This reminds me of religious arguments about how evolution can't account for complex organs like eyes. I think in general humans just have a very difficult time conceptualizing massive numbers and systems, and as such the emergent phenomena that come out of it seem unreal.
Whenever I look into neuroscience, it looks like researchers are getting a clearer and clearer idea of how things work (as you noted, we even understand how to manipulate things at a basic level), but the system is so massive that it's slow going. As such, there's a certain "god of the gaps" argument that people turn to, where anything that researchers haven't yet fully understood gets treated as evidence that there's "something more." You see the same sort of arguments for religious explanations for other natural processes that are still being understood.
When I listen to people who actually study this (and make progress on it), they don't see to hit any limits using a physical approach. The "hard problem" seems to mostly exist in the minds of people outside the field who are unsettled by the thought that we might not be special (a pretty common reaction whenever science makes progress on subjects).
Yeah this is fundamentally an argument from ignorance[1].
I want to “just” be a semi-random byproduct of the natural laws and processes. I’m completely fine with that.
On the contrary, I think it is sad that such a reality terrifies people.
So I am religious (Christian -- with a belief in God, afterlife, etc. ) but I actually find a lot of comfort with the very high likelihood that I am totally wrong. The idea of ceasing to exist after this life sounds pretty awesome! Or maybe the afterlife being a completely different experience than what I can currently comprehend.
It's interesting, though, because when I talk to other active members of my congregation about even the possibility of our views being wrong they often view the entertainment of such thoughts as a lack of faith or lack of spiritual experiences. There is often such a fearful, defensive arrogance with religious people (not excluding myself) that I completely understand why many are completely turned away from religion. It's tough to talk to people unwilling to be wrong.
I too, find it sad that people can't cope with the possibility of life being just a random occurrence. There is something beautiful to me about the idea that once we die it is all done (or that an afterlife would be different now than what I can comprehend now should we continue to exist).
Sentience is literally the thing that defines our experience of the world. It's irrational to dismiss it as "Oh, that's nothing. Don't worry about it."
It may well be "a semi-random by product of natural laws and processes", but that's a hand-wavey non-explanation.
Whatever the details are, we're so completely ignorant of them we can't even hazard a reasonable testable hypothesis about how exactly natural laws and processes create self-awareness.
Saying it's a non-problem because "obviously" it just is, is the opposite of science.
> The "hard problem" seems to mostly exist in the minds of people outside the field who are unsettled by the thought that we might not be special (a pretty common reaction whenever science makes progress on subjects).
I don't need consciousness or sentience to need a special or magic substrate to combat existential dread, because I don't feel it in the first place. My comment was not meant to be an explanation either, and I honestly can't see how you read that into it.
Listening to the guests of Lex Fridman on the subject, I'd say the exact opposite: very few of them are pure materialists. I recently tried to listen into a virtual conference of neuroscientists and the keynote (Susan Greenfield) specifically said, "we're not going to be able to turn the water into wine here" that we're only going to be able to discuss the neural correlates of consciousness, etc.
I'm a casual consumer of "popular science" but I only see serious people acknowledge the problem as hard, or explicitly limit their discussion to what-can-be-discussed. I'd say the same for physicists interested in the subject (Richard Penrose and David Deutsch come to mind.)
I'd love to hear who you think is the most convincing materialist here?
EDIT: I'll add that philosophical idealism isn't rooted in a desire to be special. An advaita guru or zen monk for instance is an extreme idealist philosophically and doesn't exhibit any evidence of wanting to be special.
Sean Carroll has a paper arguing that we know much more about the laws of physics than we know about consciousness, so it seems much more likely that we can explain consciousness within the current structure of physics than a brand new "something" that explains consciousness can slot into physical laws without violating all the existing confirmations of physics.
The only reason I'd be quick to dismiss it, is because his understanding of the panpsychist position is very physical.
When an panpsychist says capital-C consciousness (as opposed to arousal, etc) is the necessary premise of the material, they're not proposing it as a physical "ingredient." They're positing a non-thing uniform in all physical phenomena. It's only "attribute" is its self-evidence. And it is indeed passive (which he states as a gotchya).
His argument is that we understand more about physics (quantum field theory) so we should work from that grounding. But his use of "understanding" implies "we have more information." Of course we have more information, a capital-C Consciousness background is, by definition, information-less.
That's not a cop-out. We know some non-thing exists because we have our material experiences reporting to it. Our experience of it might be modulated by the physical but it's no more causal than a canvas is to a painting. The paper insists it can't be causal. True, it isn't. The canvas doesn't cause the painting even though it proceeds it as a precondition. The canvas is not an ingredient, it's a self-evident premise.
It's like looking through a telescope and saying I know much more about the sky than my eyes, therefore it's silly to develop a theory of eyes that's not based in sky.
The only reason we know we have a "hard problem of Consciousness" is because we each (at least one of us) knows "I am" and there's no way to take the derivations of that experience and give rise to their origin.
He has one paragraph/sentence on why Consciousness can't be passive: "No compelling account of consciousness can attribute a central explanatory role to metaphysical ingredients that have no influence on these kinds of behavior." He might have more to unroll here, I'd be curious to know.
my discomfort with these issues has nothing to do with some notion that we are "special" as the universe might have quadrillions of other conscious life forms and I'm OK with that. it has to do with the fact that it's completely paradoxical and links to basically all of existence being a paradox, which then makes the whole thing pretty suspect, and at the very least completely out of the realm of something that can be "understood" by the beings that are the ones currently experiencing consciousness.
This seems entirely self-consistent and non-paradoxical.
Sure there is progress in neuroscience, researchers understand more about the mechanism of the brain all the time. But there have arguably been very little progress on the hard problem of consciousness. Feel like those things are getting conflated in this comment.
It's fascinating to think about, because it raises questions like whether a tree or even a rock experiences subjectivity. If subjective experience doesn't require consciousness, then maybe more things have that experience than we might expect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
You don't falsify philosophical problems; the definition of consciousness is metaphysical, not scientific (the Chinese room, philosophical zombies, qualia and Mary the color super-scientist, the Turing test...).
You can make falsifiable scientific predictions by building theories about your philosophical concepts, by creating detailed definitions of the process you want to study (e.g. studying brain waves and correlating them with the perceptions of people subject to certain perceptual stimuli, to predict how people respond to certain images or sounds). But this approach doesn't capture the philosophical problem in its entirety, so you can't prove or disprove it in full.
If so, we should mind both possibilities, and I very much agree that philosophy is key to learning about the issue (as opposed to physics, chemistry, biology and so on), though I might add Kant to your list.
The illusion is that these abstractions are evidence of something qualitatively more advanced than simple neurons interacting in a way that's beneficial for the organism. Which isn't unusual, we've seen the same kind of reaction when people proclaim that they couldn't have "come from monkeys," or any other scientific discovery that knocks humans off the pedestal they've placed themselves upon.
A society of only p-zombies would call p-zombieness consciousness and they would be no less correct than us.
There were some experiments in which subjects were asked to push a button whenever they chose. The results showed that the impulse to push the button arose before the subject was aware of having "decided" to push the button (I can't recall how they managed to detect and measure this).
At any rate, I think that's what the parent is referring to.
Neuroscience actually confirms this :-) Brain scans show that conscious thoughts are reflections of subconscious processes doing all the work, AND that the rational mind is very good at creating post-hoc rationalizations for explaining "reasons" of why you arrived to the decisions you took. Most of what we call "reasoning" is about creating narratives to save our self-esteem.
Simply put, if you stop believing that you're sentient, you stop existing as a single entity that has a "self". Your existence and your belief aren't cause and effect, though - they're literally the same thing, just expressed in different words.
I find it more useful to think of "consciousness" as a special model created by a subconscious human brain. Unlike other abstract models that a subconscious brain can create, such as a rock or a tree or a cat, the subconscious brain learns to associate details of this special model with certain physical perceptions that the subconscious brain receives (specifically, the physical perceptions that correspond with its own body, as opposed to physical perceptions that correspond to things that this system would model as not being part of its own body). By "subconscious human brain", I'm thinking of something like an embodied, complex neural network that receives sensory inputs of various kinds and sends signals to physically respond in various ways, but which doesn't have anything we would call "self-awareness" outside of this special model that's associated with the bodily physical perceptions.
I think this offers a nice balance between explaining the tremendous flexibility we have in understanding ourselves (by telling ourselves and others stories that change our models of ourselves) and explaining the tremendous limitations we have (because any model of a system within that same system is going to have to be significantly less complex if that system is going to do lots of other things, too). And I like that it doesn't suggest that we "aren't real"; instead, it suggests that at any given point in time, we're living, physical entities with subconscious minds that often contain self-referential models that tend to be very relevant to our actual physical living.
2) Assuming "[consciousness] is an illusion created because it was evolutionarily advantageous" is true, still how do those subjective sensations of existing and being aware of things - those qualia - how do they come about? How do these alleged consciousness-enabling genes that got selected into our genome create proteins that then create this qualia for us?
2. We have no way of knowing any of this because we don't even have a handle on what sentience is.
For instance, ants exhibit self-aware behavior when presented with a mirror test. Does this mean ants are sentient?
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1026227683/mirror-mirror-on-t...
The existence of consciousness just feels like a unique problem because we only feel and think through the medium of consciousness itself. Consciousness is the closest we get to the baffling existence of existence.
The good news is that we don’t really need an answer. It is enough to know that some configuration of matter and energy coincide with consciousness, and that means we can create it. Just like applesauce.
It also seems like we can just as well say that computers magically become conscious as we can say water meat sacks magically become conscious.
To me, emergent phenomena is nothing other than the complexity resulting from observing a group of smaller phenomena interact from a higher-scope. And from what I can tell, building blocks of emergent phenomena do explain everything regarding the emergent phenomena, but only when a sufficient amount of the building blocks are accounted for.
If it is, we have a long, long way to go before we start to understand it.
People are only attracted to this idea because it rescues the concept of "true consciousness" but I am not even convinced that is the case either - it still is deriving from a deterministic evolution of a wave function.
One thing I know is that there is no physical law I've ever learned about that accounts for it. My brain is doing information processing, and the connection between that and physical laws is clear. But it seems like that could happen entirely without the accompanying subjective experience.
On the other hand, it has to be somehow connected to the physical, because my consciousness (temporarily) goes away when I sleep, and an anesthesiologist once used chemistry to force it to go away in about 5 seconds.
And I have no idea how to reconcile these two things. I've heard "it's an emergent phenomenon", but that's super hand-wavy to me. It might be true that it's emergent, but that doesn't tell me what the connection is. Plus emergent consciousness is not a very falsifiable hypothesis since it conveniently says don't be surprised if you never see anything at all if you look for it under simple conditions.
Anyway, what is an emergent phenomenon? In terms of numbers, I'll say it's like if you start with X which is tiny, then multiply it by 1.01 a whole bunch of times, eventually you'll get a number which is significant. That makes sense, but it assumes X is nonzero, and the most interesting question is why X isn't zero.