[HN Gopher] We Are Beast Machines
___________________________________________________________________
We Are Beast Machines
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 52 points
Date : 2021-10-14 11:10 UTC (1 days ago)
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| StuntPope wrote:
| Another materialist who has it exactly backwards.
|
| Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. It is the
| base layer of reality.
| ganzuul wrote:
| You have to admire the repeatability with which they get it
| wrong. It's almost like they copied their homework.
| callesgg wrote:
| Of subjective reality yes.
| hnthrway wrote:
| Which is all any of us have access to, and which all science
| is couched within
|
| Objective reality is just consensus reality
| callesgg wrote:
| I don't know.. consensus reality is what I would call the
| reality that is portrayed in media or mabye the reality
| that fits the most nr of people.
|
| Objective reality is best described with particle physics
| but that stuff can't be understood by the human mind. The
| human mind can't keep track of so much complexity at once.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I'm always curious on how the selection process works. How come
| I'm not this person or that person? How come I'm this person
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Extreme selection bias.
| ganzuul wrote:
| I'm finally starting to unravel New Age terminology which deals
| with this subject. Eastern philosophy is almost impenetrable due
| to the cultural barrier, but those who succeeded imported some
| relevant ideas to Wester society.
|
| It's really bizarre how some of these wisdom teachers go on
| conspiratorial rants which have a completely different tone from
| the actually useful information.
| joeberon wrote:
| Eastern philosophy isn't impenetrable, and people who cannot
| penetrate it aren't hampered by cultural difference.
|
| Even for natives of those cultures, penetrating that philosophy
| often takes years of spiritual practise and training. The
| reason is that it isn't about ideas, it's an actual body-mind
| training and transformation of being. It isn't something you
| just sit and talk about and discuss, although it can include
| that, but also it must come with actual implementation to
| occur.
|
| That's the main difference I've noticed between western
| philosophy and eastern philosophy which makes them difficult to
| integrate. The former is almost always understood by the
| experience of so-called "ordinary beings" and communicated in
| terms of intellectual arguments, whereas the latter cannot
| really be understood unless you actually physically and
| spiritually transform your very being.
|
| For example, I used to practise Soto Zen, and Dogen's
| philosophical writings are very popular there. Western
| philosophers, or just general non-practitioners, absolutely
| bash their heads against his writing, it's just so difficult to
| wrangle and there's no connection. In Soto Zen we understand it
| by sitting zazen (seated meditation). Literally, the only way I
| know to understand it is by doing meditation practise. Then
| next time you read it and you have a deep connection with it
| that you can't explain in a way that someone who hasn't had
| that connection would understand. Western philosophy seems to
| not be compatible with those kinds of transformations. If it
| cannot be explained in a way that is somehow independent of the
| observer's own practise, then it is not considered rigorous,
| but also such a thing is impossible when talking, for example,
| about Zen.
| ganzuul wrote:
| I did use the qualifier 'almost'... and I don't see you
| actually disagreeing with what I meant.
|
| There was something called Eckhart Seminar Training or
| something which took people through decades of training in
| the more cumbersome system in a week. Similarly, a lot of
| cultural impedance has been removed in the teachings of
| Western sages.
|
| Teachings need to be updated and modernized as we progress as
| society.
| joeberon wrote:
| > Teachings need to be updated and modernized as we
| progress as society.
|
| I don't think there's any way to do that without
| understanding them, but to understand them fully you
| basically have to become a Buddha...so it is not clear how
| to do this without removing essential parts of the
| teachings, as are often done when surgically transposing
| bits of eastern philosophy into the west
| ganzuul wrote:
| What Westerners need to be taught is different from the
| needs of other cultures. Seekers here are seldom lacking
| in their discernment, but very lacking in their empathy.
| joeberon wrote:
| I haven't experienced that the teachings need to change
| personally, but yes the emphasis needs to. Unfortunately
| westerners are being fed teachings that are more like
| "this meditation will make you experience a sober LSD
| trip" and "this one will cure your depression" and "this
| will give you insight into the nature of reality",
| because that's what westerners want. But what they
| actually _need_ is teachings on compassion, loving
| kindness, etc, which they are in no way interested in.
| Ultimately you cannot have one without the other. There
| are no eastern spiritual paths that don 't integrate both
| insight and compassion.
| ganzuul wrote:
| AFAIK the ads don't really correspond to the content.
| Regardless if you are looking for weight loss, business
| success, or liberation, you come into contact with the
| same teachings because it does all of the above. It
| brings people in with concepts they are familiar with.
| joeberon wrote:
| Yeah I think you have to misrepresent to get people in,
| but personally I don't like that. I would rather we don't
| lie about it and Buddhism (for example) dies than we
| misrepresent it.
| nickelpro wrote:
| Nothing in this essay addresses the single most prominent
| question of contemporary philosophy of mind, which is the hard
| problem of consciousness. It only addresses the soft problems,
| which everyone agrees are solvable "merely" with enough time,
| funding, and initiative. Nothing about the "beast machine"
| addresses how qualitative experience arises from physical
| phenomena, or as Chalmers puts it, "Why are we not philosophical
| zombies?" Of course the hard problem, by its nature, is likely
| irreducible, so expecting it to be solved is unreasonable.
|
| The point is books and passages like this are only compelling if
| you've already accepted a hand-wavey answer to the hard problem.
| In this case the author's accepted answer seems to be the ever
| popular, "consciousness is an illusion," but that particular
| explanation to the hard problem is no more valid (or any less
| vague) than any other. Stating it with authority and not
| acknowledging it as a "faith-based" axiom undermines the work.
| dougmwne wrote:
| To turn this on it's head, maybe the problem is assuming that
| everything else in the universe is without consciousness aside
| from certain classes of matter organized in a particular
| configuration of a brain. If we instead assume that
| consciousness is an intrinsic property of all matter and space,
| then the problem goes away. Or to state it another way, either
| everything is conscious or nothing is.
| jerf wrote:
| It doesn't do a darned thing to the problem. It just moves it
| around; the question becomes "If the entire universe is
| 'conscious', for whatever your definition is, why are some
| configurations of matter more able to express it and others
| less?" How can we build an identifier that says what will be
| more expressive and less by inputting the configuration? How
| can we engineer configurations of matter that are more
| expressive rather than less? It is clearly obviously that
| configurations of matter are not just additive, that is,
| every 3 pounds of matter is the exact same type of conscious
| as any other 3 pounds of matter, so what's the difference,
| _exactly_?
|
| Which happens to be the exact same problem.
|
| This problem doesn't go away with any amount of changing
| definitions. Shifting the mystery under the rug where you
| can't see it doesn't mean the mystery has gone away, nor that
| everyone else is going to be fooled. Some of still see the
| lump under the rug you just created.
| dougmwne wrote:
| To me, all those questions are much closer to creating a
| testable hypothesis than trying to ask how to go from 0 to
| 1, from the inert to the conscious. "Consciousness
| expression" sounds like something you could develop a
| measurement of based on an observable behavior. I'm not
| sweeping the problem under the rug, rather presenting a
| scenario in which trying to discover the origin of
| consciousness is like trying to discover the origin of
| energy.
| lostmsu wrote:
| I think you are the one doing hand-waving to pretty trivial
| resolutions of p-zombie problem.
|
| Specifically, that the way I'd define sentience, "qualia", and
| experience as certain replies to certain stimulae. Namely,
| sentience as ability (skill level) to play any game like
| Starcraft, experience as ability to reproduce previously
| received inputs, and qualia as the set of answers to all
| possible questions to describe a particular input.
|
| Given these definitions, the construct of Chinese room (which
| is supposed to be a p-zombie) has all 3.
|
| So unless you can either provide better definitions (without
| violating Occam's Razor and Popper's criteria) of the 3
| concepts, which Chinese room would not satisfy, or give another
| way to construct a p-zombie, which would not have one of them,
| but still feel otherwise indistinguishable from "a person", the
| problem's solution is staring at you right there.
| [deleted]
| robotresearcher wrote:
| I firmly believe this problem will melt away in time.
| 'Consciousness' will gradually cease to be something that
| empirical science is concerned with, any more than the 'soul'
| is now, though it was highly salient to science 200 years ago
| and still is to non-science communities.
|
| The signs of this are: there's no broad agreement on what it
| means, there are no falsifiable predictions outstanding, and
| the only reason to not accept that we are philosophical zombies
| is what people say when you ask them about it. People believe
| all kinds of things that are obviously not true. Why do we give
| such special credence to this one?
|
| I think we will move on from this idea over time.
| chmsky00 wrote:
| The hard problem will be solved in time.
|
| My reasoning is that the people that defined it did so in a
| time when our science was less developed, so of course the
| problem seemed much harder.
|
| Information theory makes even the hard problem a matter of
| understanding interaction fields of physics, with the chemistry
| of biology. Relativity and sensory network effects explain
| relative experience elegantly enough.
|
| A lot of theories from back in the day are built on outdated
| understanding. Unfortunately their authors did not get to see
| our achievements in engineering unravel a lot of their over
| baked theories due to a need to fill in gaps without hard
| evidence. Same as we won't see technology in the future have no
| need of all this software we wrote. It won't literally be
| handed on.
|
| Luminiferous Aether was once a thing to many even though it's
| not one discrete thing. One might consider it was a poetic
| initial take on field theory, which we now rely on sets of
| glyphs of shares meaning. Which artistically could also be
| imagined as flowing sets of matrix code that glow like a
| luminous field.
|
| If there's a hard problem to consciousness it's an
| unwillingness to consider there is no Valhalla. Is there a hard
| problem? Or do we hope for an answer that suggests we're not
| just meatbags?
| PKop wrote:
| >a matter of understanding
|
| There is also the possibility that our cognitive limits will
| prevent us from creating artificial intelligence and
| consciousness, even if it is materially possible.
| chmsky00 wrote:
| Good, we don't need AI.
|
| I'd be more interested in augmented human intelligence.
| Growing neuron structures to speed the acquisition of skill
| and knowledge.
|
| AI as we know it now is for empowering aristocrats. Here's
| Googles data center empowering Google to make business
| choices that involve extracting effort from us.
|
| I'd rather science and technology empower individuals
| uniquely and not be ground down to the fiscally prudent
| efforts.
| nickelpro wrote:
| The hard problem has technological progress built into its
| definition. It defines problems of consciousness that can be
| solved by progress as the "soft" problems, and the problem
| that cannot be solved by progress as the "hard" problem. The
| hard problem doesn't say that a mechanism _hasn't_ been
| found, it says a mechanism _cannot_ be found. Like Godel's
| incompleteness theorems or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
| it places a limit on what can be known about the system,
| "[the hard problem will] persist even when the performance of
| all the relevant functions is explained."
|
| The validity of that is up to you, but if you accept the hard
| problem as a valid question it will not be solved by
| technological progress.
| chmsky00 wrote:
| Yep it's not an interesting idea, the hard problem. We can
| never see outside our universe. We can't know all states of
| matter ever. We can't peek beyond the speed of light. We
| can solve a lot of problems we actually have without an
| answer (42, but what...)
|
| Humans have a willingness to see truth in metaphor and
| analogy, and invent them to avoid accepting we're just meat
| bags.
|
| That's what the hard problem of consciousness is to me;
| biological ideation run amok.
|
| It has useful political effects, it can be used to disabuse
| the self righteous because it's a purposeful thought ending
| monolith, nothing more.
|
| We'll keep iterating on our theories of the interaction of
| fields and matter and stop caring about the hard problem
| like we quit discussing luminiferous aether. We'll stop
| seeing the literal edge of reality as a boundary on
| experience in the first place.
| [deleted]
| bondarchuk wrote:
| If you are going to demand a precise, non-handwavey answer to
| the hard problem, then you must first give the hard problem in
| a precise, non-handwavey way, or at the very least prove in a
| precise, non-handwavey way that there even is such a thing as
| the hard problem. As far as I've seen nobody has really done
| this, it's always just "what breathes fire into the equations?"
| "what is it like to be a bat?" "I just feel it in my bones that
| there's something missing"... P-zombies are an attempt, except
| that "p-zombies are conceivable" is to be taken as axiomatic
| without any further explanation.
| joeberon wrote:
| That's the problem and exactly why I say I don't think it
| can't be explained via a vague feeling. I've never seen
| someone who says there is a hard problem of consciousness
| adequately explain to someone why there isn't. The poster is
| now making what seem more like appeals to emotion throughout
| the thread now: "are you saying that sufficiently complicated
| blocks of matter are conscious?" and the like. This is what
| always happens.
|
| While I personally believe there is a problem, I cannot
| _explain_ why, and for a long time I didn 't think there was
| a problem
| mach1ne wrote:
| The so-called "hard problem of consciousness" may be a
| problem through which one may find a suitable definition
| for their own humanity, but it absolutely is not a
| scientific problem.
|
| If one wishes to gain concrete data, one needs to define
| the problem before defining the answer. Any current
| "problems" relating to consciousness are explainable
| without needing a consciousness component. I have not
| encountered a single problem which couldn't be explained by
| pure cognitive computation.
|
| Consciousness becomes a problem suitable for scientific
| endeavor the moment someone can actually define the
| problem.
| nickelpro wrote:
| Yes, just like the various interpretations of quantum
| mechanics, it's not a scientific question because it
| doesn't allow for any testable hypothesis. Science is
| bound by the scientific method, questions of philosophy
| exist outside these bounds. Is math invented or
| discovered? Does the wave function collapse upon
| observation, or do observers exist in superposition? Is
| my "red" the same as your "red"?
|
| Even if we could have exact answers to these questions,
| they wouldn't allow use to make predictions, and so they
| are not science. I think it's reasonable to say that
| means they aren't "useful", we can't go to space or build
| skyscrapers with these answers, but I think it equally
| makes them the more interesting questions. Our usual
| tools at rational inquiry fail to penetrate these sorts
| of questions.
| mach1ne wrote:
| Actually most of the problems you described are relevant
| and do exist in the objective world. The problem of the
| problem of consciousness is that there is no aspect in
| the definition of consciousness which couldn't be
| explained by objective mechanisms.
|
| Currently, asking whether there is a consciousness is
| like asking if there is glaxtimbo. What is glaxtimbo, you
| may ask? I can't explain it, but I feel like it is there.
| That's the extent to which the definition of
| consciousness in its unexplainable attributes currently
| reaches.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| My question is simply " _why_ am I me? " Why and how is my
| personal point of view fixed to this particular lump of meat
| and _I_ never wake up one day as _you_?
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Because if you woke up as me, you'd be me.
|
| Let's assume that consciousness works in roughly the way
| implied by your question: it exists, but it exists
| _entirely_ separately from both the body and from mental
| contents.
|
| Now, let's further assume that the scenario you're
| proposing _actually happened_. Last night, in our sleep,
| you and I switched souls. Yesterday 's me is actually you
| now, and yesterday's you is actually me now.
|
| How can either of us tell the difference? Clearly the
| contents of our consciousness - our memories, knowledge,
| skills, perceptions, emotions, etc. - are attached to the
| body, particularly the brain. This is just the assumption
| we started with. What, then, makes you _you_ and me _me_?
| Clearly our souls aren 't doing a very good job at telling
| the difference!
| nickelpro wrote:
| Agreed, I somewhat address this in my follow on comment. In
| my mind rejecting the hard problem is the same as accepting
| the "consciousness is an illusion" answer to the problem. But
| I can see the point of view that views the entire
| conversation as a category error.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I find the classical argument with color qualia very
| convincing (in fact, I thought about it before even knowing
| what qualia were...). Nothing you can find out about
| wavelengths, cones, rods, neurons and so on will tell you why
| you see red the specific way you do, and whether my
| perception of red corresponds to yours or my "red" is
| actually your "green". So there is a gap there, something
| that doesn't follow from the mechanical state of the system.
|
| Of course, I won't claim to be able to define that gap in a
| precise way (I'm not even a philosopher), but I think it's
| clear that it exists, and in my view the burden on proof is
| on those that claim the problem doesn't exist because no one
| can come up with a believable methodology (even supposing
| infinite time, infinitely precise measuring instruments,
| etc.) that would tell us the answer to questions like why my
| "red" feels like it does or whether my experience of red is
| different from yours.
| the8472 wrote:
| > I find the classical argument with color qualia very
| convincing (in fact, I thought about it before even knowing
| what qualia were...). Nothing you can find out about
| wavelengths, cones, rods, neurons and so on will tell you
| why you see red the specific way you do, and whether my
| perception of red corresponds to yours or my "red" is
| actually your "green".
|
| Red being green makes no sense. Let's simplify a bit and
| say you have a neuron for hearing the word "red", one for
| the visual stimuli "red" and then a sensory fusion/abstract
| concept of red. Several layers up you'll also have one for
| a "stop sign" (which also takes inputs like octagon shapes
| and some white letters). There are many other, more distant
| associations of course, we have many neurons after all.
|
| The spoken words, physical wavelengths and stop sign design
| are more or less physically or socially fixed. If you
| magically swapped some red and green neurons then those
| physical stimuli wouldn't change. The brain would be forced
| to rewire all the associations until it arrived at the
| original connections again. Or it would suffer from
| observable mispredictions such as being more likely to
| respond to a green rather than a red stop sign. Why would
| there be a free-floating "qualia green" neuron connected to
| "visual red" that is yet somehow disconnected from
| "physical green" and why wouldn't it update once it became
| miswired?
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Suppose that I see red the way you see green. Then, when
| I see a stop sign or a fire extinguisher, I'm seeing the
| color that you would call "green". But of course, I have
| been told since birth that fire extinguishers, stop
| signs, etc. are red, so I would naturally call that color
| red. And in the same way, if I see green the way you see
| red, when I look at grass I would be perceiving the same
| color that you see when you look at a stop sign. But I
| would call it green, because everyone knows grass is
| green, what else would I call it?
|
| There would be no disagreement between us about what
| objects are red, no way to tell that we see them
| differently, and no real-world consequences that would
| force to rewire any neurons, because our ways of
| perceiving the world would both be coherent and equally
| valid.
| civilized wrote:
| > Suppose that I see red the way you see green. Then,
| when I see a stop sign or a fire extinguisher, I'm seeing
| the color that you would call "green".
|
| Are you sure it is possible to pluck the color I'm seeing
| out of my head, and the color you're seeing out of your
| head, and compare them side-by-side, like we could
| compare two different colors of paint on a piece of
| paper?
|
| I'm not so sure about that. It seems to depend a lot on
| what phenomenon "how you see a color" actually refers to.
|
| If "how you see a color" refers to the neural patterns
| excited by light of the relevant wavelengths, and you and
| I have the same neural patterns, then we see the color
| the same way. There is no metaphysical layer on top that
| can make one of those experiences green and the other
| red.
| mopierotti wrote:
| By that sense, if qualia have no discernible impact on
| any part of the system, in what sense do they exist?
|
| One can take this thought further. Red vs green light
| have real physical properties that affect one's
| subjective experience of them. For example different
| colors' physical properties change the way that they are
| perceived in low light conditions, the way they are
| perceived when placed next to other colors, etc. So at
| the end of the day even if hypothetically one person's
| qualia for red is swapped for green, you end up with a
| green that acts an awful lot like a red for all intents
| and purposes in the brain.
|
| Edit: So my personal hunch is that qualia can't be
| meaningfully said to exist.
| mabub24 wrote:
| There is a very fruitful line in philosophy of mind and
| language that addresses the colour qualia question: anti-
| cartesianism and anti-skepticism.
|
| Wittgenstein's arguments on seeing-as is the best example
| of this line. He argues, quite convincingly I think, that a
| lot of the kind of skepticism, of a cartesian sort,
| implicit in the colour qualia question arises out of
| conceptual confusions in language. The goal isn't to
| _solve_ the debate, or directly refute it per se, but to
| dissolve the entire conceptual confusion upon which it
| relies by making clear how it is essentially a house-of-
| cards.
|
| For instance, we know that humans have a relatively uniform
| perceptual landscape. Physiological realities in the eye
| limit the variations in human visual perception to a
| certain set wavelength band. With all the correct parts
| working correctly, we see and we all see in relatively the
| same way. We don't see our seeing. We don't perceive our
| perceptual experience from the inside out. We see. The
| variations in "what people see" are more _in_ language,
| which is to say that people _report_ seeing different
| things. As Wittgenstein would put it, we often "see-as"
| just as much as we "see-that", which are ways of "seeing"
| that intersect and mix in language.
|
| Colour is interesting because in our language it is heavily
| dependent on ostensive definitions, which is the linguistic
| way of saying colour is reliant on pointing at examples.
| Often quite literally pointing with your hand, or directing
| someone to look at something in particular. So if there is
| a red car in front of you and both people say the car is
| "red" then they are seeing the same red because the colour
| is not the result of empirical validation of an internal
| private perceptual experience, but because the colour is in
| language. They are reporting the same colour.
|
| Viewed in this line, the colour qualia question essentially
| dissolves away as irrelevant.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I don't understand the point: we could both be seeing a
| red car (which is objectively red, in the sense that it
| has a wavelength of 625-740 nm) but we could be
| perceiving it radically differently (for example, maybe
| my perception of red is exactly like your perception of
| blue) and language would never help us find out.
|
| In my world, that car, stop signs, fire extinguishers or
| chili peppers would look like the clear sky or sea water
| in yours. But we would never find out, because I would
| point at the car and say "red" (I have learned that all
| objects that look that way from my point of view are
| "red"), and you would agree that it's "red". There is no
| way to find out that our perception is different.
|
| But I guess my lack of understanding is because I haven't
| read Wittgenstein, so I hope to do so when I get the
| time. Thanks!
| mabub24 wrote:
| > There is no way to find out that our perception is
| different.
|
| Wittgenstein's point is more that there is no way in
| which a distinction of that kind could even be
| _intelligible_ in the way that you have presented it.
| What is intelligible is our public behavior, namely our
| language use, so to find out if what you perceive is
| different you can ask someone if you 're looking at the
| same thing, if it has the same characteristics, etc.
|
| He would point to the fact that we don't have radical
| uncertainty in our day to day life and perception. The
| philosophical question is a question of sense and
| nonsense around the concept rather than a metaphysical
| question about an "inside" vs. an "outside".
|
| I would really recommend reading Wittgenstein's
| _Philosophical Investigations_ if you are interested in
| these kinds of questions, it 's incredibly influential
| _in philosophy_ precisely because of the way it
| approaches "age-old" problems in ways that lead to
| clarity and very interesting results.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| >the colour qualia question essentially dissolves away as
| irrelevant
|
| And yet, I still wanna know.
|
| The question is IMO as valid as "if I poke you with this
| pen, do you feel it different enough than what I feel if
| I poked myself?"
|
| If we go through the exercise of breaking down the
| physiology, neurology and linguistic, I still wanna know
| if they feel it any different and how different.
| mabub24 wrote:
| > The question is IMO as valid as "if I poke you with
| this pen, do you feel it different enough than what I
| feel if I poked myself?"
|
| Funnily enough, Wittgenstein also famously looked at pain
| as well [0] in the context of his famous private language
| argument, and he comes to the same conclusions as he does
| about perception and language.
|
| It should be noted that Wittgenstein's central point is
| about the _intelligibility_ of color, or perception, or
| pain, or a private language. He is not denying the
| existence of pain, or of what could be considered "first
| person priority", _as a sensation_. But he 's commenting
| on the logical necessity of a public intelligibility for
| it. For him that intelligibility comes about through
| behavior or public criterions, that is, what we might
| call pain-behavior wrapped up in a public form of life.
|
| > I still wanna know if they feel it any different and
| how different.
|
| Wittgenstein's whole point, really, is that you can get
| an answer by asking them because, after all, you're
| speaking the _same_ public language. That is also why
| pain, as it is intelligible, _has a history_.
|
| [0]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > _Nothing you can find out about wavelengths, cones, rods,
| neurons and so on will tell you why you see red the
| specific way you do_
|
| Or maybe it will, but we just don't have the neurological
| and information-theoretical tools at this moment in time.
|
| > _and whether my perception of red corresponds to yours or
| my "red" is actually your "green"._
|
| And maybe (at least this is my personal guess right now) it
| will show that this question is incoherent.
| civilized wrote:
| > Nothing you can find out about wavelengths, cones, rods,
| neurons and so on will tell you why you see red the
| specific way you do, and whether my perception of red
| corresponds to yours or my "red" is actually your "green".
|
| This is begging the question. You're _assuming_ that color
| qualia exist in the way that objects do. That "my red" and
| "your green" are not just properties of personal
| experience, but refer to _objects_ that could be
| identified, drawn out, moved around and compared like the
| ordinary objects in our world.
|
| The basic mistake of qualia theory is to assume that qualia
| share any of the properties of physical objects or even
| abstract concepts. That qualia are entities distinct and
| stable enough to be placed side by side, compared and
| contrasted, the way you could compare rocks or different
| software architectures.
|
| I suspect that this makes about as much sense as asserting
| that square circles exist. You can say it, you can even
| kinda-sorta imagine it, but you can do that with a lot of
| things that fall apart on closer inspection.
|
| For all we know, p-zombies are square circles. We think
| that they're a coherent concept because we can kinda-sorta
| imagine them, but we're nowhere near _knowing_ that they
| 're a coherent concept.
|
| There is such a thing as trusting feelings and intuitions
| and imaginations too much, especially in the incredibly
| abstract context of somehow reifying your experiences and
| attempting to understand what they "are".
|
| There are a lot of things that people used to feel strongly
| about, like "heavier objects fall faster". Many people
| still didn't believe Galileo was right when he proved it
| false with his experiments. Even when he did the experiment
| right before their eyes. The feelings and intuitions were
| too strong.
|
| Such is the case with qualia, I think. I don't know if
| we'll ever be able to prove the intuitions wrong and
| illuminate the true nature of consciousness, like Galileo,
| but that doesn't mean our prescientific intuitions are
| correct by default. P-zombies and qualia are embellishments
| of our prescientific intuitions, not rigorous or scientific
| versions of them.
| FactolSarin wrote:
| I don't see why two people experiencing red differently
| causes a problem for consciousness. Can't we both be
| conscious even with very different qualia?
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Of course we can be all conscious but with different
| qualia. But the thing is that if consciousness was merely
| a physical phenomenon, we should be able to determine
| qualia purely by looking at the physical system, just as
| we determine any other property. However, we could be in
| a situation where we have understood our behaviors down
| to particle level, and I would still have no idea how you
| perceive colors.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > However, we could be in a situation where we have
| understood our behaviors down to particle level, and I
| would still have no idea how you perceive colors.
|
| I do not see how this is possible. If you can perfectly
| simulate me you can perfectly simulate any response I
| will give to any question about how I experience red.
| Moreover you will have better idea than I do because you
| could also simulate how my experiences of red will change
| with time as I gain more experience from seeing red or
| anything else really.
| pitspotter2 wrote:
| Check out Chapter 11 of _The Hidden Spring_ by Mark Solms.
|
| In it he identifies subjective experience, for example
| perceiving the colour red, as an observational _perspective._
|
| He reminds us that we can also experience vision objectively,
| with the right lab equipment, e.g. by listening to spike trains
| travelling from the retina down the optic nerve.
|
| Say we do the latter. We can then legitimately ask what the
| same process looks like from the point of view of the
| system/subject/patient. Answer, vivid red.
|
| So spike trains and redness are differing valid perspectives on
| the same underlying physical process, namely vision. One
| doesn't arise from the other; they are both products of vision.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Generally it is understood that qualia are not quantifiable.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Isn't that begging the question?
| ganzuul wrote:
| I don't think so... I thought GP was explaining how they
| would be quantifying qualia, and pointed out that this is
| kind of against the definition of the word.
|
| Maybe I missed something.
| joeberon wrote:
| So far the only answer I've seen people give to the question is
| "what problem? There's no problem". Basically, there are many
| people who don't (or also have convinced themselves that they
| don't) perceive an incongruity between their personal
| subjective experience and the idea that consciousness is just
| an emergent phenomena of a physical system. I haven't found a
| good way to explain it, I just know that there's something
| wrong or missing.
|
| 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.
| nickelpro wrote:
| I don't understand how someone can not understand the
| problem.
|
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| I think a variation of the Sorites paradox [1] should be
| sufficient to argue that 4) is closest and that there is a
| continuum of consciousness:
|
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
| [deleted]
| joeberon wrote:
| Well we do know emergent phenomena that occur as
| abstractions. Probably the most obvious example is a
| computer program. At a basic level, the computer really
| doesn't look like it's doing useful work, it just processes
| lists of rules and stuff, but actually the emergent
| behaviour is that I am browsing Hacker News. What is the
| difference between a computer and a rock? Well there isn't
| actually a fundamental difference, other than that the
| computer is physically arranged such that it is doing some
| complicated calculation resulting in this rich UI
| experience.
|
| 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
| daseiner1 wrote:
| But the question is when and from where does
| "experiencing things" (qualia) arise. When does
| calculation become sensation?
| joeberon wrote:
| Those same people might say that it is just the
| experience of "being the computer" rather than seeing it
| from afar. But I don't know, because personally it isn't
| an argument I find convincing.
|
| 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.
| GonzaloRizzo wrote:
| So if there's such a thing as "being the computer" could
| we say that a computer experiences qualia and it is
| somewhat conscious?
| GlennS wrote:
| Obviously: in the insect that wriggles its legs in pain.
|
| Earlier, in the cell that avoids the chemical.
| nickelpro wrote:
| Exactly, you have a handwave. A vague idea that when a
| system becomes "complex" enough it suddenly becomes
| conscious. There's no mechanism, no rigor, no cause and
| effect. With the browser you can chase down every bit
| through the hardware, down to the quantum tunneling
| effect dictating what's happening in the silicon and come
| up with a concrete explanation based in physical laws.
|
| 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"
| joeberon wrote:
| I don't have it, because it's not my argument, it's their
| argument, and it's clearly making you emotional so I
| think it's better to stop it here.
| nickelpro wrote:
| Apologies if my language is emotional, I like this debate
| a lot and get rare few opportunities to discuss it with
| people who are familiar with all the background. I don't
| mean to invalidate anyone, I think all camps are equally
| valid regardless of my personal feelings.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The problem in your stating (and many others) is that the
| notion of consciousness has self-awareness is baked into
| it. It's odd to think that the ability to experience
| qualia magically occurs for sufficiently complex systems,
| but it's not odd to think that self-awareness just arises
| once a system that can experience qualia reaches a
| sufficient complexity level. Unfortunately, people latch
| on to the reasonableness of the latter, and ignore the
| ridiculousness of the former.
| [deleted]
| adriand wrote:
| One obvious difference between computers and humans is
| that only one of them is an animal. So far as we can
| tell, consciousness only arises in animals. This sounds
| like a truism, but I wonder if using phrases like
| "complex system" masks it: both humans and computers are
| complex systems, and only one of them is conscious, and
| therefore what could possibly be the difference?
|
| 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.
| n4r9 wrote:
| If we take a human and replace one of their neurons with
| a silicon chip that exactly replicates its electrical
| activity, is the human any less "conscious"? Presumably
| their conscious experience is the same (if not why not?)
| If the human is still conscious, what if we continue one
| by one to replace all the neurons with silicon chips in
| the same way? Where does this thought experiment fail?
| joeberon wrote:
| Personally I think most people who argue consciousness is
| an emergent property of complicated physical systems
| would believe that the machine would still be conscious
| after replacing every neuron with a chip
| slfnflctd wrote:
| Given a sufficiently advanced chip which included all
| chemical interactions (or effective simulations), why
| wouldn't they be?
|
| 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.
| lovecg wrote:
| On the topic of simulating neurons, we might be able to
| simulate the _static_ structure but neurons also move
| around and make new connections. This video opened my
| eyes on how far we really are from a realistic
| simulation: https://youtu.be/CJ3d1FgbmFg
| adriand wrote:
| My house is made of bricks. I can confidently remove one
| of the bricks and replace it with a Kleenex box. The
| house is still standing, it's perfectly liveable and no
| one can tell the difference. Now what happens when I
| replace all the bricks with Kleenex boxes?
| n4r9 wrote:
| At some point, the structure will collapse or blow over.
| When that happens depends on the order in which you work,
| and the weather conditions, but the outcome is at least
| well-defined and conceptually graspable.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| You have a honey-comb structure. Maybe put exactly
| fitting X-shaped stabilizers into them, before. For
| safety, and such :)
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| >To sum this up: consciousness, in this view, is not an
| emergent property of complex systems. Rather it is a
| fundamental property of animals.
|
| 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.
| adriand wrote:
| > 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.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Sure, but was anyone really suggesting that we somehow
| create disembodied people? That seems to be the other
| side of the dialectical coin from immaterial souls, which
| are precisely what most Hard Problem disbelievers deny.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You think your computer isn't conscious? How do you know?
| Just because it's not demonstrating free will? How many
| layers of error correction are built into computers to
| stifle the "randomness" of electronic equipment? Do you
| think you could still exercise free will locked in a
| padded room and strapped to a bed with a straightjacket?
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| This comment is amazing. Thank you.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| I don't think free will matters at all for consciousness.
|
| 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?
| adriand wrote:
| There's a difference between knowing, and knowing how you
| know. I know my computer is not conscious even if I'm not
| entirely certain how I know. I chalk this up to the fact
| that, as a conscious animal with millions of years of
| evolutionary history, it is both beneficial and entirely
| natural for me to be able to recognize conscious beings
| when I encounter them.
|
| (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.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| That breaks down for anything that is not your kin
| though. "How do you know the computer is not conscious?"
| does not allow the answer "Because we are not kin". Best
| you can say is "Because we are not kin, I don't know".
| The dog example is illustrative of only half of the
| question.
| adriand wrote:
| I take your point, but I disagree: your statement assumes
| that there are conscious beings who are not my kin (and
| to be clear, by "kin" I broadly mean animals: living
| entities that are embodied and show characteristics like
| intention, mood and emotion). But there isn't any
| evidence that these exist and there's little if any
| evidence that they are even possible.
|
| 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.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| No, there's no such assumption in my statement. That
| statement is merely open about what we don't know.
| Conversely, there is an assumption in your reasoning that
| non-animals are never conscious, which is, well, an
| assumption, and not derived from facts.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| But maybe a computer isn't a complex system.
|
| Most, if not all, animals are much more complex than
| computers.
| rmah wrote:
| Consider the weather. Weather exists, I think everyone can
| accept this. But what is weather? Is it simply an aggregate
| emergent property of many interacting atmospheric and
| geological systems? Or is it something more? How can
| emergent properties of even a complex system create self-
| organizing and self-perpetuating semi-stable phenomenon
| like tornadoes? What controls the weather?
|
| 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?
| danielheath wrote:
| In nature, there are many instances of systems which change
| drastically as they pass a tipping point.
|
| 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".
| ivanbakel wrote:
| The trouble with the "hard problem" of consciousness is
| that it's predicated on the possibility of the existence of
| p-zombies. Even if you don't know how a complex physical
| system gives rise to consciousness, you understand that a
| block of steel is _not_ a complex physical system - so the
| fact that it isn 't conscious isn't that contentious.
|
| 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.
| joeberon wrote:
| Yeah I think a more interesting problem is asking what
| the difference between an electronic robot that behaves
| in every way like a human, and a human, is. Or further,
| an electronic robot where every single neuron in the
| human was completely simulated. I thought about this a
| lot when I was a teenager lol, surely in this case such a
| robot must have a subjective experience just as we do,
| but why?
| nickelpro wrote:
| Really? A sufficiently advanced computer is a perfect
| P-zombie to me. This is the Chinese Room problem
| restated. A computer is capable of behaving as a
| conscious actor without any concept of knowledge or
| qualia as we would recognize it. But again this gets into
| a faith-based discussion. To me a sufficiently complex
| computer doesn't suddenly cross a "consciousness
| threshold" of complexity, but if to you it does there's
| no problem, which we could call "camp 3" in this
| discussion.
| joeberon wrote:
| A vast majority of people who believe that consciousness
| is an emergent property would also say that a
| sufficiently advanced computer is exactly as conscious as
| you or I. At least when I believed that human
| consciousness was an emergent property I believed that an
| advanced robot would be totally conscious.
| lovecg wrote:
| In the original Chinese Room thought experiment it's a
| human inside performing all the calculations by hand. To
| be consistent you would also believe that this room with
| a human in it has its own consciousness as a whole,
| correct? This just seems too weird to me.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > This just seems too weird to me.
|
| I don't think that something feeling weird justifies
| violation of Occam's Razor of the same scale as making up
| souls, gods, etc.
| lovecg wrote:
| Absolutely, no argument there. It seems the answer will
| be weird whatever it is.
| comex wrote:
| For me this is analogous to, say, a PC running a NES
| emulator.
|
| 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).
| ivanbakel wrote:
| >This is the Chinese Room problem restated. A computer is
| capable of behaving as a conscious actor without any
| concept of knowledge or qualia as we would recognize it.
|
| 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.
| nickelpro wrote:
| I concur with this completely. Rejecting p-zombies as a
| concept aligns you either with (3) or (4) of the toy
| framing above, depending on if you're materialist
| (consciousness emerges from physical phenomenon/doesn't
| exist) or non-materialist (consciousness emerges from
| non-physical phenomenon, and does so universally) about
| the follow on question.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The problem with the Chinese Room formulation is there
| are arguments against the near term possibility of
| autonomous vehicles that go "It's the same as AGI." In
| other words, a "Chinese Room" driver is not good enough.
|
| 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.
| the8472 wrote:
| > This is the Chinese Room problem restated.
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Blocks of steel don't have nervous systems of any kind, let
| alone complex brains. Hell, they aren't even alive at all:
| they lack the underlying physiology for a nervous system to
| sense and control in the first place.
|
| Seems like a bit of a hint for why we're conscious and
| they're not.
| GonzaloRizzo wrote:
| Why are you so sure about consciousness emerging from the
| brain?
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| I didn't say "from the brain". I also didn't say
| "emerging". I mentioned the nervous system as a whole,
| and physiology (eg: internal bodily control systems) to
| boot.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'd go with a variation on 2:
|
| 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.
| nickelpro wrote:
| But then you are like a block of steel, you are
| deterministically governed by the laws of physics. Any
| block of matter arranged just so is conscious in that
| framing, which differs from the religious framing.
| PKop wrote:
| >you are deterministically governed by the laws of
| physics
|
| Yes.
| joeberon wrote:
| > Any block of matter arranged just so is conscious in
| that framing, which differs from the religious framing.
|
| That is literally the secular materialist view of
| consciousness, yes.
| disambiguation wrote:
| I think (4) gets more interesting if we replace "block of
| steel" with "fetal tissue" at various stages of development
|
| 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.
| callesgg wrote:
| 7) I am a model of a primate created/executed by the actual
| brain of the primate that the model is modeling. Ie, the
| primate is not like a block of steel cause it is modeling
| its own existence, while the block of steel is not modeling
| it's own existence.
| GlennS wrote:
| I think the opposite problem - or rather the assumed
| explanation - is harder.
|
| 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.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That's a nice looking dead end, because your subjectivity
| biases you. Instead, step outside your own consciousness.
|
| 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?
| GlennS wrote:
| > That's a nice looking dead end, because your
| subjectivity biases you. Instead, step outside your own
| consciousness.
|
| 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.
| nickelpro wrote:
| > Magnetic scanners. Strong evidence in my opinion.
|
| > 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.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I agree about the best parties. But what about the idea
| that consciousness exists on a continuum -- that everything
| that processes information has a scope of consciousness
| that corresponds to the complexity of what it processes? A
| block of steel doesn't really process any information, but
| a thermostat does, and so does a paramecium. I'm happy to
| grant qualia to a paramecium, even if I don't think those
| qualia are very substantial or interesting in human terms.
| I feel a little weirder about the thermostat, but, um,
| sure, why not, I guess?
|
| 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.
| nickelpro wrote:
| Asking "how is consciousness quantized?" definitely would
| put you in (4) and is favored by Chalmers I believe. The
| idea that consciousness can somehow be "aggregated" by
| sufficiently complex or anti-entropic systems lends
| itself to this view.
| Hayarotle wrote:
| I like that option. You don't have to find something that
| would give a hard border between "conscious" and
| "unconscious" entities, nor claim qualia doesn't exist,
| nor claim a rock has a level of consciousness equivalent
| to that of humans.
| joeberon wrote:
| This is personally my feeling of it too. I think the
| boundaries between us are illusory, and that it is all
| continuous and fuzzy. So a universal consciousness is no
| issue for me, one that is neither singular nor separate.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I agree with this. IMO any theory wrt to consciousness
| has to first and foremost consider that no hard line can
| be drawn along the continuum from human beings to
| elephants to ants to yeast cells.
| mr_overalls wrote:
| 7) A purely phenomenological viewpoint (such as the one
| held by some schools of Mahayana Buddhism) would claim that
| the only reality is one's own mind. The steel block along
| with all other aspects of perceived reality, are akin to a
| magical illusion or dream.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > I just know that there's something wrong or missing.
|
| 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]
| 53r3PB9769ba wrote:
| I'm quite firmly in the "do not feel the incongruity" camp.
|
| 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.
| mtberatwork wrote:
| I think a lot discussion around consciousness focuses too
| much on the binary (e.g. either you have it or you don't),
| but I like to think of consciousness as a spectrum, with
| organisms falling into various points along that spectrum.
| Your take fits nicely into that picture I think.
| joeberon wrote:
| Yeah that's a pretty common experience actually. There are
| a lot of memes on tiktok and twitter joking about "gaining
| consciousness" as a child. I think a lot of people remember
| moments as young children where they first truly felt like
| real separate beings.
| ericmay wrote:
| > Brains are not for rational thinking, linguistic communication,
| or perceiving the world.
|
| Isn't this false?
|
| Brains are for whatever brains are for, and if brains are
| thinking rationally (2+2 = 4), communicating linguistically (I'm
| typing this using language), and perceiving the world using
| senses than they are for those things just as much or as little
| as they are for or not for anything else. I suppose you can say
| something along the lines of "brains are for continuing survival
| and propagation of genes" as they author did which is fine, but
| it would make more sense to state that and try to prove it...
| Because how do we know that thinking rationally _isn 't_ what
| evolutionary drive is? How do we know that brains are evolved for
| survival? Survival for what? Gut bacteria? The earth (keep
| reproducing to keep organic material churning)? How do we know
| that the emergence of language and propagating that isn't what
| brains are for?
|
| I think it's hard to really say what brains are for or not for.
| That's a deceptively difficult question and probably shouldn't
| casually throw out "brains are not for X".
|
| -edit-
|
| I also wouldn't take it for granted that brains or anything is
| _for_ anything.
|
| I do think we are "philosophical zombies" as someone else put it,
| but it's not a distinction that matters because whether we are or
| are not doesn't change anything. It's like accepting that you
| don't have free will - it doesn't change anything. You still go
| to jail if you rob someone (the interesting question comes from
| the morality of this actually IMO).
|
| Consciousness is probably an evolutionary adaptation for
| increased cooperation - to that end it's a shared delusion
| (language allows us to become "more" conscious), but a useful
| one.
|
| I'd posit that certainly all mammals are conscious (if they're
| not, then I'm not sure you can argue that anything is conscious
| besides yourself which is fine if you hold that view) and likely
| all animals are conscious, just a matter of degree of genetic
| expression. Panpsychism is tempting but if we wanted to say that
| rocks are conscious than I think we could set aside still
| different "levels" of conscious expression and draw meaningful
| distinctions - it's not a hill one has to die on.
|
| Most of our work on consciousness that I've observed has
| historical religious baggage (not insulting religion here) with
| humans being at the center and "special" but if you strip that
| away I think it's pretty easy to see that we're not. Many
| scientists that I've seen or observed kind of have the God
| problem - which is that they're wrestling with a question or
| dilemma and supposing God is involved or exists and so it must be
| dealt with. Similarly in the study of consciousness it seems that
| we're supposing that humans are conscious to some special degree
| and trying to fit science to explain that - which is a faulty
| premise from the start.
|
| /rant :)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " Experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way
| the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body."
|
| I don't know about you other beast machines, but I rarely ever
| think of the internal states of my body (trying to adjust beating
| heart, pupil adjustment, etc.). To think that consciousness is
| required for these rare moments of internal state reflection
| seems a stretch (considering most life doesn't require it).
| esarbe wrote:
| Consciousness is nothing more but the final arbiter of attention.
| As such it must have a way to evaluate situations, including our
| own internal state and this is done by emotions. Emotions are our
| default approach interpret a given situation.
|
| I think the 'beast machines' analogy is a good one. We're
| reproduction machines. We're not thinking machines. We do not
| evaluate our environment using logical thinking and although some
| may learn to use this tool (logical thinking) to justify paying
| attention to something in particular, it's emotions that guide
| our eyes and our attention.
|
| Anything that has attention to guide has a consciousness. It
| might not use words or other symbols to reinforce attention but
| the basic mechanism, the cycle of emotion, evaluation and
| attention stays the same.
| state_less wrote:
| We may have body consciousness at times, though conscious doesn't
| depend on body consciousness or is required to be embodied. When
| I dream I often am not conscious of breathing or my body for
| example.
|
| I once had a strange dream that exemplifies this. I was dreaming
| in Wisconsin of being on a subway train in NYC. A man in the
| train crouches down near me. I follow him down. He asks, "What is
| your name?" I tell him, "it's Seth." "That's an old name", he
| responds.
|
| I am thinking, who is this guy?
|
| Then as if to show me something, he pantomimes a mallet and
| strikes an imaginary bell, except I hear the bell ring out as
| clear as if I were awake. A disembodied voice says something in
| German, which I don't understand, though I wish I could remember
| it now. Then I wake.
|
| See I was conscious of the bell, though none was struck. I didn't
| hear it in my ear, I heard it in the mind. So I don't think
| vibration is sound and EM waves aren't color, though they are the
| most common precursors to this sort of consciousness.
|
| We can go to places in our minds where our bodies can not follow.
| I think it's a hopeful vision of what might be possible some day.
| That we might find a way to transform ourselves into a world less
| inhabited with fears and self loathing to world of wonder and
| discovery.
|
| P.S. I understand I'm not solving the hard problem of
| consciousness in this passage. Though I wanted to add some notes
| of what I've learned about consciousness along the way.
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