We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free.
You, on the other hand, are qualia-full. Whether the experience you have when a red object is in front of you derives purely from your optical sensory apparatus, or if it derives from a self-reflective awareness that your brain is dealing with "red" really makes no difference to the central point: you have an experience.
We have no explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia, and possibly, because they are either extremely or completely subjective, we may never any means of studying their existence.
What I’m imagining is that the registering mechanism would itself have sensors placed on its wires that measure the currency levels on those wires, and have the measurements of those sensors as additional inputs into the cognition automaton. And then have sensors on the gates and wires of that automaton, which again feed as additional inputs into that same automaton. Add memory and timing delays. And then multiply all that some million times to get to the level of complexity of our inner mind, of our sensory and movement apparatus, and of our mental models.
When introspecting myself, I don’t see or feel or think anything that couldn’t be explained by such a setup. The different textures (qualia, if you will) of what I perceive in my mind have a certain complexity, but that is merely quantitative and structural, not qualitative.
I therefore simply do not agree that there is a hard problem of consciousness to begin with, in the usually given sense. I don’t agree that there is a qualitative difference between the perception of “qualia” and other perceptions. “Qualia” are just a perception of representations and processes happening in my brain. I see no puzzling mystery that would require solving.
It is not a question of what the sensor detects. It is a question of how it is possible for there to be an experience when sensing occurs.
Your introspection is simply pointing out the likely nature of what you experience, and I actually agree (tentatively) with the idea that most of our conscious experience is rooted in a self-reflecting system. But none of that has any bearing on how there can be ay experience at all.
Think about it: How do you know that you have what you call an “experience”? It’s because you perceive the having of the experience. So, at some point, the perception of having an “experience” is something that enters as an input into your cognitive process, and you match it to some mental models you have about such inputs.
I adjusted my mental model to think of those “qualia” perceptions as being the sensing of parts of the internal workings of my brain. It’s a side-effect of all the processing that is going on, if you will, and of the likely fact that the sensing of some subset of the processing steps is being feed back as inputs into the cognitive processing.
We know that physical systems can sense phenomena in the world. We doubt that they experience anything when they do so. Even if we create a Hofstadterian "strange loop" so that we sense our own sensing, that does not give rise to "experience".
I concede that it could be a matter of scale, but a photosensor that knows that it glows yellow when it senses red does not have an experience.
Yes, a photosensor doesn't have that kind of sensation, and that's because there is nothing going on inside of it that would correspond to that sensation. In the humain brain there is enough that is going on (the complexity and quantity is staggering) that our range of inner experience is easily representable by it. And "experiencing" merely means that we are processing those representations in a way that enters our cognition, like "mere" perceptions do as well.
It seems that you are thinking that perceptions lead to experience, and then nothing else. My view is that perceptions lead to internal processing that in turn is itself perceived by our cognition, in addition to the original perceptions. And it's the texture of this perceived processing that we call "experiencing". That is, it doesn't stop at the "experience" step, because then we wouldn't know anything about it. Instead, the information about the experience then enters our cognitive processing as a subsequent step. And that's how we don't perceive just "red" full stop, but also an associated "experience" of the red. But again, we wouldn't know about that experience if that wasn't information that enters our mind. And I see no puzzle about such information entering our mind.
It seems that you are thinking that perceptions lead
to experience, and then nothing else.
My view is that perceptions lead to internal processing
that in turn is itself perceived by our cognition, in
addition to the original perceptions
If we decide that a simple light sensor isn't "conscious" because it's a pure input/output machine with no machinery that could reasonably be described as "internal processing", then what about a Roomba?
I also don’t think consciousness is black and white, there is certainly a spectrum. To us, qualia have complex, multi-faceted and multi-layered textures, in line with what we can cognitively perceive and process, and they trigger just-as-complex associations and emotions. It seems to me that this richness is a large part of what makes consciousness wondrous.
I don’t think a Roomba is observing its own internal processing. A program that debugs/profiles its own execution and uses those data as inputs of its main functions, or a neural network that feeds back the changing weights of its edges as additional inputs for itself, would maybe come closer to asking that question.
As an analogy, does a simple light sensor qualify as “seeing”? “Seeing” on the level of a mammal, with object and motion recognition and building an internal spacial model of what it sees, along with predicting what will happen in the next moments based on what it sees, is certainly on a whole other level.
There is a theory, Integrated Information Theory (IIT) [0], which argues exactly that [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
[1]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.2307/25470707#_i2
Maybe the analogy is that a single DNA molecule is not a living thing but that molecule along with a bunch of others is?
Seems like the problem arises in pinning down what level of complexity is required.
However, if this does turn out to be true, I suspect that it will not constitute an "explanation" of experience, merely a description of its prerequisites.
There's also a view that consciousness is intrinsic to everything (ah, here you go https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousnes...) which is a cheap, cheesy and IMO totally unacceptable way to 'explain' consciousness and I reject that as an explanation, but it doesn't make it actually wrong.
Edit: missed your last line "We have explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia" - I'm surprised, you can explain it, got any links?
[ fixed the missing "no" in the GP ]
And if you throw in phrases like "composition problem" and "analytical idealism" the fer fuck's sake provide some simple explanation or something.
At any rate, given the context of the thread I didn't feel the need to clarify what the composition problem nor idealism are. But since you ask:
The composition (aka combination) problem refers to the need to explain how multiple bits of consciousness combine together to form a united and cohesive experience such as yours or mine. The hard problem focuses instead on how quantities (matter) give rise to qualities (experience).
Analytic Idealism is the view that experience is the ontological primitive. Both problems sublimate away. Yes, you can derive physics from it. In fact you don't even bother physics in any way: all we know about it remains valid under analytic idealism. If anything, many counterintuitive findings of QM fall into place under AI. If this pique your interest, here's a good intro https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/.
No. It can be entirely right. It just isn't useful in any way.
From your link "Analytic Idealism is a theory of the nature of reality that maintains that the universe is experiential in essence"
Maintain all you like. It might even - per my prior statement on pan-psychism - be true. I want quantifiable evidence before we accept it as true. Cough up.
Anyway, thanks for the descriptions of the tech terms.
Don't fall back to sophistry. Is there evidence? yes or no, if yes then show me.
> There is research compatible with these claims. It's mentioned and linked in the link I've previously provided.
I'm downloading the single video which mentions the word evidence. If there is any more evidence links, please show me them, especially written evidence, and especially especially, empirical evidence.
To ask what something _is_ implies reduction. You want a description of experience in terms of something else. So you are begging the question, having already concluded that it's not fundamental. In idealism experience is the reduction basis, so the question makes no sense. On the contrary, one should try to explain everything else in terms of experience (and if you don't accept a reduction basis, then you won't be able to explain anything, even with materialism).
Now, the explanations need to be consistent with empirical evidence and they need to have explanatory power. I submit to you that AI succeeds, and the empirical adequacy of those claims is abundantly linked in the description of the material you are downloading.
Science and scientific theories are concerned with the behaviour of nature, not its essence. They tell us how it behaves, not what it is. We build models out of observations and given the chance, we should stand by a model with the most explanatory power.
This is not true. When people have asked "what is gravity" and they determine that its a fundamental, non-decomposable force within the universe, they are not disappointed. That's still an answer.
"Consciousness is a fundamental property of <X> in our universe" is a perfectly fine answer to the question "What is consciousness". It's just not the answer that most people currently find most likely.
> To ask what something _is_ implies reduction
Yes, but you learn something. What is wood? Partly it's lignin. What's that? Randomly polymerised phenol-like molecules. What's phenol? A benzene ring (unsaturated carbon ring) with an OH on it. What are C, O and H? Elements. What is (eg.) carbon? An atom composed of... etc.
You can't reduce consciousness/qualia in any way so you cop out.
The AI video #5 takes some interesting quantum stuff and extrapolates it with extreme dodginess and emotive language into some semi/pseudo-scientific conjectures. My guess is you haven't even watched the vids.
> I submit to you that AI succeeds, and the empirical adequacy of those claims is abundantly linked in the description of the material you are downloading
Nope.
I've had enough here.
Do you notice that this is infinite regress? At a certain point you must accept a non-reducible fundamental. If you don't, then it's infinite regress and you have explained effectively nothing. Materialism accepts the quantum foam as primitive. Idealism consciousness. But it's the same epistemic step, accepting a primitive, and derive the rest from it.
Would these be like the “easy problems” then?
Besides, wouldn't that be exactly like our current physics? (Where we reduce until we find something fundamental like “electric charge just is and has this properties”, similarly for Quantum fields and the like -- and then how that composes and interacts with other fundamentals is the whole business.)
The main difference is that physics is quantifiable, so we can come up with in-principle explanations of really complex stuff (weather forecasts, life itself, etc). With qualities it's a different ballgame, because we are talking about different subjects combining into one. Not saying that it's a dead end, but we haven't even yet started to define the problem, let alone solving it.
There are other more compelling roads. Rather than a combination mechanism, we can look at the problem from a decomposition perspective. This is easier because it's a really well understood phenomenon that we can actually study: the compartmentalization of one unified mind into separate minds, also known as multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder. Here, we have a clear in-principle path to walk.
Actually, no. This is the one part of the problem we are clear on.
Since this is an adequate excuse to give a lecture, here we go:
Suppose I say "I am fat", and suppose you say of me "he is fat". In both of these sentences, the same thing is meant - an observation of the physical world was made, and excess lipids were detected. However, if I say "I am looking at a laptop", and you say "he is looking at a laptop", we don't mean the same thing. You mean that a particular physical state has been observed, with my eyeballs and brain directed laptopwards. Whereas what I mean...
...well, what I certainly don't mean is that I see any eyeballs, or brain. I don't observe any process of looking at all. I just look. What I mean by "I am looking" is completely different to what you mean by "he is looking" even though the two statements are formally similar.
In other words, there are two wildly different, incommensurable uses of the word "am". One of them has a corresponding "is", one of them does not.
So, getting back to qualia, there simply are no qualia. There are qualia that am, but as noted above, that doesn't imply that there are qualia that are.
We have many explanations for what people describe as "the hard problem". But nobody who believes in "the hard problem" accepts these explanations, which have been given for decades by philosophers like Dennett.
There is no way to reconcile your view, that there IS a hard problem and that no progress has been made toward solving it, with our view, that there is no such problem, and that it does not need solving.
For me, the hard problem is such an obvious and almost intractable thing that any folks who dismiss it clearly don’t understand it (or live an inner experience that lets them understand it).
And because I’ve never really seen anyone flip on their view of the hard problem, I’m 99% convinced it’s because they actually have a different lived conscious experience. Perhaps they process information different, or have more or less access to their internal state.
It’s possible that folks who dismiss the hard problem actually have more conscious access to their internal state and hence don’t understand why it’s an issue.
An analogy is aphantasia (folks who don’t have an internal visual experience). Somebody with an aphantasic brain simply doesn’t experience consciously like others. I feel that understanding that the hard problem exists is something rooted in a different internal experience.
As for how illusions occur and from what things, it does hardly seem possible. But the alternatives are hardly better.
The illusionism argument is ridiculous because an illusion is still experienced (the very fact we are talking about it is proof), so at best it is circular reasoning. Probably it's woo-enough to be taken seriously by some :)
What are "you"? And what is an "experience"? You highlight this like it's a magical phrase that cannot be explained, and your arguments suggest that you take it as a foundational assumption. But if you assume a fundamentally inexplicable nature to both personhood and experience, then you cannot possibly recognize any explanation for these, because doing so would require giving up your assumption.
I recently came across a paper arguing that consciousness as commonly referred to does not exist due to semantic issues around the term "consciousness," and your arguments reminded me of it. It's quite readable, if you're interested: "Consciousness Semanticism: A Precise Eliminativist Theory of Consciousness" by Jacy Reese Anthis. The abstract and main argument:
> Abstract. Many philosophers and scientists claim that there is a ‘hard problem of consciousness’, that qualia, phenomenology, or subjective experience cannot be fully understood with reductive methods of neuroscience and psychology, and that there is a fact of the matter as to ‘what it is like’ to be conscious and which entities are conscious. Eliminativism and related views such as illusionism argue against this. They claim that consciousness does not exist in the ways implied by everyday or scholarly language. However, this debate has largely consisted of each side jousting analogies and intuitions against the other. Both sides remain unconvinced. To break through this impasse, I present consciousness semanticism, a novel eliminativist theory that sidesteps analogy and intuition. Instead, it is based on a direct, formal argument drawing from the tension between the vague semantics in definitions of consciousness such as ‘what it is like’ to be an entity and the precise meaning implied by questions such as, ‘Is this entity conscious?’ I argue that semanticism naturally extends to erode realist notions of other philosophical concepts, such as morality and free will. Formal argumentation from precise semantics exposes these as pseudo-problems and eliminates their apparent mysteriousness and intractability.
> 3 The Semanticism Argument
> Now that terminology is established, the semanticism argument is brief and straightforward.
> 1. Consider the common definitions of the property of consciousness (e.g., ‘what it is like to be’ an entity) and the standard usage of the term (e.g., ‘Is this entity conscious?’).
> 2. Notice, on one hand, each common definition of ‘consciousness’ is imprecise.
> 3. Notice, on the other hand, standard usage of the term ‘consciousness’ implies precision.
> 4. Therefore, definitions and standard usage of consciousness are inconsistent.
> 5. Consider the definition of exist as proposed earlier: Existence of a property requires that, given all relevant knowledge and power, we could precisely categorize all entities in terms of whether and to what extent, if any, they possess that property.
> 6. Therefore, consciousness does not exist.
https://jacyanthis.com/Consciousness_Semanticism.pdf
I recommend reading it before objecting, as the author addresses a number of possible objections in section 4.
Edit: I read it. Anthis readily grants the existence of a mental life but wants to deny that “consciousness” is a meaning property. Sure, for the sake of argument. But that leaves the question of why I have a mental life at all entirely unaddressed.
You might as well demand the atheist explanation for how god created the world. The atheist must deny the premise of the question, they can't give an answer in the terms of the question.
"We have no explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia"
We do, but not in the terms you set out. The explanation is that that there is not a you that experiences qualia, two separate things. Rather the experiences ARE YOU. There's nothing they happen to. Their happening is you.
You don't have to agree with it. But the hard question is not ducked. It is not a coherent question in this view.
Short of panpsychism (which could be a thing), I think we mostly all agree that there are almost certainly objects in the world in which there is no experience By contrast, I think we mostly all agree that we (each of us as individuals, and humans as a group) are things in which experience does occur.
This naturally gives rise to the question: if some set of things have no experience, and another set of things have experience, how does experience arise in the the second set of things?
There are subsidiary question, such as whether experiences may come in different "levels" thus creating a continuum between "none" and "definitely experiencing". But these are secondary, mostly, the question of how things in which experience occurs differ from the things where it does not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
It could be that a rock, an ant, a computer, and a human being are all experiencing its existence at varying levels of awareness. And that this "experience" isn't necessarily exclusive to living things - though it may be impossible to prove or understand how a computer experiences itself, if at all.
It's also amusing to entertain the opposite, the perspective of people who deny the existence of "experience and qualia" altogether, who argue there is no "hard problem of consciousness" in the first place. Maybe people experience consciousness so differently, for some it's "invisible", and for others it's undeniable and obvious that it exists.
Indeed. I have seen it proposed by hard problemists that people to whom it is "invisible" may in fact be p-zombies.
Your thought experiment actually shows why a materialistic model makes much more sense than any model that takes "the hard problem" seriously. It's trivially easy to show that the human brown is much more complex than an electronic circuit that registers red or blue light, and that the human brain is doing much more. It's no surprise to anyone that a simple circuit like that lacks an abstraction of the world around it.
But if you believe qualia is an actual thing, than how can you show that the circuit lacks it? No one seems to be able to come up with any way of measuring qualia, or even showing that it exists. There's no way to show that we have more of it than the circuit, and we're left relying on what "feels right."
Before demanding that models solve "the hard problem," we should first ask ourselves if there's any evidence that "the hard problem" even exists. The only evidence I've seen anyone provide for qualia is that they feel they have it, or extremely contrived thought experiments where people feel like it makes the most sense. Counter to this is the entirety of science showing that the world we live in is one that is an emergent one of physical properties. Which, yes, leads to a good number of surprising things.
Creationists thought that god had to have a role in creating life, because they couldn't conceive that something as complex as an eye could be an emergent feature of random physical properties. "Hard problem" folks think that there must be some sort of non-physical "qualia," because they can't comprehend that our experiences are simply an emergent feature of the extremely complex neurons in our brains. Yet scientists that actually study these things don't run into these problems, and keep using the physical model because it's the only one that has made any sense so far.
Is that not sufficient? It's Descartes' "I think therefore I am". Qualia are just experiences, so if you experience something then they exist.
I don't think qualia need to be non-physical. The "hard problem" remains even if they are physical, because they don't exist within our current understanding of physics and thus still need to be explained.
Actually, reading https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/#Uses, it seems that your restricted definition of qualia "Qualia as intrinsic, nonphysical, ineffable properties" is one use of the term. But it also has a more general meaning:
"Qualia as phenomenal character. Consider your visual experience as you stare at a bright turquoise color patch in a paint store. There is something it is like for you subjectively to undergo that experience. What it is like to undergo the experience is very different from what it is like for you to experience a dull brown color patch. This difference is a difference in what is often called ‘phenomenal character’."
If you experience something, some experience exists. It does not mean that qualia exists. I've had people use the same personal experiential evidence for the soul, god, reiki, and a whole host of other metaphysical phenomenon. Hopefully we can agree that someone relating their experience of the metaphysical is not sufficient evidence that the metaphysical exists (if it is, we need to believe in a whole host of things).
I've followed a lot of neuroscience research. I've never seen any that says "hey, we've run into this problem, but it can't be solved by our current understanding of physics." The "hard problem" seems to reside entirely in the realm of philosophy. There might be a few neuroscientists who engage it in an informal way from time to time, but by and large the people who actually study the mind don't seem to have this problem.
That's not to say that there's not a lot left to learn. There is. But there's no evidence that anything like the "hard problem" or "qualia" exists or is a barrier to our understanding of the brain.
That's because neuroscience explicitly avoids the philosophical problems of the mind as a premise of the entire discipline. The "hard problem" is that we can reach a point where neuroscience has completely explained human behaviour, and we still won't have explained the existence of experience or how it relates to the physical world. Neuroscience doesn't worry about the "hard problem" because it isn't even close to solving the "easy problem" yet.
> If you experience something, some experience exists. It does not mean that qualia exists.
I believe that "qualia" as used in the context of the "hard problem" is just "experience". It doesn't imply anything more specific than that. To quote Chalmers who coined the term "hard problem":
"...even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?"
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...)
What he is talking about is just experience. Not a more specific meaning of qualia (i.e. definition 1, not 2, 3, or 4 on this list https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/#Uses)
I personally feel like it's hard to justify being anything other than agnostic on this question (and indeed the question of whether inanimate objects like rocks have consciousness). Reason being essentially that we have so little understanding of consciousness that it seems hard to justify claiming any knowledge of it at all.
+ Human beings
+ Dogs
+ Bugs
+ Plants
+ Eukaryotes
+ Viruses
+ Proteins
+ Molecules
+ Atoms
+ Subatomic Particles
+ ???
+ Pure Information, ones and zeros
Here is a line (--------). Place it so that above it, things are conscious, and below it, things are not conscious. It seems very obvious to me that there is nothing special about human beings, (or dogs, or bugs, or plants, or wherever you draw the line), that makes them special and conscious. For example; if you assert that the line is at "Bugs" I could not possibly disprove or prove you right, although I would suspect that you might be a Bug. Likewise, I could assert that your circuit has qualia, and you could never prove or disprove me.
Proving or disproving me is solving the hard problem. It's hard because it's meaningless, because consciousness is either shared by all things; or, shared by no things. Which is, imho, a distinction without a difference.
Alternative: it is shared by 192 kinds of things, and nothing else.
Why not?
+ ???
+ The Galaxy
+ The entire Biosphere
+ Regions of Space
+ Corporations
+ Humans
We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit
that registers different current levels when
exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm
aware of) suggests that there is an experience
within the electronic circuit
If we are to claim that consciousness is a series of inputs and outputs, then even a simple device like the one you described is "conscious."
A moderately more complex device (say, a Roomba) might even be said to experience "qualia" because it clearly makes decisions and considers some things good and other things bad.
And by this logic a blade of grass is almost certainly conscious.
That's fine, I guess, but it feels awfully lazy. If we expand the definition of consciousness to include Roombas and blades of grass, that's cool, but we still have the challenging problem of defining what makes human consciousness different from grass consciousness. If we decide that the difference is purely quantitative, then we have some uncomfortable things to think about.
If we value human life more than grass or Roombas, because we have "more" consciousness, then are some humans more valuable than others because they have more neurons, or perhaps simply more active neurons?