This is a common attempt to rationalize away the hard problem of consciousness that I find to be an almost textbook example of "begging the question". What is a feeling? Well, it's a type of experience. Does a glass of water have experiences? Probably not, because experiences are phenomena that are relative to conscious entities. Saying that X has experiences or that X is conscious are, in my view, equivalent claims.
Saying that "consciousness is just a feeling" is equivalent to saying that "consciousness is just consciousness". It may sound like and explanation, but it is just a tautology.
I was fascinated by a paper that argues the compression conjecture: the idea that consciousness is indistinguishable from compression. I just finished putting down my thoughts on the matter this morning [1]. This paper addresses "the hard problem of consciousness" directly:
> The answer to this question lies in the realization that the hypothesis of Amy’s subjective experience is a hypothesis which Amy herself holds, an understanding which is manifested through the compression she carries out. Understanding the hypothesis that one is feeling something and the actual experience of
feeling are the same thing. Amy’s feeling therefore exists relative to the assumption of her own existence, an assumption which the system itself is capable of making
I would say the hard problem of consciousness is the problem of relativity. How do you see what happens in a different reference frame? Well, you can speculate, model, imagine it, but you can't see it. To see it you must be in that reference frame an look right from there. When you're in place of mind, you see what happens in it, otherwise you don't and can only speculate, model and imagine.
The "hard problem" is only a problem at all because it is ill defined. I don't get why many people think the hard problem is a problem. We think therefore we are.
What would a solution to the so called (I argue non-existent) hard problem look like?
Why is the hard problem a problem?
What new, useful information would "solving" it deliver?
Ah since we know why humans share a common qualia for red now we can do X?
I don't get it. Attempting to rationalise away an irrational premise, i.e. a hard problem exists, is always going to fail to convince believers. What is the point in attempting to define something that is ill-defined to start with?
Here is my position. Consciousness is a word. What it means varies over time and and space and according to who uses it. The mental model of who uses it may or may not correspond to objective reality in a broad or narrow sense. Magic is a word too. Just because we can explain N magic tricks does that mean that there is some "essence" of magic that is left unexplainable, i.e. the hard problem of magic? Just because we can come up with words for things does not mean that we actually know what we are talking about. I think "consciousness" as a word is not concretely defined therefore I am sceptical of a single unified natural phenomenon underlying the word. Giving a mental model a name does not necessarily give it reality.
I have a first person experience of the world. You probably do too. Everything that I know, including all of the science I have learned, all of the books I have read, all the music I have listed too, all of the people I loved and even this post that you wrote and me replying to it exist for me purely within my first person experience of reality.
My subjective experience of reality is the only thing I have direct knowledge of. Everything else I must doubt. If you think about it, I am sure you will come to the same conclusion.
My paycheck says that I am a scientific researcher, and I have a deep appreciation for science. It provides me with models that go all the way from the subatomic world to societies, that expose regularities in reality, that allow me to understand how many things fit together, and to make predictions. But these are the things that are "just words" or, better yet, symbols. My conscious experience is the thing that I DO KNOW. Maybe it's all a dream. Maybe I'm a brain in a jar. Maybe I was created one nanosecond ago, and I am just a random fluctuation in some process and all of my memories are part of that.
And yet, and yet, the most fundamental phenomena of them all, the thing that I have experience of, is not predicted by any of the scientific models. There is no reason why a bunch of atoms should "become conscious" once their interactions are complex enough. There is no way to build a scientific instrument that measures consciousness. Sure, you can build a scientific instrument that detects brain states that we assume to be correlated with consciousness, but this is just crude analogy. Firstly we can never be sure, and secondly we don't know where the boundaries of the phenomenon are. Is a star conscious? Is the universe? Are the individual cells in your body? How do you know? How could you tell?
That is the mystery. I find that the people who deny the mystery have something equivalent to a religious belief, and that they are not necessarily aware of it . Believing that matter -> ??? -> consciousness is not so different from believing in creationism. A comforting story that makes reality seem intelligible, but that has no basis other than one's wishful thinking and group think. It certainly has nothing to do with science or rationality, at least so far.
The way I get out of that conundrum is to ask what would happen if the Earth were destroyed in some cataclysmic event and there were no humans left. I mean do you agree that the universe would still exist?
Do you think some other life in the universe might have consciousness, even if it's organized in a way that would be unrecognizable to us? How would you go about examining that question?
Carl Sagan spent a lot of time looking for ways to pose that question in ways that make it possible to "do science" about it and not just trail off into ideas that are beyond discussion, beyond meaning.
I mean if you are looking at a planet to see if the surface has been worked in a way that proves the existence of a technology-capable species (even if it was long extinct), you're talking about something "real" at that point.
Also, the book "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem is really wonderful in the way it evokes the mystery of how a being can be sentient and utterly non-comprehensible to us. Quite brilliant really.
> Saying that "consciousness is just a feeling" is equivalent to saying that "consciousness is just consciousness". It may sound like and explanation, but it is just a tautology.
I think you hit the nail in the head with that. Consciousness might very well just be a tautology, so the only definitions we are going to be able to produce are going to be circular or recursive.
However, this is a problem with written language in general. The definition of any word is only provided in the form of other words, which themselves are defined by words as well, so without an interpreter/reader that makes a connection from language to something else, language by itself can’t really have any meaning.
You may be surprised to learn that there is more to the theory than is conveyed in the headline to the Nautilus Q&A with the scientist who came up with it. A more accurate statement of Solms's view is that consciousness is precision adjustment within a hierarchical network of Markov blankets that self-organise to minimise free energy. You can judge for yourself whether he avoids tautology or rationalises away the hard problem, but you should probably first read his book, in which he explains the idea. Remarkably, given that this is a book about predictive coding in the brain, it is not all that taxing to read. What's more, as far as I can see, it does in fact solve the problem.
I feel like the greater problem is that we use the word 'consciousness' at all; the very term is undefined and acting like its a term we can build a science on is just as flimsy as saying its a feeling
How do you know there is a difference between a conscious being and a glass of water? I'm not saying the glass of water is conscious. Let's say it isn't. What tells you that an animal is any different?
I don't know if a glass of water is conscious or not, nor can I come up with a scientific experience to test such an hypothesis, so I remain agnostic on that question. In fact, I cannot even come up with a scientific experience to test if other people are conscious. I just bet they are, because they are similar to me and I know I am.
My point is simply that "feeling" already assumes consciousness. Maybe everything is conscious. Still, saying "it's just a feeling" explains nothing. Most people assume that glasses of water are not conscious, so I just used that example to illustrate my point. But you make a valid remark.
This crosses my mind from time to time, what physical properties sustain conciousness?
Our brains, which is where we suppose our conciousness originates, is made (most likely) from the same sub-atomic particles inanimate objects are made of.
So is there something more to these inanimate objects? Does a rock has more potential then we are aware of?
Another good analogy here is definition of life. What is life and what is a difference between a living being and a glass of water? The difference is that they are different systems that work in different ways, for a system to be conscious, it should work in a certain way, and a glass of water doesn't work in that way, that's why it's not conscious. Consciousness should perceive reality, remember, model and analyze it, maybe even have intelligence, will, abstract thought, attention and reflection, then it can be seen as consciousness.
We should not assume that the appearances of experience is proof of well... anything, and especially not of existence of experience. The classic example of where I think people f*** this up is with unironically accepting "Cogito Ergo Sum" or "I think, therefor I am". I'm surprised that blade runner didn't give folks intuition for why this might be wrong.
Funny enough though, many people have tried to boil down consciousness to be some "simple" concept like the original author with "consciousness is just a feeling". I'm reminded of when Sartre writes all about it in Being and Nothingness: "All of consciousness is consciousness of something"
It's clearly not a tautology. It's a basic scientific approach:
> You reduce it down to something much more biological, like basic feelings, and then you start building up the complexities.
Author is attempting to "build up the the complexities" from discrete falsifiable parts. There's great and obvious benefit to that. One obvious drawback is that it may not succeed in adequately addressing the complexity suggested by the history of philosophy of consciousness. But that in no way makes it a tautology.
> You reduce it down to something much more biological, like basic feelings, and then you start building up the complexities.
But at this point we're not even sure if the thing you're referring to is the same thing we originally intended to study.
This is one of the pitfalls of scientific discussions of consciousness. Usually the first reductionist step appears to substitute the subject under discussion for something entirely different and then proceeds to explain this other thing.
It galls me every time I see “neuroscientists”/“neuropsychologists” and the like considering themselves to have essentially discovered the problem of mind-brain duality, fundamental questions about what consciousness is, and so forth, as if philosophers haven’t been carefully studying these topics for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years—and as if many were not continuing to study it in philosophy departments to this day.
This guy for instance seems not to have read much or any philosophy. The interviewer appropriately poses question regarding Searle and Chalmers, but from his answers he doesn’t seem familiar with these quite important thinkers.
I’m genuinely confused—what is it that makes someone who calls themselves a scientist want to avoid having their lit reviews include writings categorized as philosophy?
I have a Ph.D in Cognitive Neuroscience, and my dissertation was on the neurophysiological correlates of consciousness [0].
I can assure you that Philosophy of Mind is part of the curriculum. About a third of my dissertation deals with Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle, and others.
The general consensus among my peers is that philosophy is an essential part of scientific inquiry. Studying philosophy of mind is regarded as the only way to ensure the empirical questions we're asking even make sense, or that our discoveries are non-trivial.
It bears repeating: the cognitive neuroscientists I frequented have a deep respect and genuine interest in philosophy.
[0] Specifically: I presented evidence that attention was a causal mechanism in conscious access. We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention.
> We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention.
That's cool! Can you say more about how the experiment worked?
What do you think about people like Chalmers who obstinately refuse even the idea of neural correlates of conscious is even a thing, preferring to just assert that the hard problem is hard, full stop?
People like Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle were/are stuck in the framework that tries to explain (while it provides no explanation at all) consciousness as an emergent property of a complex enough computation (by neurons).
So Dennett, Hofstadter, Edelman et al, while really smart, will never get an inch closer to a true explanation.
The mechanism by which general anesthetics temporarily and partially/fully disables consciousness should provide a nice hint in which direction a true explanation should go.
There is no doubt imo that the theory will be based on quantum mechanics. Roger Penrose goes even a step further and states that the theory needs a non-computational component. (see Orch Or : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti... )
In any case, I'm still waiting on an Einsteinian admission from most scientists that it is "their biggest mistake" to consider that a "warm, wet and noisy" environment like the brain cannot host the necessary quantum phenomena. In the current state of affairs, they have been proven wrong already.
Smart people have a tendency to think that their intelligence is enough to figure out anything. Turns out it's basically impossible to have an original thought in most fields without first getting caught up.
Actually, now that I think about this, I'd extend it to just about everyone, not just academics/engineers/etc. Imagine two people working on a plumbing problem. An hour into it, Bob waltzes in, looks at it, and says, "did you try __?" The two people who have actually been working on it roll their eyes and mutter, "yes, Bob, we've been working on it."
Sometimes Bob will get lucky and notice something they didn't, because they're too deep in the weeds, but I think people dramatically overestimate how likely this is.
It's important to recognize this tendency in everyone. When I have the instinct to say something like that, I switch gears and recognize that I'm not helping - I'm actively asking them to stop working on the problem and get me caught up.
Usually the only time I'm actually helpful in situations like that is if I have esoteric knowledge or experience that is uncommon and directly related to the problem at hand - "Oh, I ran into this 3 years ago, here's what we did to solve it". Your peers have already tried the obvious things.
Another rule of thumb to notice when this is happening is the word just. "Why don't you just..." is a belittling thing to say, as if they hadn't already thought of the obvious. Better is "why didn't X work"?
On the other hand smart people tend to avoid simple solutions to "hard" problems, that reduce their ego to a mechanical process.
For instance, I don't see a good reason why having consciousness of X is in any way fundamentally different, than having an ability to play StarCraft at MMR Y this instant in time. IMHO, conceptually they are the same and the only difference is the game being measured.
Info asymmetry in society will keep growing as Info keeps growing. On the other hand that 6 inch chimp brain we have, has no way to keep up no matter what tech is produced within our lifetimes.
So only thing worth doing is point people at things you know and keep walking, sort of like two ants passing each other in the universe.
I continually go back to the story of Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi. 2500 years later and it’s still relevant today.
The Oracle of Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest of Greeks; and Socrates took this as approval of his agnosticism which was the starting point of his philosophy: ‘One thing only I know’, he said, ‘and that is that I know nothing’. Philosophy begins when one begins to doubt — when one begins to question the accepted wisdom of tradition. Particularly the one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms.
Puzzled by the priestess of Delphi’s statement, Socrates felt obliged to seek the meaning of her remark. By questioning others who had a reputation for wisdom, he came to see that he was wiser than they, because unlike them he did not claim to know what he did not know.
Funny you say that.. I've recently read a book about child psychology and it was constantly praising the progress of science (specifically neuroscience).. yet I've read all this stuff before, for example in Jung or even in the Stoics.
Ok maybe they didn't know. Or maybe it's science's job to methodically confirm knowledge, that has so far been rather anecdotal, and scientists can pat themselves on the back for it, why not.
But it somewhat annoyed me to read that book anyway. They just made it sound like some breakthrough research, which I think it wasn't.
The thing to remember about philosophy is that philosophy is more akin to mathematics than to science. It's the exercise of taking some postulates and forming a theory atop the assumption the postulates are true. Whether the philosophy you end up with actually reflects reality is a function of whether those postulates map to real things... The philosophy can (and, in history, many times, has) live independently of the postulates, describing an interesting, self-consistent world that just isn't real.
Aristotle described matter as being made up of atoms, and he's first-order-approximation correct, but his mechanistic details of how they worked were extremely wrong. Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" proof rests extremely heavily on an assertion he makes earlier in the Discourse where he combats the hypothesis that he's just a brain in a jar being fed lies by an evil demon by asserting that the God that would allow that reality would be a really shitty god, so he dismisses it out of hand. It's through scientific investigation that we came to discover which parts of Aristotle's philosophy matched reality and which can be discarded (and we lack the scientific insight, as of yet, to have strong evidence for or against that evil-demon brain-in-a-jar hypothesis. ;) ).
There are a thousand, thousand algebras that are internally-consistent but ultimately uninteresting because they map to nothing we observe in the universe, and then there's linear algebra. There are a thousand, thousand philosophies that are internally-consistent hot garbage, and then there's Jung. To say "Jung described this, why did it take science so long to discover it?" is like saying "Complex wave functions already describe quantum mechanics; why did it take physicists so long to realize that?"
Now, what philosophy does gift us with (if it's grounded in strong logical consistency) is a roadmap of where to look next if we notice that things in reality do align to the postulates, because the philosopher has already imagined, in vivid detail, the consequences of those assertions. And that is extremely cool.
Galling can go both ways. Why is it that philosophists have gone hundreds or thousands of years thinking on a problem and produced no tangible results and yet Science put a man on the moon? Reproducibility.
Yours is literally a philosophical question. You are doing philosophy. Surely you see the relevance and importance of your own question...
More to the point, most of what you hold dear is precisely philosophical in nature. Let us list but two, which I draw directly from your comment:
1. The value of putting a man on the moon
2. The superior (epistemological!) quality of scientific knowledge.
That last one bears repeating. The entire reason you think that you think science is better than philosophy is because of a philosophical stance. You are manifestly an empiricist, albeit one who does not understand empiricism and its rational context very well.
Respectfully, I leave you with the following quote by Gordan Fee:
Before you can say, ‘I disagree,’ you must be able to say, ‘I understand.’
It is axiomatic that before you level criticism you should be able to state
an author’s position in terms that he or she would find acceptable.
Your position betrays an ignorance of philosophy that would appall history's greatest scientists.
No tangible results? You live in a world shaped entirely by political philosophy, which itself is almost inseparable from philosophy writ large historically. The modern political Western world is entirely built on Kantian ideals.
By definition philosophy has come to refer to the study of things that cannot be resolved by empirical inquiry. So, every time human advancements have ACTUALLY allowed us to answer a question, it ceases to be the realm of philosophy.
For instance, Plato and other Ancient Greek philosophers theorized about the basic building blocks of matter—what their shapes and natures were. That question has become one of physics.
That’s why philosophy is referred to as the Mother of the Sciences.
This hardly makes philosophy worthy of your description as lacking “tangible results.”
> Galling can go both ways. Why is it that philosophists have gone hundreds or thousands of years thinking on a problem and produced no tangible results and yet Science put a man on the moon? Reproducibility.
Someone should probably let you know that science is a subset of philosophy (or "philosophism" as you seem to think it's called).
What do you mean no tangible results? Pretty much everything around is derived from some philosophical idea that's been normalized throughout the population.
As you say, these topics have been carefully studies for thousands of years but these two have done a lot to muddy the waters with confusing arguments, and I don't blame anyone for disregarding them.
You haven't really done anything here but ignorantly dismiss philosophy categorically (citing two relatively recent arguments made in the context of the modernist tradition). Frankly, I don't loose sleep over zombies personally because I don't find this to be a real problem. It is the result of modernist presuppositions. What I find rather philistine is the cockiness of science fetishists who fail to recognize their own metaphysical presuppositions, which typically seems to be, because of historical accident, preposterously crude like materialism or dualism.
Funny, I've been repeating around "Consciousness is just a feeling" for a while. My question is also "why has it evolved at all" ? Keep reading for a hint.
Hunger, for example, is just a feeling.
Thirstiness is just a feeling.
But we don't build complex theories of the world around Thirstiness. Somehow we do with Consciousness, because I suspect it tricks us, playing recursively with our thinking.
Consciousness, which nobody really ever defines clearly, it's probably just a name around a bunch of feelings we have.
It's clear why Thirstiness has evolved: to get us to find water. Not salty one.
Probably Consciousness does something like that. For example, it might be just a feeling of oneness to keep us intact, across peripherals (legs, arms) and time (now is really a continuation or whatever we were doing before, you need a feeling to enforce that).
>Consciousness, which nobody really ever defines clearly,
I think this is really the core of the problem. My non-scientific belief is that when learn enough about the brain, we'll learn that "consciousness" is a good descriptor for the human experience of having a mind, but not really a meaningful word scientifically.
Stack depth is finite. If consciousness is cognitive recursion, we only can get so far down before the results are garbage. My working theory is that "max cognitive stack depth" is a measure of consciousness.
The scarier concern is that consciousness is a useful intelligent behavior bootstrapping tool, but once we encode everything it has helped generate into cultural DNA or literal DNA it becomes an evolutionary redundant appendix-like organ that will atrophy in the coming generations (See Blindsight by peter watts)
Although I understand what you're pointing at, I think you have focused too specifically on feeling or reason (i.e. thought). I am willing to go as far as to say that all our actions, thoughts and feelings are mechanical/predetermined - but this all doesn't cover "existence". That's where I believe consciousness truly lies. It doesn't think or decide what to think, nor does it decide how to feel and it does not plan or take actions. It does, however, experience it all. Your life-story is a roller-coaster and consciousness is that thing going on for the ride.
IMO, the true nature of consciousness sits at the same level as the nature of the universe. It touches on what it means to simply "exist".
Having said that, I'd be happy to know what others think.
I see what you mean. The "existence" part I suspect is a trick. I think "That thing going on for the ride", is actually just a feeling evolved for a bodily purpose.
The body is doing the ride, with all its chemical gradients pulling the levers, and the thing we call Consciousness it's just "the feeling of the ride" which has evolved to keep some temporal/spatial unity. You could have legs, and memories, without being able to connect them to you.
For example, without that feeling of unity, the brain wouldn't not know which subject all the things are related to.
Something would be thirsty or hungry, but it wouldn't know that is the same thing with those legs and memories that it was referring to a just a moment ago.
I wouldn't describe thirst as a feeling, but maybe it's because we can obviously tie a physiological state to it. If consciousness was a signal/feeling too, what process would this be entertaining ? the need for the brain to keep chunking the world and produce new memories, ideas ?
This seems like a very accurate description, especially the observation about temporal continuity, which we take for granted, but on occasions it can feel like a fragile illusion.
> Consciousness, which nobody really ever defines clearly
"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism -— something it is like for the organism." [1]
We don't know what consciousness is OR what it's for. There is no theory of what a brain is capable of with consciousness vs without or if this is even a valid question.
Decent interview, but surprised no mention or allusion to the hard problem[1]—saying consciousness is "just a feeling" doesn't do much to chip away at the core issue.
Oh? I thought he said clearly that consciousness (your hard problem i.e. the experience of qualia) is just a feeling (from the brainstem).
And then he explains that cognition takes place in the cortex, which isn't the seat of consciousness. Cognition is built on top of and relies upon the hard consciousness relayed from the brainstem for "drive".
So, with cognition, you can calculate that to satisfy your desire, you need to walk three blocks north and two blocks east to the store to buy food. The drive for this behaviour originates lower in the brainstem through the quality of hunger, which is referred from the body when a sensor in your tank registers empty.
Fair question, but my problem (and I could be misunderstanding his position) is that he doesn't provide any cohesive explanation or line of reasoning why there's subjective experience effectively accompanying these "drives" at all.
The hard problem would put this in the category of easy problems[1].
Oh man, who cares about the article, it's the consciousness thread! ;)
I also have my strong opinion, but anytime such heated discussion emerges it's worth remembering that disagreement is often more about mapping between some word and reality, rather than discussing the reality associated with that word.
I'm always surprised in these discussions that the ideas of Tesla, Planck and others don't come up. Someone once tried to convince me that consciousness arose from the brain by saying that if he removed a part, then consciousness would change and diminish. I answered along the lines of Tesla that perhaps the brain is a like a radio receiver and if you remove parts from the receiver it is not going to work.
My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists
― Nikola Tesla
All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.
We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter
― Max Planck
It is known you can remove parts of brain, thus reducing ability to think, sometimes abruptly (but not completely). One of the abruptions will be fatal for ability to stay conscious.
You can remove the antenna from a radio and remove the ability to hear the ballgame. That does not mean the game was happening in the antenna.
Before getting hung up on the idea of transmission, understand this is just an analogy: breaking something by removing a part does not prove much at all.
“Since the cerebral cortex is the seat of intelligence, almost everybody thinks that it is also the seat of consciousness, Solms writes. “I disagree; consciousness is far more primitive than that. It arises from a part of the brain that humans share with fishes. This is the ‘hidden spring’ of the title.””
This is a very cerebral approach (pun intended) not at all shared with many or even the vast majority of non-western philosophical schools. Until science begins to integrate (or reject) these models, we are a long way off from even approaching if mechanisms of consciousness can actually be 'known', let alone making affirmative assertions about it
I must've read about 100 articles in a similar vein to this over the last 10-15 years. I feel like I've learned literally nothing from any of them. I read Descartes and later David Chalmers, and I feel nothing has been added to our understanding of the fundamental issues at all. And to be honest, I shouldn't be surprised or particularly disappointed. The Mind-Body problem has existed for millennia for good reason.
b) Affect is real, and not simply an imagined experience.
In other words, question the validity of the above. Are they in fact true? How do we know them to be true? Why is a feeling given more credence than hallucinations? What if all feelings are an imagined experience, one that is "programmed" into birth by the genetic material? Just because an imaginative experience is encoded genetically it shouldn't make it any more real, should it? How would humans look like to some alien species that is capable of cognition and consciousness (without being robotic, as our species' scifi literature imagines) but not affect and identity? Wouldn't they see us all acting as if suffering from some mass delusion?
You are using very strange definitions of terminology. Consciousness is just the word we use for the fact that a stream of experiences exists. To say it might be "imagined" is nonsensical - the experiences are there regardless, and their existence is the mystery.
Readit News
Saying that "consciousness is just a feeling" is equivalent to saying that "consciousness is just consciousness". It may sound like and explanation, but it is just a tautology.
I was fascinated by a paper that argues the compression conjecture: the idea that consciousness is indistinguishable from compression. I just finished putting down my thoughts on the matter this morning [1]. This paper addresses "the hard problem of consciousness" directly:
> The answer to this question lies in the realization that the hypothesis of Amy’s subjective experience is a hypothesis which Amy herself holds, an understanding which is manifested through the compression she carries out. Understanding the hypothesis that one is feeling something and the actual experience of feeling are the same thing. Amy’s feeling therefore exists relative to the assumption of her own existence, an assumption which the system itself is capable of making
[0] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/297030798.pdf
[1] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/consciousness-as-compres...
Are you of the opinion that gzip is conscious? When I execute gzip is it aware that it's compressing things?
If so, why do you think that?
If not, I don't understand the argument that consciousness and compression are the same thing.
What would a solution to the so called (I argue non-existent) hard problem look like?
Why is the hard problem a problem?
What new, useful information would "solving" it deliver?
Ah since we know why humans share a common qualia for red now we can do X?
I don't get it. Attempting to rationalise away an irrational premise, i.e. a hard problem exists, is always going to fail to convince believers. What is the point in attempting to define something that is ill-defined to start with?
Here is my position. Consciousness is a word. What it means varies over time and and space and according to who uses it. The mental model of who uses it may or may not correspond to objective reality in a broad or narrow sense. Magic is a word too. Just because we can explain N magic tricks does that mean that there is some "essence" of magic that is left unexplainable, i.e. the hard problem of magic? Just because we can come up with words for things does not mean that we actually know what we are talking about. I think "consciousness" as a word is not concretely defined therefore I am sceptical of a single unified natural phenomenon underlying the word. Giving a mental model a name does not necessarily give it reality.
My subjective experience of reality is the only thing I have direct knowledge of. Everything else I must doubt. If you think about it, I am sure you will come to the same conclusion.
My paycheck says that I am a scientific researcher, and I have a deep appreciation for science. It provides me with models that go all the way from the subatomic world to societies, that expose regularities in reality, that allow me to understand how many things fit together, and to make predictions. But these are the things that are "just words" or, better yet, symbols. My conscious experience is the thing that I DO KNOW. Maybe it's all a dream. Maybe I'm a brain in a jar. Maybe I was created one nanosecond ago, and I am just a random fluctuation in some process and all of my memories are part of that.
And yet, and yet, the most fundamental phenomena of them all, the thing that I have experience of, is not predicted by any of the scientific models. There is no reason why a bunch of atoms should "become conscious" once their interactions are complex enough. There is no way to build a scientific instrument that measures consciousness. Sure, you can build a scientific instrument that detects brain states that we assume to be correlated with consciousness, but this is just crude analogy. Firstly we can never be sure, and secondly we don't know where the boundaries of the phenomenon are. Is a star conscious? Is the universe? Are the individual cells in your body? How do you know? How could you tell?
That is the mystery. I find that the people who deny the mystery have something equivalent to a religious belief, and that they are not necessarily aware of it . Believing that matter -> ??? -> consciousness is not so different from believing in creationism. A comforting story that makes reality seem intelligible, but that has no basis other than one's wishful thinking and group think. It certainly has nothing to do with science or rationality, at least so far.
Do you think some other life in the universe might have consciousness, even if it's organized in a way that would be unrecognizable to us? How would you go about examining that question?
Carl Sagan spent a lot of time looking for ways to pose that question in ways that make it possible to "do science" about it and not just trail off into ideas that are beyond discussion, beyond meaning.
I mean if you are looking at a planet to see if the surface has been worked in a way that proves the existence of a technology-capable species (even if it was long extinct), you're talking about something "real" at that point.
Also, the book "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem is really wonderful in the way it evokes the mystery of how a being can be sentient and utterly non-comprehensible to us. Quite brilliant really.
I think you hit the nail in the head with that. Consciousness might very well just be a tautology, so the only definitions we are going to be able to produce are going to be circular or recursive.
However, this is a problem with written language in general. The definition of any word is only provided in the form of other words, which themselves are defined by words as well, so without an interpreter/reader that makes a connection from language to something else, language by itself can’t really have any meaning.
My point is simply that "feeling" already assumes consciousness. Maybe everything is conscious. Still, saying "it's just a feeling" explains nothing. Most people assume that glasses of water are not conscious, so I just used that example to illustrate my point. But you make a valid remark.
Our brains, which is where we suppose our conciousness originates, is made (most likely) from the same sub-atomic particles inanimate objects are made of.
So is there something more to these inanimate objects? Does a rock has more potential then we are aware of?
I don't know. Funny question to ask though.
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Funny enough though, many people have tried to boil down consciousness to be some "simple" concept like the original author with "consciousness is just a feeling". I'm reminded of when Sartre writes all about it in Being and Nothingness: "All of consciousness is consciousness of something"
> You reduce it down to something much more biological, like basic feelings, and then you start building up the complexities.
Author is attempting to "build up the the complexities" from discrete falsifiable parts. There's great and obvious benefit to that. One obvious drawback is that it may not succeed in adequately addressing the complexity suggested by the history of philosophy of consciousness. But that in no way makes it a tautology.
> You reduce it down to something much more biological, like basic feelings, and then you start building up the complexities.
But at this point we're not even sure if the thing you're referring to is the same thing we originally intended to study.
This is one of the pitfalls of scientific discussions of consciousness. Usually the first reductionist step appears to substitute the subject under discussion for something entirely different and then proceeds to explain this other thing.
"Assume a spherical cow" and all that.
Like the need to pee.
This guy for instance seems not to have read much or any philosophy. The interviewer appropriately poses question regarding Searle and Chalmers, but from his answers he doesn’t seem familiar with these quite important thinkers.
I’m genuinely confused—what is it that makes someone who calls themselves a scientist want to avoid having their lit reviews include writings categorized as philosophy?
I can assure you that Philosophy of Mind is part of the curriculum. About a third of my dissertation deals with Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle, and others.
The general consensus among my peers is that philosophy is an essential part of scientific inquiry. Studying philosophy of mind is regarded as the only way to ensure the empirical questions we're asking even make sense, or that our discoveries are non-trivial.
It bears repeating: the cognitive neuroscientists I frequented have a deep respect and genuine interest in philosophy.
[0] Specifically: I presented evidence that attention was a causal mechanism in conscious access. We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention.
That's cool! Can you say more about how the experiment worked?
So Dennett, Hofstadter, Edelman et al, while really smart, will never get an inch closer to a true explanation.
The mechanism by which general anesthetics temporarily and partially/fully disables consciousness should provide a nice hint in which direction a true explanation should go.
There is no doubt imo that the theory will be based on quantum mechanics. Roger Penrose goes even a step further and states that the theory needs a non-computational component. (see Orch Or : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti... )
In any case, I'm still waiting on an Einsteinian admission from most scientists that it is "their biggest mistake" to consider that a "warm, wet and noisy" environment like the brain cannot host the necessary quantum phenomena. In the current state of affairs, they have been proven wrong already.
Ironically, you're opining on the scientist of opining on consciousness without having read philosophy, without having read the scientist.
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Actually, now that I think about this, I'd extend it to just about everyone, not just academics/engineers/etc. Imagine two people working on a plumbing problem. An hour into it, Bob waltzes in, looks at it, and says, "did you try __?" The two people who have actually been working on it roll their eyes and mutter, "yes, Bob, we've been working on it."
Sometimes Bob will get lucky and notice something they didn't, because they're too deep in the weeds, but I think people dramatically overestimate how likely this is.
Usually the only time I'm actually helpful in situations like that is if I have esoteric knowledge or experience that is uncommon and directly related to the problem at hand - "Oh, I ran into this 3 years ago, here's what we did to solve it". Your peers have already tried the obvious things.
Another rule of thumb to notice when this is happening is the word just. "Why don't you just..." is a belittling thing to say, as if they hadn't already thought of the obvious. Better is "why didn't X work"?
For instance, I don't see a good reason why having consciousness of X is in any way fundamentally different, than having an ability to play StarCraft at MMR Y this instant in time. IMHO, conceptually they are the same and the only difference is the game being measured.
Info asymmetry in society will keep growing as Info keeps growing. On the other hand that 6 inch chimp brain we have, has no way to keep up no matter what tech is produced within our lifetimes.
So only thing worth doing is point people at things you know and keep walking, sort of like two ants passing each other in the universe.
The Oracle of Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest of Greeks; and Socrates took this as approval of his agnosticism which was the starting point of his philosophy: ‘One thing only I know’, he said, ‘and that is that I know nothing’. Philosophy begins when one begins to doubt — when one begins to question the accepted wisdom of tradition. Particularly the one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms.
Puzzled by the priestess of Delphi’s statement, Socrates felt obliged to seek the meaning of her remark. By questioning others who had a reputation for wisdom, he came to see that he was wiser than they, because unlike them he did not claim to know what he did not know.
Ok maybe they didn't know. Or maybe it's science's job to methodically confirm knowledge, that has so far been rather anecdotal, and scientists can pat themselves on the back for it, why not.
But it somewhat annoyed me to read that book anyway. They just made it sound like some breakthrough research, which I think it wasn't.
Aristotle described matter as being made up of atoms, and he's first-order-approximation correct, but his mechanistic details of how they worked were extremely wrong. Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" proof rests extremely heavily on an assertion he makes earlier in the Discourse where he combats the hypothesis that he's just a brain in a jar being fed lies by an evil demon by asserting that the God that would allow that reality would be a really shitty god, so he dismisses it out of hand. It's through scientific investigation that we came to discover which parts of Aristotle's philosophy matched reality and which can be discarded (and we lack the scientific insight, as of yet, to have strong evidence for or against that evil-demon brain-in-a-jar hypothesis. ;) ).
There are a thousand, thousand algebras that are internally-consistent but ultimately uninteresting because they map to nothing we observe in the universe, and then there's linear algebra. There are a thousand, thousand philosophies that are internally-consistent hot garbage, and then there's Jung. To say "Jung described this, why did it take science so long to discover it?" is like saying "Complex wave functions already describe quantum mechanics; why did it take physicists so long to realize that?"
Now, what philosophy does gift us with (if it's grounded in strong logical consistency) is a roadmap of where to look next if we notice that things in reality do align to the postulates, because the philosopher has already imagined, in vivid detail, the consequences of those assertions. And that is extremely cool.
More to the point, most of what you hold dear is precisely philosophical in nature. Let us list but two, which I draw directly from your comment:
1. The value of putting a man on the moon
2. The superior (epistemological!) quality of scientific knowledge.
That last one bears repeating. The entire reason you think that you think science is better than philosophy is because of a philosophical stance. You are manifestly an empiricist, albeit one who does not understand empiricism and its rational context very well.
Respectfully, I leave you with the following quote by Gordan Fee:
Your position betrays an ignorance of philosophy that would appall history's greatest scientists.For instance, Plato and other Ancient Greek philosophers theorized about the basic building blocks of matter—what their shapes and natures were. That question has become one of physics.
That’s why philosophy is referred to as the Mother of the Sciences.
This hardly makes philosophy worthy of your description as lacking “tangible results.”
Someone should probably let you know that science is a subset of philosophy (or "philosophism" as you seem to think it's called).
Honestly.
It is not solutions what Philosophers seek. Mostly they pose questions.
The problem with Science is that it just answers them. And Scientist deem that sufficient.
The hard thing is to tackle questions which have only personal answers. Universal ones are easy.
Same for anyone: from Plato to Descartes to Hume to Nietzsche to Husserl.
Like Vizzini in the Princes Bride: "Plato, Aristotle... Morons".
It is so easy to mistake science for wisdom.
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Chalmers: philosophical zombies
As you say, these topics have been carefully studies for thousands of years but these two have done a lot to muddy the waters with confusing arguments, and I don't blame anyone for disregarding them.
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Hunger, for example, is just a feeling. Thirstiness is just a feeling. But we don't build complex theories of the world around Thirstiness. Somehow we do with Consciousness, because I suspect it tricks us, playing recursively with our thinking.
Consciousness, which nobody really ever defines clearly, it's probably just a name around a bunch of feelings we have.
It's clear why Thirstiness has evolved: to get us to find water. Not salty one.
Probably Consciousness does something like that. For example, it might be just a feeling of oneness to keep us intact, across peripherals (legs, arms) and time (now is really a continuation or whatever we were doing before, you need a feeling to enforce that).
I think this is really the core of the problem. My non-scientific belief is that when learn enough about the brain, we'll learn that "consciousness" is a good descriptor for the human experience of having a mind, but not really a meaningful word scientifically.
I think this is key. The idea that we can not only feel thirst, or think about thirst, but also think about thinking about thirst!
The scarier concern is that consciousness is a useful intelligent behavior bootstrapping tool, but once we encode everything it has helped generate into cultural DNA or literal DNA it becomes an evolutionary redundant appendix-like organ that will atrophy in the coming generations (See Blindsight by peter watts)
IMO, the true nature of consciousness sits at the same level as the nature of the universe. It touches on what it means to simply "exist".
Having said that, I'd be happy to know what others think.
The body is doing the ride, with all its chemical gradients pulling the levers, and the thing we call Consciousness it's just "the feeling of the ride" which has evolved to keep some temporal/spatial unity. You could have legs, and memories, without being able to connect them to you.
For example, without that feeling of unity, the brain wouldn't not know which subject all the things are related to.
Something would be thirsty or hungry, but it wouldn't know that is the same thing with those legs and memories that it was referring to a just a moment ago.
"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism -— something it is like for the organism." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
And then he explains that cognition takes place in the cortex, which isn't the seat of consciousness. Cognition is built on top of and relies upon the hard consciousness relayed from the brainstem for "drive".
So, with cognition, you can calculate that to satisfy your desire, you need to walk three blocks north and two blocks east to the store to buy food. The drive for this behaviour originates lower in the brainstem through the quality of hunger, which is referred from the body when a sensor in your tank registers empty.
Is not his "drive" your "hard consciousness"?
The hard problem would put this in the category of easy problems[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...
Repeating the question doesn't answer it. What is this "feeling?" It's merely moving the question down from "the brain" to "the brainstem."
I also have my strong opinion, but anytime such heated discussion emerges it's worth remembering that disagreement is often more about mapping between some word and reality, rather than discussing the reality associated with that word.
My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists ― Nikola Tesla
All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter ― Max Planck
Scientists research man missing 90% of his brain who leads a normal life https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...
Before getting hung up on the idea of transmission, understand this is just an analogy: breaking something by removing a part does not prove much at all.
This is a very cerebral approach (pun intended) not at all shared with many or even the vast majority of non-western philosophical schools. Until science begins to integrate (or reject) these models, we are a long way off from even approaching if mechanisms of consciousness can actually be 'known', let alone making affirmative assertions about it
a) Consciousness depends on affect
b) Affect is real, and not simply an imagined experience.
In other words, question the validity of the above. Are they in fact true? How do we know them to be true? Why is a feeling given more credence than hallucinations? What if all feelings are an imagined experience, one that is "programmed" into birth by the genetic material? Just because an imaginative experience is encoded genetically it shouldn't make it any more real, should it? How would humans look like to some alien species that is capable of cognition and consciousness (without being robotic, as our species' scifi literature imagines) but not affect and identity? Wouldn't they see us all acting as if suffering from some mass delusion?