inputs and outputs.
Both of those can be considered to exist at the same time.
But of course, the emulated CPU doesn’t have an independent physical existence; it’s just an abstraction that exists within the PC. Its register values and RAM contents are represented by some part of the PC’s register values and RAM contents, with some arbitrary encoding depending on the emulator in use. Its time flows whenever the PC feels like running the emulation. The emulator might be set to 1x real time, or 2x or 0.5x, but even that setting only applies on average; individual clock cycles will always proceed at a highly erratic rate. The emulated CPU’s output might go to a real screen or it might just be saved as a video file. And so on.
But if the CPU isn’t real:
(1) Does that mean it’s a “p-zombie” that is only pretending to run 6502 code, but isn’t really?
(2) Does that mean you’re not really playing Super Mario Bros. if you play on an emulator?
My answer to 1 is: maybe, maybe not, but it makes no difference. Because my answer to 2 is: no, you definitely are playing the same game regardless of whether you’re using an emulator or not. The essence of what it means to “play Super Mario Bros.” is to interact with a system that follows certain rules to map controller inputs to video outputs. The rules are a mathematical abstraction, not inherently connected to any physical object. So it doesn’t matter whether the rules are implemented by a physical CPU or an emulator inside another CPU.
And I see consciousness as basically the same thing. A conscious being, to me, is fundamentally a mathematical abstraction consisting of some state, some inputs and outputs, and rules for manipulating the state and producing outputs from inputs, where the rules have to meet certain standards to count as conscious. For example, the rules should be able to perform general-purpose logical reasoning; they should include some kind of concept of self; etc. The exact boundaries could be litigated, but at minimum the rules corresponding to the operation of the human brain quality.
And a physical brain is really just one possible physical representation of that abstraction. A Chinese room would work too. It would be impossibly slow, and the person would need an astronomical number of filing cabinets to store the necessary data, and they’d inevitably commit calculation errors, but aside from that it would work.
So yes, the Chinese room, or the mathematical process it represents, can have consciousness, while the person within it has their own independent consciousness. Just as a NES CPU can exist “inside” a PC CPU, an emulated brain can exist “inside” a real brain (well, “inside” except for the filing cabinets).
Which is non-physical because the storage complexity of a lookup table containing all possible answers to all possible inputs grows exponentially. It wouldn't fit in the universe.
i personally lean towards (4) for this reason. if we say "soul assignment" is not the answer, then we have to explain how some unconscious cells eventually acquire consciousness, and then go back to unconscious again. one solution is that its been there all along, and is every where.
Perhaps the human brain (any brain?) is just a lens for something quantum, or a radio for some signal? or maybe there are some immaterial forces that we can never observe under a microscope.
Seems like a bit of a hint for why we're conscious and they're not.
Start with empiricism: conciousness appears when we add other mental capacities, so probably it is built upon them.
The idea that conciousness (or abstraction) is a fundamental building block (as espoused by neoplatonists) is a much more unlikely explanation to me.
> I am not like a block of steel, but I don't know why.
Let's start from here. This is obviously correct, I think?
Why should I know why?
Most of my conciousness is build on top of unconcious processes that I can't control and only receive input from.
Based on objective observation, you are dynamic and reactive, steel is static and mostly unreactive. Beyond that, you might as well be the same. You claim to experience your existence, but what evidence do you have? And what evidence do you have that a bar of steel doesn't experience something of some sort?
Don't understand, sorry.
> You claim to experience your existence, but what evidence do you have?
Others also make that claim. We appear to each-other to be similar.
> And what evidence do you have that a bar of steel doesn't experience something of some sort?
Magnetic scanners. Strong evidence in my opinion.
I think you shouldn't start with steel, you should start with chemicals that produce nervous signals.
> I think you shouldn't start with steel, you should start with chemicals that produce nervous signals.
The idea being that none of this is direct evidence of consciousness. These give you evidence for answers to soft problems, a block of steel cannot see because it does not have eyes to see. If you attached eyes it would not see, because it would not have an optical cortex. If you gave it an optical cortex it would not see because it does not have... etc.
You can solve all of these soft problems, but they would never tell you how the block of steel experiences the color red, the "qualia" of vision. That's the hard problem. All of the soft problems are "minor" by comparison.
2a) I am not like a block of steel, but I know why ("evolution")
In the same way that a camera takes pictures while a block of steel doesn't because someone designed it that way, we are conscious because evolution designed us that way. Conscious people survive better than those knocked unconscious.
That is literally the secular materialist view of consciousness, yes.
Yes.
You and I are (I presume) conscious and have a meaningful sensation of qualia. If you were to take a high powered laser and destroy exactly one neuron, we still would be. Given how many people survive and do relatively fine after traumatic brain injuries, you can probably extend that to some number of fried neurons while still preserving consciousness.
If the laser destroyed all of our neurons and left our brains a smoking lump of cinder, we would not be conscious. If the laser destroyed all but one neuron, we probably still would not be conscious. That's probably equally true of five or ten neurons.
Now, it may be that if you extend those two scenarios then at some number of neurons, the two will meet and frying just one more neuron completely flips your brain from "as conscious as a fully functional human" to "as inert as a block of steel". But the existence of that magic number seems highly unlikely to me. It would require some explanation for what is special about that exact quantity of neurons that one more or less completely lacks.
It seems then that the most likely reality is that consciousness is a continuum where cognitive machines and living beings can have relatively more or less of it and any threshold that we define to mean "conscious" is mostly as arbitrary as the names of colors.
I suspect the human (and many animal) brain has an information density sufficient to pass such a tipping point. That could even explain why observating quantum phenonema changes the outcome (due to multiple extremely-low-entropy states being unstable).
There could, of course, be many other explanations. Which camp is "I'm unlikely to figure out the answer, and I'm unclear on how it would help me if I did, so I'll continue to disregard the question".
What I'm about to say might make no sense at all, but I seem to remember (or at least think I do, it might be a false memory arising from thinking too much about it) slowly gaining consciousness in early childhood.
I have a birthmark on the back of my hand and some of my earliest memories are triggered by noticing it and realizing I’m a separate being from other people and can influence my actions, stop being a mere observer of my body running on “autopilot”.
I have only passing knowledge of lucid dreaming, but from what I’ve read I’d say becoming a lucid dreamer is not at all dissimilar to developing consciousness in childhood. So maybe that’s a potential avenue for consciousness research.
Attention schema instead builds gradually. It starts with selective signal processing, advancing to body schema, then to attention schema, then to social schema (modeling other's bodies and attention).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...
We know with certainty - since you tell us - that you have that feeling. People have strong feelings about lot of things. People disagree about things of the most intense importance to them, such as the existence of god. I won't list any more examples to avoid arguing about them.
But since people have mutually exclusive very strong intuitions/knowledge/feelings, it seems very clear to me that the presence of the feeling entails absolutely nothing about the further reality of the thing being believed.
A simple and complete explanation is that you have this feeling, and the feeling is all there is to it. Maybe the feeling has some functionality in a social ape. The feeling entails nothing.
Susan Greenfield has a nice expression of a similar idea: the only known functionality of consciousness is that when you ask yourself 'am I conscious?' the answer seems to come back 'yes'.
[edit: typos]
I'm starting to think that the thing that feels "wrong" is just that it directly contradicts foundational elements of your current belief system. And it's perfectly natural to avoid updating a belief system that has and continues to serve you reasonably well, even if you know deep down that it's inaccurate. Because you also know that updating it will have a significant cost as the implications unfold.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the "religion solution" contains a lot of brute-force belief-writing and evidence-avoidance techniques.
Coming from someone who no longer feels the incongruity, and has paid for that update.
So basically it seems there's three camps:
Those that feel the incongruity and don't know a solution.
Those that feel the incongruity and have found their own solution (which is usually what people will call "religion").
Those that do not feel the incongruity.
I don't personally see a way to justify it if someone doesn't feel the problem in their bones.