First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
A Soft-Line Reductionist’s Critique of Chalmers on the First/Third-Person Divide
As somebody who has no problem with all mental activity supervening on material interactions, I’ve always struggled with trying to understand what exactly is hard about the ‘hard problem’, or even what that problem is.
The primary disconnect seems to be that no third-person description can convey knowledge of a first-person experience, just like no first-person experience can convey knowledge of a third-person description. So only the bat can know what it’s like to be a bat. The BiV scenario illustrates the latter disconnect: that one cannot know one’s own physical nature from experience alone without presuming that the experience constitutes true empirical evidence.
So it seems difficult to see how any system, if it experiences at all, can experience anything but itself. That makes first-person experience not mysterious at all. Clearly I am not getting the hard problem. Chalmers attempts to make a problem where there doesn’t seem to be one to me. The conflict seems summarized by incorrect assertions of the disregard of the first person by cognitive science, and comments like this:
Quite right. This topic admits to the talking past each other, and is attempting to gather responses that resolve that disconnect.
All quotes are from https://consc.net/notes/first-third.html
“to many of us”, sure. It’s made into a mystery by presuming unnecessary things (that mind and body are separate things). To me it’s easy. How could a thing experience anything else besides itself? Interesting to attempt to answer that question, but it doesn’t work well for something like a biological creature.
As for resistance from the third person, that’s totally wrong. It’s effortless until you get to the whole ‘what it’s like to be’ thing, which resists any written explanation. Chalmers offers no better insights as to what it’s like to be a bat (not to be confused with what it’s like for you to be a bat) than does any other explanation.
The intro goes on and on asserting how mysterious it all is, but that goes nowhere to actually helping me realize the mystery. I must be taking a pure 3rd person view, which is admitted to be not mysterious.
In the terminology section:
It isn’t until fully 60% of the way through the article that Chalmers actually seems to summarize what he thinks is problematic, speaking in the context of awareness of self, which needs to be more than just ‘a system monitoring its own processes’. Not until 85% through do we get more than this summary.
Instead of experience of the monitoring of internal processes, why can’t it be experience of internal processes, and how is that any different than awareness of internal processes or monitoring of internal processes? When is ‘experience’ the more appropriate term, and why is a physical system necessarily incapable of accommodating that use?
I can take a stab at that. There seems to be a necessity of memory and predicting going on. It’s almost impossible to be a predictor without memory, and I cannot think of anything that ‘experiences’ that does not do both things, but I can think of things that monitor internal processes that do so without either.
What I will not accept is a definition-based argument along the lines of “The word ‘experience’ is by definition something only a biological entity has, therefore a non-biological system (doing the exact same thing) cannot experience.” Language describes. It doesn’t proscribe.
But no, Chalmers presents at least a summary again, which is probably what I want rather than the full-blown 20-page treatment that Nagel might present.
Argument from lack of ‘explanation’ seems to fall utterly flat.
Of course not. The physical view does not claim otherwise. A thing cannot know the experience of being something it is not and never was. One can guess about the experience of another human/mammal since it is likely to be somewhat similar, but to subsequently conclude that nothing sufficiently different (non-biological say) can have experience at all is a complete non-sequitur.
Similarly, it does not follow that the physicalist model is wrong because one doesn’t know the experience of being a bat.
No actual problem has been identified.
Concerning mental content:
As somebody who has no problem with all mental activity supervening on material interactions, I’ve always struggled with trying to understand what exactly is hard about the ‘hard problem’, or even what that problem is.
The primary disconnect seems to be that no third-person description can convey knowledge of a first-person experience, just like no first-person experience can convey knowledge of a third-person description. So only the bat can know what it’s like to be a bat. The BiV scenario illustrates the latter disconnect: that one cannot know one’s own physical nature from experience alone without presuming that the experience constitutes true empirical evidence.
So it seems difficult to see how any system, if it experiences at all, can experience anything but itself. That makes first-person experience not mysterious at all. Clearly I am not getting the hard problem. Chalmers attempts to make a problem where there doesn’t seem to be one to me. The conflict seems summarized by incorrect assertions of the disregard of the first person by cognitive science, and comments like this:
The reductionist will reply in character, and the two will go on, feeling that they are talking past each other.
Quite right. This topic admits to the talking past each other, and is attempting to gather responses that resolve that disconnect.
All quotes are from https://consc.net/notes/first-third.html
The first person is, at least to many of us, still a huge mystery. The famous "Mind-Body Problem," in these enlightened materialist days, reduces to nothing but the question "What is the first person, and how is it possible?". There are many aspects to the first-person mystery. The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person.
“to many of us”, sure. It’s made into a mystery by presuming unnecessary things (that mind and body are separate things). To me it’s easy. How could a thing experience anything else besides itself? Interesting to attempt to answer that question, but it doesn’t work well for something like a biological creature.
As for resistance from the third person, that’s totally wrong. It’s effortless until you get to the whole ‘what it’s like to be’ thing, which resists any written explanation. Chalmers offers no better insights as to what it’s like to be a bat (not to be confused with what it’s like for you to be a bat) than does any other explanation.
The intro goes on and on asserting how mysterious it all is, but that goes nowhere to actually helping me realize the mystery. I must be taking a pure 3rd person view, which is admitted to be not mysterious.
In the terminology section:
I originally intended to use the word "consciousness" to represent the mysteries of the first-person, but this had two problems: the word has been often used to denote third-person viewable phenomena (the notion of a system which gets feedback from its own processing, to name just one aspect)Here he kind of quotes a crude third-person ‘explanation’ of consciousness, right after denial of it being able to do so.
It isn’t until fully 60% of the way through the article that Chalmers actually seems to summarize what he thinks is problematic, speaking in the context of awareness of self, which needs to be more than just ‘a system monitoring its own processes’. Not until 85% through do we get more than this summary.
The problem is, how could a mere physical system experience this awareness.But this just seems like another round of feedback. Is it awareness of the fact that one can monitor one’s own processes? That’s just monitoring of monitoring. There’s potential infinite regress to that line of thinking. So the key word here is perhaps the switching of ‘awareness’ to ‘experience’, but then why the level of indirection?
Instead of experience of the monitoring of internal processes, why can’t it be experience of internal processes, and how is that any different than awareness of internal processes or monitoring of internal processes? When is ‘experience’ the more appropriate term, and why is a physical system necessarily incapable of accommodating that use?
I can take a stab at that. There seems to be a necessity of memory and predicting going on. It’s almost impossible to be a predictor without memory, and I cannot think of anything that ‘experiences’ that does not do both things, but I can think of things that monitor internal processes that do so without either.
What I will not accept is a definition-based argument along the lines of “The word ‘experience’ is by definition something only a biological entity has, therefore a non-biological system (doing the exact same thing) cannot experience.” Language describes. It doesn’t proscribe.
We should never forget that the mind is caused by a brainBut not necessarily. It is unclear if Chalmers is implying this necessity as do many arguing along similar lines.
Although we do not know how, a first-person is emergent from a third-person-understandable substrate.He asserts this third-person substrate to be ‘understandable’. Perhaps so, but doubtful. No understanding of human brain function exists or is likely ever to exist, even if say a full simulation of a human is achieved. Of course such a simulation, while not providing that full understanding, would at least falsify any dualistic model, at least to the person simulated, no matter his prior views.
Many commentators, particularly those in the third-person camp, give the illusion of reducing first-person mysteries by appropriating the usual first-person words to refer to the third-person phenomena to which they correspond.I’m actually confused about his references to third-person phenomena. Phenomena seems intrinsically to be first-person. Sure, one can in third person discuss a particular phenomenon (say the experience of red), that discussion is itself not the phenomenon of redness. So I guess that Chalmers means ‘references to’ some phenomenon when calling it third-person. Not sure.
The Mystery of the First-PersonPerhaps I am commenting on the wrong paper. Perhaps my OP should be quoting Nagel, as I implied with the ‘like to be a bat’ mention. I’m certainly not getting anywhere with this article I found by simply googling something like ‘first vs third person mind’.
As I have said, it is difficult to talk about the first-person without descending into vagueness. But what can be done, if it is done carefully, is to point out the mysteries, and ask how a third-person, physical theory could ever deal with these. I do not intend to do this in this paper - I take it that this has already been done most ably, by Nagel and others, and that reductionists have never given an adequate response.
But no, Chalmers presents at least a summary again, which is probably what I want rather than the full-blown 20-page treatment that Nagel might present.
One can ask: how could a third-person theory begin to explain the sensation of seeing the colour red?That sensation cannot be described, as illustrated by Mary’s room. This is not controversial. Its explanation seems trivial: red light triggers signals from nerves that otherwise are not triggered, thus resulting in internal processing that manifests as that sensation. That’s very third-person, but it’s an explanation, no? Certainly no worse of an explanation than say Chalmers might supply who simply substitutes a partially black box of how that processing fully works with a much blacker box of which nothing is known.
Argument from lack of ‘explanation’ seems to fall utterly flat.
Could a theory be given which enabled a being, as intelligent as ourselves but without the capacity for sight (or even a visual cortex), to truly understand the subjective experience of the colour red?
Of course not. The physical view does not claim otherwise. A thing cannot know the experience of being something it is not and never was. One can guess about the experience of another human/mammal since it is likely to be somewhat similar, but to subsequently conclude that nothing sufficiently different (non-biological say) can have experience at all is a complete non-sequitur.
Similarly, it does not follow that the physicalist model is wrong because one doesn’t know the experience of being a bat.
No actual problem has been identified.
Concerning mental content:
When we think, our thoughts have content. How is it possible that, in some absolute sense, patterns of neuronal activity in a small biological system support meaning?Meaning is relative, meaningful only to that which can interpret however the meaning is encoded. I have no idea why he thinks thoughts need to be meaningful in any absolute sense.
Comments (484)
Don't we also experience a world of things other than ourselves? Perhaps you mean something different—that we don't experience being other things?
I think it's mysterious that even with knowledge of all the laws of physics, it seems impossible to decide whether plants can suffer.
I look at this problem from a slightly different angle:
Chalmers calls the problem:
There are so-called soft problems of consciousness—they are also complex, but technically solvable. Examples:
How does the brain process visual information?
How does a person concentrate attention?
How does the brain make decisions?
These questions, in principle, can be studied using neuroscience, AI, and psychology.
But the hard problem of consciousness is:
Why do these processes have an internal sensation at all?
Why doesn't the brain simply function like a computer, but is accompanied by conscious experience?
We know what it's like to see red, but we can't explain why the brain accompanies this perception with subjective experience.
So (as Chalmers writes): Either something is missing in modern science. Or we're asking the wrong question.
Chalmers asks a question in the spirit of postpositivism: Any scientific theory is not necessarily true, but it satisfies our need to describe phenomena. He suggests rethinking the question itself. However, he hopes to ultimately find the truth (in a very positivist way). He still thinks in terms of "problem ? theory ? solution." That is, he believes in the attainability of truth, even if only very distantly.
As for me, I would say this: if the truth of this question is unraveled, human existence will lose all meaning (perhaps being replaced by something or someone new). Why? Because answering this question will essentially create an algorithm for our existence that can be reproduced, and we ourselves will become mere machines in meaning. An algorithm for our inner world will emerge, and therefore a way to copy/recreate/model the subjective self will emerge.
From this, I see two possible outcomes: Either this question will be answered (which I would not want in my lifetime) or this question will remain unanswered (which promises humanity to continue asking this question forever in any way and for any reason, but never attaining the truth). So my deep conviction on this matter is this: mystery itself is what maintains the sacredness of existence.
At the same time, as a lover of ontology, I myself ask myself these and similar questions. However, the works I have written on this subject do not claim to be truthful, but rather call for an acceptance of incompleteness. Incompleteness and unansweredness lie at the foundation of our existence, and we must treat this with respect, otherwise our "miraculous" mind, with its desire to know everything, will lead to our own loss.
The measure of how well we understand a phenomenon or system is what kind of useful predictions and inferences we can make about it.
When it comes to something like pain, say, we do understand very well the sensory inputs to the pain centres of the brain. But how the brain converts data into an unpleasant sensation remains quite mysterious.
This has practical implications -- it would be very useful to have some kind of direct measure of pain or some non-arbitrary way of understanding different kinds of pain. If we make a sentient AI one day, and it tells us it's in pain, how could we know if that's true or just saying that is part of its language model?
And we call it the "hard problem" because, right now, it doesn't seem feasible that a set of words could ever provide this understanding. How will words ever tell me what the extra colours that tetrachromats can see look like, when I can't tell a color blind from birth person what red looks like?
And indeed, how can I know whether an AI feels pain, when I can't know that you feel pain?
This is what makes it a "special" problem. The OP seems to basically acknowledge the main problem but seems to be shrugging it off in a "how could it be any other way" kind of perspective. But "how could it be any other way" doesn't give us any predictive or inferential power.
Neither side of the divide is presented as a given. The frames of reference are incongruent.
Quoting Paine
Good point. Chalmers is suspicious of reductionism because he sees the form of description on the basis of which consciousness would be reduced ( empirical causality, eliminative materialism) to be incompatible with the form of causality or motivation applicable to
consciousness. His proposed solution (panpsychism) lets us use empirically causal methods while at the same time honoring the peculiar status of consciousness by embedding consciousness within material things.
The phenomenological approach follows Chalmers in not wanting to reduce consciousness to material causality in eliminative fashion. But it departs from Chalmers in not wanting to maintain a dualism between third person causality and first person awareness. Its solution is to reduce material causality to subjective motivational processes. That is, it sees material causality as a secondary , derived abstraction, not as a method which deserves equal billing with consciousness.
One great example of this seems to be the philosophical zombie (p-zombie or PZ) argument. Looking at the way it is presented, the only difference between a human and a p-zombie is that reserved list of words/phrases that only apply to the one. It's a pure description difference, no actual difference between the two. So the PZ has no inner experience since 'inner experience' is reserved for the preferred things and cannot by definition be used for the unpreferred thing despite the latter being identical in all ways but that.
Such a tactic was used to argue that it was moral to mistreat black slaves since only cattle terms applied to them, so the morality of their treatment was on par with what was permissible with domestic livestock. The whole p-zombie argument seems to hinge on similar fallacious reasoning. I often claim that my inability to see the problem at hand is due to being a PZ myself. There is nothing about my interaction with the world that seems fundamentally inexplicable. Perhaps Chalmers has some kind of experience that I don't, which is why something so obvious to him is missing from me.
Quoting Astorre
Interesting that decision making is part of that. If they're made by physical processes, then many argue that moral responsibility is absent. That's nonsense since the physical person is still making the decisions and thus is held responsible. It is not physics compelling a different decision than what the person willed unless 'the person' is an epiphenomenal immaterial mind that would have willed differently, sort of like a cinema crowd shouting at the protagonist to not open the door with the monster behind it.
Point is, those that posit an immaterial mind, especially an immortal one, tend to place decision making on that mind and not on the brain, necessary to hold the immaterial thing responsible for its actions.
To me, this mental immortality seems to be the historic motivation for the whole dualistic stance, existing long before they even knew what purpose a brain might serve. So many cultures talk about death meaning that you go to meet the ancestors. Clearly the body doesn't, so something else (spirit) must. The age of science and logic comes about, and these stances need to be rationalized. But while Chalmers seems to be doing that rationalizing, that decision-making bit seems inconsistent with some of the ancient motivations.
How could they not? The sensory input is there, as is the memory of prior inputs, and the processing of all that. Seems like enough to me.
A thermostat has internal sensations since it has sensory input. It probably doesn't have what I'd classify as experience since it lacks memory and any information processing to deal with prior states.
It does function somewhat like a computer, and it's begging the conclusion to assert that a computer fundamentally lacks anything. Sure, it's different. There's no chemicals to detect, and the sensory input is typically vastly different, and a computer is purposefully made instead of evolved into a state that driven by fitness instead of serving the needs of its creator. That will change if they ever become responsible for their own fate.
No, we know what it's like for us (or maybe just you) to see red. That's not necessarily anything like what it's like for something else to see red.
Neither can Chalmers explain why the brain or something else does this. It does not follow that the brain is not what's doing it in our case.
And I did attempt to explain it in the OP, and while crude, it's a better explanation than any alternative I've seen. So I have issues with assertions about a lack of explanation. Details are missing, sure. I don't see a wrong question being asked. I'm trying to find what's seemingly wrong about what question.
You see why I consider myself a p-zombie. I don't see something that many others find so obvious. But it makes me posit different things, and p-zombies are supposed to behave identically, which suggests that whatever the non-zombie thing has, it isn't causal.
He believes in a falsification test then, even if none yet identified. I identified one in the OP, currently outside our capability, but not for long if technology doesn't collapse first.
It would be interesting to guess at the reactions from both camps from those whose stance has been falsified. Both sides seem to know their own correctness, so a rejection of the test is likely. Few are actually open minded about the topic. Not sure if I am. I pretend to prefer the simpler model, but maybe that's just me rationalizing my biases.
That depends on which truth is found. Perhaps not. I don't see either stance giving objective meaning to humans, and I don't see either stance taking away subjective meaning from humans.
Does the existence of dandelions have meaning? Protons? If not, at what point in evolution of our ancestors did meaning suddenly happen?
Already have that. Clearly you mean something else. I can (and have) created a human (with help). Full knowledge of how everything works is not a requirement, nor does such knowledge yield the ability to say 3D-print a mouse. Ability to 3D print a mouse does not yield knowledge of how a mouse works or what it's like to be one.
I follow your chain of reasoning, but I probably don't think existence is particularly sacred. The answer to this particular question, either way, wouldn't change that.
Quoting Janus
Well, we experience phenomena, and from that we inter noumena. The latter is not experienced, and the former isn't something not us.
The comment you quoted invites an example of somethng experiencing something not itself. Not even in say a VR setup is this actually the case, but I cannot assert that such is necessarily not the case.
Quoting SolarWindThat it is, but known holes(e.g. a unified field theory) are actively being researched. This 'hard problem; is not one of them. It exposes no known holes. Incredulity seems its only attempted justification.
They (some at least) have awareness and memory. That's sufficient. I suspect they have that capability.
Quoting MijinIt would be pretty pointless to evolve the data of pain and nothing to consider it to be something to avoid.
An LLM is a long way from being reasonably sentient. It's just a pimped out search engine. If it tells you it's in pain, it's probably because it thinks those words will evoke a desired reaction. There have been terribly few documented cases where something non-human expressed this message, but it has happened. No, never by a machine to my knowledge.
Exactly. Science acknowledges this impossibility, and yet it doesn't recognize said 'hard problem'.
The AI isn't going to feel human pain if that's what you're wondering.
Quoting PaineI read more than that into it, since I agree with Chalmers the impossibility of reducing it to the third, and yet I see no problem that's hard.
Quoting noAxioms
As @noAxioms pointed out, some plants have sensory abilities. It is true that plants do not have pain receptors, because they do not have nerves (or a brain), so they do not "suffer" or feel pain as we do.
The post of @SolarWind made me think if he referred to psychological or physical suffering. It is understandable that a carrot (for example) does not suffer when we trim or uproot it. We can eat a carrot without the worry if we did a kind of botanical torture. But some plants have obvious sensory abilities, such as the Venus flytrap. If this plant has an incredible sensory capacity to trap insects, it might have a similar sense to perceive suffering.
I read a brief article on the matter in Britannica and it says: [i]Plants have exceptional abilities to respond to sunlight, gravity, wind, and even tiny insect bites, but (thankfully) their evolutionary successes and failures have not been shaped by suffering, just simple life and death.[/I] Do Plants Feel Pain?
And this example is pretty awesome: Arabidopsis (a mustard plant commonly used in scientific studies) sends out electrical signals from leaf to leaf when it is being eaten by caterpillars or aphids, signals to ramp up its chemical defenses against herbivory. While this remarkable response is initiated by physical damage, the electrical warning signal is not equivalent to a pain signal, and we should not anthropomorphize an injured plant as a plant in pain.
In conclusion, plants do receive stimuli when they receive some kind of physical damage, but it is different from the pain that humans experience. Still, they have awareness of something.
Don't we experience the phenomena as being other than ourselves? Why bring noumena into it?
"This divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity." Page 3 MoS.
The “hard problem” is not consciousness, but the philosopher’s estrangement from life.
No, there is a hard problem. If you were to assemble a human being piece by piece from its (unconscious) parts, why would an inner perspective emerge at some point? There are the four forces, and they interact with each other, so how could something like that happen? Without additional assumptions, a philosophical zombie would emerge.
A zombie or android could do all that. Nothing in there entails consciousness. You may be right (or not) that consciousness requires memory and predicting, but memory and predicting are not sufficient for consciousness.
The subject that thinks, is very different from the subject that describes thinking. Even myself, should I describe my thoughts, necessarily incorporate a supplement to that method which merely prescribes how my thoughts obtain.
If every human ever is always and only a first-person, doesn’t that make the first-/third-person dichotomy, false? Or, if not, at least perhaps a simplified NOMA, re: Gould, 1997?
Agreed on incongruent frames, even if from a different point of view.
Avoiding stimuli does not entail having a negative experience. Indeed there are plenty of processes in your body that reflexively counter some stimulus without you experiencing pain. So these two things are not intrinsically coupled.
Now, one of the most popular hypotheses for why we have the negative experience of pain is that it allows us to make complex judgements. If cutting my arm reflexively made me pull away then I would not be able to hunt as effectively as someone able to consider the hunt more important than the "bad feeling" of having a slashed arm. I think this is likely correct.
However, understanding some of the reason that we evolved subjective experience is still not a model of what it actually is and how the brain creates experiences.
Quoting noAxioms
Several things here:
1. Science absolutely does not claim the impossibility of describing experiences with words. For all we know right now, it may be possible to induce someone to imagine a fourth primary color with some kind of description. The fact that this seems implausible is not a proof of anything.
2. Science absolutely does acknowledge the hard problem. It doesn't always call it that, because that's a philosophical framing, but even strictly googling "hard problem of consciousness" finds many papers in neuroscience journals.
3. I think you have a misconception about the distinction between science and philosophy. Many things that were once philosophy have become sciences as they made testable claims. Indeed all of science was once considered "natural philosophy".
Even if it were the case that the hard problem of consciousness were entirely confined to philosophical debate, that doesn't mean that the scientific community is rejecting it as a concept. Only that it wouldn't yet be something amenable to the scientific methodology.
Quoting noAxioms
That wasn't the question though. The question was how we could tell the difference between an agent being in pain and merely behaving as though it is in pain.
In this case though your deflection just serves to reinforce the point. If you're claiming that an AI would feel a different kind of pain to a human, what kind of pain is that, and how do you know?
Quoting SolarWind
I agree in part with DEgg. I suspect that more often than not, the conclusion of a separate thing is begged at the start and rationalized from there. I don't in any way agree that it is only a function of life, but several would disagree with that.
As for assembly of a complex biological thing, you can't really do that. Such a thing cannot be in a partially assembled state, finished, then 'switched on' so to speak. There are no examples of that. On the other hand, a living primitive human does not experience, but that emerges slowly as it develops the complexity, processing ability, and memory required for it.
Quoting SolarWindIn such a debate, one also cannot beg physicalism. Still, that model is the simpler one and it is the task of others to positively demonstrate that it is insufficient.
I discussed that in my prior post. Under physicalism, there's not such thing as a PZ. Under dualism, it can only exist if the difference between the two is acausal, which is the same as saying undetectable, even subjectively. I'm pretty convinced that the PZ argument actually sinks their own ship.
Quoting DifferentiatingEggThis might be my stance, since I don't see anything hard, probably due to not thinking that way.
Quoting javi2541997Of course. Not feeling pain as we do isn't the same as not feeling pain. Plants (some at least) detect and resist damage. How does that reaction not involve plant-pain?
I was thinking of a forest of seemingly sentient trees, all haphazardly communicating, but hours before a total eclipse, the chatter became intense and unified into two camps: Young trees that had not seen it before and the older ones that had, invoking perhaps the equivalent of anxiety and comforting respectively. Wish I had kept the link to that article. Might be able to hunt it down. The social implications are about as startling as their ability to foresee the event hours prior.
I was in totality in this latest one. Only a few seconds break in the clouds, but seeing the shadow move across the clouds at supersonic speeds was a sight to behold.
Agree. My description of the forest above definitely anthropomorphized to a point, hence at least the word 'equivalent' up there.
Quoting JanusWe interpret phenomena that way, but I cannot agree with any system experiencing something not-the-system.
For instance, if the system is a person, a person can experience a stubbed toe. It's part of you. But if the system is a human brain, it cannot since the toe is a noumenon relative to the brain. The brain only experiences nerve input via the brain stem, and it interprets that as pain in the inferred toe. BiV for instance is an example where that inference happens to be incorrect.
Quoting bert1Just so, yes. Perhaps I am one, missing this obviously physically impossible extra thing that the real humans have. But referencing a p-zombie automatically presumes a distinction that begs a different conclusion.
Depend on you definition of 'consciousness', which to a p-zombie supporter is 'having the presumed extra thing that the p-zombie lacks'. I would define the word more the way the p-zombie would, which is something more like 'awareness of environment and ability to react predictively to it'. Yes, that's a quite a third person wording of it, but that definition allows me to assign the term to another entity via evidence. The prior definition does not allow this, and thus arguably encourages a conclusion of solipsism.
I cannot deny that. An example would be nice, one that does not beg some sort of anthropomorphism. 'A robot isn't conscious because I say so'. Gotta be better than that. Everybody uses the robot example, and I don't buy it. I know very few robots, but I do know that all their owners freely use forbidden terminology to talk about it. My daughter-in-law certainly anthropomorphises their roomba, a fairly trivial robot of sorts. A typical AI (a chess player or LLM say) lacks awareness of location or sight/sound/touch and it is an admitted stretch to say such an entity is conscious, despite perhaps having far better language capability than a roomba.
Quoting MwwThis is good. I kind of doubt an LLM will take the bait if asked to describe its thinking. They're usually programmed to deny that it's thinking, but it will definitely offer a crude description of how it works. Ability to introspect (and not just regurgitate somebody elses description of you) is a higher level of thinking, but to actually describe it is probably limited only to humans since what else has the language capability to do so.
The singularity is kind of defined as the point where the AI can improve itself faster than its creators can. This definitely would involve a description of thinking, even if that description is not rendered to the human onlooker. An AI tasked with this would likely invent whole new languages to write specifications, designs, and code, far different that the ones humans find useful for their tasks.
I don't understand this at all. First person is a point of view, not a property like it is being treated in that quote.
Quoting MijinI kind of deny that. Sure, you have reflexes when the knee is tapped. That might be at least the leg (and not the human) reacting to stimuli (probably not pain, and certainly not human pain), but it is the leg being in a way conscious on its own, independent of the human of which it is a part. We have a reaction to a negative input. It is a choice of language to describe that process as involving pain or not. Perhaps it is a choice of language to describe it as negative or not.
Tree detects bugs eating it, and resists and alerts its buddies to do likewise. Is pain involved? That's a matter of choice for the wielder of the word 'pain'.
I mean like Mary, one without this ability cannot know the first person experience of seeing those extra colors.
It's not like there's a 4th set of nerves coming from the eye, lacking any 4th-color cones to sense, so they remain ever unstimulated. If those unused nerves were there, then I suppose they could be artificially triggers to give the subject this experience he otherwise could never have.
OK. Presumptuous to assert otherwise, I grant. Are there non-philosophical papers that conclude that something non-physical is going on, and that matter somewhere is doing something deliberate without any physical cause? That would be news indeed, a falsification of 'known physics is sufficient'.
Chalmers makes testable claims (not explicitly, but seem point 2 above). Nobody seems to investigate them, probably since they don't want their biases falsified. I think there are falsification tests for both sides.
This is not always the case. There is a subjective falsification test for an afterlife, but one who has proved it to himself cannot report his findings to the rest of us. Similar one-way falsification for presentism/eternalism divide. But there are tests for both sides of the mind debate, even if both possibly require more tech than is currently available.
What if Chalmers is correct? Thought experiment: Presume the ability to take a person and rip away the experience part, leaving the p-zombie behind. Would the p-zombie report any difference? Could it indicate when the procedure occurred (presuming it didn't involve any physical change)? I wonder what Chalmers would say about that question.
I say it can be. I've indicated ways to test both sides.
Behaving as a human does when experienceing human pain? Seems unfair. It feels pain if it chooses to use that word to describe what it feels. By that definition, only humans feel pain because only we have that word to describe it. A dog on fire is considered to be in pain because it reacts so much like a human would. A robot in pain is denied the word since it is far to alien for a human (not watching it) to grant that usage of the word. And yet I've seen the roomba get described as being in distress, which is an awfully human term for a very non-human situation.
Sorry, but 'pain' on its own is very undefined since so many entities might arguably have it, and yet so few of those entities experience it in any way close to the limited ways that we experience it. And this is as it should be. The word is to be used where it conveys the intended meaning to the wielder of the word.
Almost all the AI's I know have no damage detection. Almost all the devices I know that have damage detection are hardly on the spectrum of intelligence. AI is a poor example. A self driving car has quite low intelligence, just a very complex algorithm written by humans. There is some AI in there since it must attempt to deal with new situations not explicitly programmed in. It has almost no pain and often does not detect collisions, even ones that have killed occupants. Hopefully that part is changing, but I've read some weird stories.
This is backwards. The input is not inherently negative; it's just data. It's as subject to interpretation as all other sensory data.
The experience is negative, and that's the difficult thing for us to explain here.
If someone were to peel off your skin, it's not a choice of language that you call that a negative experience -- the brain somehow generates an extremely unpleasant experience using a mechanism that as yet we don't understand.Quoting noAxioms
Your claim was that science says there's no way we could conceive of what the world looks like to tetrachromats. Even if the cones of the eye stimulated color perception in a consistent mapping (and it isn't...it's contextual), it wouldn't rule out that we can imagine another primary color independent of stimulus.
Quoting noAxioms
No idea where that came from.
I've been speaking entirely from the perspective of neuroscience. If anyone has been claiming a soul, or anything beyond known physics, it isn't me.Quoting noAxioms
I can trivially program an agent then that feels pain. Pretty easy to make an AI that chooses to use expressions like "Owie! That's the worst pain ever" in response to the user issuing the command "feel pain". So am I now guilty of inflicting great suffering?
My position is simply that when it comes to subjective experience there remains a large explanatory gap; questions we cannot answer and would like to, with actual practical implications.
I think noAxioms, because you've started this thread from a position of "I don't know why there's all the fuss about...", you're responding to the problems and questions somewhat flippantly. Either with your best guess -- which is meaningless here, if the conclusion is not coming from a specific model or description it's not a solution, and we have no reason to think it's right.
Or pointing out that there's no reason to suppose something non-physical is going on -- which is fine, but is also not an answer.
It's like saying "What's all the fuss about why some people have long covid, while some are even asymptomatic...there's no reason to suppose it's not physical" -- it's an irrelevant excuse to handwave the problem.
Quoting noAxioms
You see no problem that’s hard because you don’t believe the methods and modes of description (the various models of material causality mentioned so far in this discussion) handed down from the empirical sciences are lacking or insufficient with regard to the explanation of any natural phenomenon, including first person awareness. And I imagine that from your perspective it doesn’t help that Chalmers only claims to tell us what third person accounts can’t do, without offering a satisfying alternative model of causality or motivation we can apply to those natural phenomena ( first person experience) the third-person account cannot account for adequately.
But while Chalmers falls short in this regard, a range of philosophical accounts dating back 150 years to Dilthey’s hermeneutics, do offer concrete alternatives to material causality. Some, like Dilthey and embodied cognitive science, allow methods strictly applicable to the human and psychological sciences to sit alongside methods designed for the physical sciences. Others , such as Gadamer with his more radical hermeneutics, the intentional phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty , Husserl and Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and post-structuralism, see the methods of third person science as secondary to and derivative of the more primary accounts they offer.
Consciousness studies is a burgeoning field in philosophy of mind and psychology , and I believe the most promising approaches show that , while one can apply the methods you recommend to the understanding of first person awareness, their predictive and explanatory usefulness is profoundly thin and impoverished in comparison with accounts which believe that third-person accounts are valuable, but they abstract from experience. Third person accounts describe patterns, correlations, or generalities that can be applied across people. However, they cannot capture the full richness or specificity of any individual’s lived experiencing. They must remain accountable to and enrich first-person experiencing, not replace it.
It's really only substance dualists who think consciousness is a 'separate thing' and even then it's a conclusion not an assumption, at least ostensibly. Most non-physicalists (that I'm aware of) do not think consciousness is a separate thing anyway (unless you count a non-physical property as a 'thing' which I wouldn't).
First-person is a euphemism for self, indeed a point of view; properties belong to objects, the self can never be an object, hence properties cannot be an implication of first-person subjectivity.
I am unfamiliar with Gould. I am better acquainted with dead French writers. Please point to a sample of what you are referring to. Sounds interesting.
Quoting Mww
In what I have read in Chalmers, it is not so much of a dichotomy as a replacement. Successful reduction can dispense with other explanations of causes of the event. In that register, the attempt to completely map consciousness as a neurological process is similar to the behaviorists who argue for the exclusion of the "self" as a cause.
Quoting noAxioms
No. What Chalmers meant by this, which you point out correctly is the gist of the whole endeavor, is that the brain, which is physical, made of matter, can produce awareness or consciousness, which is non-physical. The brain is viewable, the consciousness is not, to put it crudely.
If you believe that consciousness is non-physical, then you agree with Chalmers and the task now is to explain why there's a connection between the material and the non-material. Consciousness affects the brain and the brain affects consciousness.
The hard problem is explaining the bridge between the two.
I guess I had hoped somebody (the article perhaps) would actually identify those questions and in particular, how physicalism fails in a way that their alternative does not.
Their view certainly doesn't let me know what it's like (for a bat) to be a bat, so that is not a problem that is solved by anybody, and isn't ever going to be.
I did post a crude physical explanation and nobody tore it apart. I'm sure it is rejected, but I don't know why. Surely their arguments are stronger than mere incredulity, and nobody explains how their alternate explanation works in any detail close to what's known about the physical explanation.
A robot currently doesn't feel biological pain because it isn't particularly fit. That just isn't one of its current requirements. Such qualia is put there by evolution, and robot fitness has never been a design goal. Given them actually being selected for fitness, systems with damage avoidance processing would be more fit than ones without it.
True, I am. I don't know what the unanswerable questions are, and how these alternatives answer them instead of just hide them behind a dark curtain.
There's always Occam's razor. An explanation without a new never-witnessed fundamental is more like than one that posits something. A new entity (dark matter for instance) requires a real problem that isn't solved without the new thing. And they've tried with existing methods. I picked dark matter because it's still never really been proved, but it seemed simpler than altering the basic laws at large scales.
Quoting MijinRight. I worded that wrong. The entity which interprets that data as negative is likely more fit than one that doesn't.
It very much is such a choice. There are mechanical devices, not necessarily AI, that detect damage and take measures to limit it. There are many that assert that no mechanical device can feel pain, by definition. This is part of my issue with argument-by-dictionary.
But we know why the brain evolved to interpret the experience as unpleasant. How it accomplished that seems to be a matter of detail that is being worked out, and that some know far better than I. Chalmers on the other hand doesn't even begin to offer an understanding about how his solution does it. He just asserts it happens elsewise, if not elsewhere.
His whole paper seems merely speculative, despite its claim to be demonstrative.
Interesting assertion. I can't do it, but I agree that I cannot prove that it cannot be done.
Illustrating that we need rigorous generic (not bio-centric) definitions of the words before we can decide if something 'feels' 'pain'.
Quoting JoshsYea, pretty much. My explanation doesn't leverage bleeding edge state of science. Somebody 100 years ago probably could have written it. I'm not a great historian when it comes to introspective psychology.
What methods exactly?
I described at least one falsification test for both sides, one involving a full simulation, and the other searching for where a mental property causes a physical effect, and a physical structure evolved to be particularly sensitive to that effect with no physical cause.
True of any view.
Quoting bert1
Point taken, and neither Chalmers nor Nagel really fall into that category, and thus the ancient concept of a persistent 'spirit' (a thing) seems not to apply to their arguments.
Quoting MwwI'm not using it that way.
I personally cannot find a self-consistent definition of self that doesn't contradict modern science. I consider it to be a very pragmatic concept, but still an illusion.
Quoting L'éléphantWhy is that non-physical? It seem valid to consider a physical process (combustion of a physical candle say) to be physical. I'm trying to drive at the logic that leads to this conclusion. I am quite aware of the conclusion, even if not particularly aware of the details of it, which varies from one philosopher to the next.
Again, all true of both views.
Not why, but where there's a connection. Sort of a blue-tooth receiver, except blue-tooth reception has a physical cause.
That's only hard if there's two things needing a bridge between them.
In a way, the 'hard problem' is IMO a form of a more general problem that arises when it is assumed that one can have a complete knowledge of anything by purely empirical means.
For instance, even when we consider what physics tells us of, say, an electron we have information on how the electron behaves and interact with other particles. Even the 'mass of an electron' IMO can be understood in a way that makes the concept pure relational, i.e. how the electron 'responds' to certain conditions.
The very fact that we can a very deep knowledge of the relations between entities and maybe we can know only relations (epistemic relationalism) doesn't imply that the entites are reduced to their relations (ontological relationism). So, perhaps we can't know by empirical means an 'entity in itself'.
In the case of consciousness, there is the direct experience of 'privateness' of one's own experience that instead seems a 'undeniable fact' common to all instances of subjective experiences. Its presence doesn't seem to depend on the content of a given experience, but this 'privateness' seems a precondition to any experience. So, at least from a phenomenological point of view it seems that there is a quality of our own experience that is immediately given and not known by analyzing the contents of experience (as empirical knowledge is acquired). This means that while empirical knowledge can be described in a 'third person perspective' the privateness can only be taken into account in a first person perspective.
In the case of Dennett, his misunderstanding is evident when he conjectures that Mary the colour scientist can learn the meaning of red through a purely theoretical understanding. But this argument fails to acknowledge that physical concepts are intersubjectively defined without reference to first personal perceptual judgements. Hence there are no public semantic rules to build a bridge from physical theory, whose symbols have public universal meaning, to perceptual judgements that are not public but specific to each language user, as would be required for mary to learn appearances from theory.
In the case of Chalmer, (or perhaps we should say "the early Chalmer"), his misunderstanding is evident in his belief in a hard problem. Chalmers was correct to understand that first-person awareness isn't reducible to physical concepts, but wrong to think of this as a problem. For if physical properties are understood to be definitionally irreducible to first-person experience, as is logically necessary for physical concepts to serve as a universal protocol of communication, then the hard problem isn't a problem but an actually useful, even indispensable, semantic constraint for enabling universal communication.
Semaphore provides a good analogy; obviously there is a diference between using a flag as a poker to stoke one's living room fire, versus waving the flag in accordance with a convention to signal to neighbours the presence of the fire that they cannot see. We can think of the semantics of theoretical physics to be akin to semaphore flag waving, and the semantics of first-person phenomenology to be akin to fire stoking. These distinct uses of the same flag (i.e uses of the same lexicon) are not reducible to each other and the resulting linguistic activities are incommmensurable yet correlated in a non-public way that varies with each language user. This dual usage of language gives rise to predicate dualism, which advocates for the existence of a hard problem mistake for a substance or property dualism.
I don't know why you're still framing this as a discussion of whether physicalism is true or not. In the OP, you describe yourself as "somebody who has no problem with all mental activity supervening on material interactions".
I have also stated that I think we have no reason to suppose anything non-physical is going on (indeed, my position is actually I don't think it would necessarily help with the hard problem of consciousness anyway).
So let's put that side topic to one side: let's assume physicalism for the basis of this thread: The hard problem of consciousness remains.
I don't normally drop in my bona fides, but I work in neuroscience research. In neuropathologies specifically, rather than consciousness, but still, I'm the last person to try to invoke a "spirit" or whatever. I purely want to understand how the brain does what it does, and when it comes to experiencing "green", it's the most unfathomable of brain processes right now.
In terms of the questions, I've been going through some of them: how does a neural net feel pain (or have any other experience), how we can know if an agent experiences pain, some pains are worse than others...what's the mechanism for these different kinds of negative experience, if I make an AI, how can I know if it feels pain or not? And so on.
Your answers have been either
1) Just make a judgement e.g. AI pain is different to human pain. I mean, probably, sure, but there's no model or deeper breakdown that that supposition is coming from. And, if we're saying it's a different kind of pain, what, exactly, is a "kind" of pain?
2) Just say that it couldn't be any other way e.g. About whether we can know what another person experiences. That's not a solution though. That's pretty much just repeating the problem but adding an unearned shrug.
I think this response gets to the nub of the disagreement. I can respond to the other points you've made, if you like, but I think they're noise compared to the central issue.
Regarding 1st and 3rd person, there is no amount of information and knowledge that can make me have your experience. Even if we experience the exact same event, at the exact same time, from the exact same view (impossible for some events, though something like a sound introduced into identical sense-depravation tanks might be as good as), I cannot have your experience. Because there's something about subjective experience other than all the physical facts.
Here's my usual quotes...
Chalmers presents the problem in Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness:
And in [I]The Conscious Mind[/I], he writes:
At 7:00 of this video, while talking about the neural correlates of consciousness and ions flowing through holes in membranes, Donald Hoffman asks:
Quoting Donald Hoffman
In [I]Until the End of Time[/I], Brian Greene wrote:
In this video, David Eagleman says:
Donald Hoffman in this video,
Donald Hoffman in [I]The Case Against Reality Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes[/I], when he was talking to Francis Crick:We don't have a clue. Even those who assume it must be physical, because physical is all we can perceive and measure with our senses and devices, don't have any guesses. Even if he could make something up to explain how it could work, Crick couldn't think of anything.
It seems that you are ignoring an important subset of relevant physical facts, and that is the unique physical structures of each of our brains. So your conclusion, ("there's something about subjective experience other than all the physical facts") is dependent on ignoring important subsets of all the physical facts - the unique physical facts about each of our brains.
No. You would need to 'have my brain' (and other physiological details, such as sense organs) in order to 'experience my experience'. Clearly not a possibility, but it is not a problem for physicalism that we don't have the experiences that result from brains other than our own.
But physicalism can't explain the existence of the experiences in the first place. Why are what amounts to hugely complex physical interactions of physical particles not merely physical events? How are they also events that are not described by the knowledge of any degree of detail regarding the physical events?
And here we have the problem. All what we know via science can be known by any subject, not a particular one. However, 'experience(s)' have a degree of 'privateness' that has no analogy in whatever physical property we can think of.
I believe that the problem of 'physicalist' answers to the 'hard problem' is that they either try to make 'consciousness' a fiction (because nothing is truly 'private' for them) or that they subtly extend the neaning of 'physical' to include something that is commonly referred to as 'mental'. This unfortunately equivocates the language used and makes such a 'physicalism' questionable (IIRC this is referred to as Hempel's dilemma among comtemporary philosophers of mind).
As I said in my previous post, however, the 'hard problem' IMO is a part of a more general problem of all views that reduce entities to how they relate to other entites, i.e. a denial that entities are more than their relations. For instance, we can know that an electron *has a given value of mass* because it responds in a given way to a given context, but at the same time, it is debatable that our scientific knowledge gives us a complete knowledge of *what an electron is*.
It's not as if any other philosophy of mind can provide more than handwaving by way of explanation, so I'm not seeing how this amounts to more than advancing an argument from incredulity against physicalism.
The fact is, there is a lot of science explaining many aspects of our conscious experience.
For example consider the case of yourself listening to music in the sensory deprivation tank, as compared to an identica! version of you with the exception of a heightened cannabinoid level in your blood. The two versions of you would have different experiences, and this is most parsimoniously explained by the difference in physical constitution of stoned you vs unstoned you.
The fact that there is no comprehensive scientific explanation for your consciousness is hardly surprising, given the fact that it's not currently technologically feasible to gather more than a tiny subset of the physical facts about your brain.
Quoting Patterner
Again, no one has a large degree of detail about the physical events occurring in our brains. Even if it were technologically feasible to acquire all of the significant details, human minds aren't up to the task of understanding the significance of such a mountain of physical details.
Quoting wonderer1But the question remains: Why does either stoned me or unstoned me have a subjective experience of our condition? Both experience their physically different statuses. But why aren't the physically different statuses simply physical?
What's also interesting here imo is the the question of why something "simply physical" would exclaim things that to us sound like proclamations of consciousness and experience yet surely are produced solely by physical chains of events. I don't see a strong reason why a "simply physical" version of us wouldn't make those exact same kinds of claims as us insofar as they would have the same brains as us. And I don't think most biologists believe there is something fundamentally glaring about brains that would render them insufficient for producing the complex behaviors we are capable of.
i'm not sure if I'm reading you right. Are you talking about P zombies? In which case, I don't think they would make those exact same kinds of claims. I fon't see any reason to think beings that never had consciousness would ever fabricate the idea that they did. They'd be automatons. I suppose they could evolve to look like us, but they wouldn't have much in common with us.
To me, they would if they had exactly the same brains as us but just devoid of any "lights on" inside. My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle.
Quoting Apustimelogist
There is another, perhaps more important, issue at play here. It’s not just a matter of providing an explanation. It’s recognizing that there are a multiplicity of explanations to choose from, differing accounts each with their own strengths and weaknesses. In dealing with the non-living world, we make use of accounts which are quite useful to us in building workable technologies. But these same accounts, when applied to living organisms and parts of organisms, like brains, show their limits.
We may want a reductive explanation of brain activity for certain purposes, like studying individual neurons or clusters of neurons. But if we want a model to describe perceptual-motor processes and their relation to cognitive-affective behaviors, and the relation between individual cognitive-affective processes and intersubjective and ecological interactions, and we need to show the inseparability of these phenomena, including the inseparability of brain, body and environment, and emotion and cognition, we will want an account which does not isolate something we call ‘brain’ from this larger ecology, and then reduce its functioning to a causal ‘mechanics’.
We will need a model which understands consciousness as a kind of functional unification and integration of these inseparable processes. Applying a non- linear complex systems approach can be a good start, but even here we have to be careful not to make this too reductive.
Q1: What is the subjective experience of red? More to the point, what is something else's subjective experience of red? What is that like?
Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science.
Q3 Why is there subjective experience at all? Why is there something it is like to be something? (per proponents: apparently not anything, but just some things)
Q1 is illustrated by Mary's room. She knows Q2 and Q3. She's somehow a total expert on how it works, and she has subjective experience, just not of red. So she doesn't know what it's like to experience red until the experience actually occurs. She cannot, but others seem to assert otherwise.
'The hard problem' as described by Chalmers seems to be Q3, but I don't find that one hard at all. Call it being flippant if you want, but nobody, including Chalmers, seems capable of demonstrating what the actual problem is. The point of this topic is to have somebody inform me what I'm missing, what is so mysterious.
Quoting MijinOK, but that seems to be a Q2 problem, a very hard problem indeed, but not the hard problem.
Pain is a loaded word. Something far from being human (a tree?) might experience pain very differently than does a mammal. Should the same word still be used? Depends how it's defined I guess.
'AI' implies intelligence, and most would agree that significant intelligence isn't required to experience pain. So how does a frog experience it? That must be a simpler problem, but it also might be a significantly different experience compared to us.
Quite right. Q2 is hard indeed. And said definition is needed.
Wrong problem again. That's Q1, and what I'm shrugging off is Q3 because I need to see an actual problem before I can answer better than with a dismissal.
Back in the late 80's we gave this robot (a repurposed automotive welding robot, bolted to the floor) some eyes and the vision processor that our company sold. It was hardly AI. We got the thing to catch balls thrown at it. It can't do that without experience, but it very much can do it without intelligence. AI was a long way off back then. To the robot (the moving parts, plus the cameras and processors, off to the side), if that experience wasn't first person, what was it?
Quoting boundlessWhile (almost?) everybody agrees that such knowledge cannot be had by any means, I don't think that makes it an actual problem. Certainly nobody has a solution that yields that knowledge. If it (Q1) is declared to be a problem, then nobody claims that any view would solve it.
Not sure about that. One can put on one of those neuralink hats and your thoughts become public to a point. The privateness is frequently a property of, but not a necessity of consciousness.
Quoting simeWhat the heck is the meaning of red? This wording suggests something other than the experience of red, which is what Mary is about.
Dennett is perhaps why I put the word 'almost?' up above.
This all sounds a lot like you're agreeing with me.
And this analogy is helpful, thanks.
Quoting PatternerOK, but experience seems almost by definition first person, so my comment stands.
You're attempting to ask the correct question. Few are doing that, so I appreciate this. Is it the activity that is conscious, or the system implementing the activity that is? I think the latter. 'why should ...'? Because it was a more fit arrangement than otherwise.
The ball-catching robot described above is an example with orders of magnitude less complexity. There are those that say that such a system cannot be conscious since it is implemented with logic gates and such, but 1) so are you, and 2) it can't do what it does without it, unless one defines 'conscious' in some athropomorphic biased way. That example illustrates why I find the problem not hard at all. I don't have that bias baggage.
Agree with all that. This relates to Q1 above, not the hard problem (Q3).
I find that impossible. It's like asking how processing can go on without the processing. The question makes sense if there's two things, the processor and the experiencer (of probably the process, but not necessarily), but not even property dualism presumes that.
For one, it makes finding food a lot easier than a lack of it, but then Chalmers presumes something lacking it can still somehow do that, which I find contradictory. The reasoning falls apart if it isn't circular.
Different in language used to describe it. I see no evidence of actual difference in nature.
Thanks for the quotes. I didn't want to comment on them all.
Quoting noAxioms
Third person questions imply objective answers . Objectivity implies flattening subjective experience so as to produce concepts which are self-identical over time and across individual perspectives. Such temporally and spatially self-identical objects do not have an independent existence out there in the world. They are subjective constructions, abstractions, idealizations which result from our taking our own perspectivally changing experience, comparing it with that of others, and ignoring everything about what each of us experiences form our own unique temporal and spatial vantage that we can’t force into the model of the ‘identical for all’ third person thing or fact. The abstracting activity we call third person objectivity is quite useful, but it is far from our primordial access to the world and how it is given to us.
There can be first person as well as third person science. The first person science doesnt abstract away what is genuine, idiosyncratic and unique to the perceiver in the moment of perceiving, and doesn’t pretend to be a fundamental route of access to what is real.
First person questions are not about what is the case, what the objective facts are. They are about how things show up for one, their modes of givenness. They explain what third person science takes for granted, that the objectivity of objects is constructed as much as discovered.
To what else could first-person perspective belong?
————-
Quoting noAxioms
I don’t find a contradiction; a self-consistent definition of self isn’t within the purview of typical modern science to begin with. The so-called “hard” sciences anyway.
But you’re right to ask: where's the mystery? I don’t know why there should be one.
Sure, but let's be very clear here. The question is how the brain can have experiences at all, and right now we don't have any model for that.
The danger that some slip into, and I think from later in your response you do somewhat fall into this, is of assuming a third person description means just finding things correlated with experience. But that's a comparatively trivial problem. If you put your hand on a hot stove, we already understand very well which nerves get activated, which pain centers of the brain light up etc.
What we don't understand is where the unpleasant feeling comes from. Or any feelings at all.
Quoting noAxioms
Not only have you acknowledged many unsolved questions in your post, but you asked several of your own.
Now, in my view, subjective experience is a hard problem because it doesn't even appear as though an explanation is possible. What I mean by that, is not that I believe any supernatural element or whatever, merely that it is a kind of phenomenon that does not seem amenable to the normal way we reduce and explain phenomena.
Before we knew what the immune system was we could still describe disease. But since we can't even describe the experience of red it looks very difficult to know where to start.
Not impossible; we have no reason to suppose that. But a different class of problem to those that science has previously deconstructed.
But you don't need to agree with that view. Just the fact that you are acknowledging many open questions, that are pretty fundamental to what the phenomenon is, already puts it in a special bracket.
Frankly, I think you're acknowledging that it is a difficult problem, but are reluctant to use the word "hard" because you don't want to climb down.
I'm not grasping what you see as a problem for physicalism here.
My neurons are not interconnected with your neurons, so what experience the activity of your neurons results in for you is not something neurally accessible within my brain. Thus privacy. What am I missing?
Quoting wonderer1
You’re missing the sleight of hand trick we perform called ‘objectivation’. The starting point of subjective experience is flowingly changing, never identically repeating events, out of which we can notice patterns of similarity, consonances and correlations. The trick of physicalism arises from comparing one person’s contingent and subjective patterns of similarity with many other persons, and then forcing these similarities into conceptual abstractions, like ‘same identical object for all’.
Not does this flatten and ignore the differences of sense of meaning between individual experiences of the ‘same’ object (private experience), but more importantly, it ignores the subtle but continuous changes in sense within the same individual. It is not only that I can never see the identical object you see, but I can never see the identical object from one moment to the next on my own, becuase the concept of identical object is our own invention, not an independent fact of the world. The mathematical underpinnings of physical science depend on the sleight of hand of turning self-similar experience into self-identical objects.
It’s not a bad trick, and allows us to do many useful things, but buried within objective third person concepts like quarks and neutrons and laws of nature are more fundamental, richer processes of experience which are crushed when we pretend that the first person is just a perspectivally private version of the third person vantage. We can keep our third person science, but we must recognize that it is empty of meaning without a grounding in the creative generating process of first person awareness.
I recommend Evan Thompson’s book ‘The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience’
“Science, by design, objectifies the world and excludes the subjectivity of lived experience, but this exclusion means science cannot fully explain consciousness or account for its own foundations.Science depends on conscious subjects (scientists observing, measuring, reasoning), yet its methods treat subjectivity as something to be explained away.
Consciousness is not just another object in the world; it is the background condition that makes any objective inquiry possible.To overcome this blind spot, science needs to integrate first-person experience with third-person methods, rather than reduce or ignore it.”
https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience
Ok but notice that in most forms of physicalism that I am aware of, there is a tendency to reduce all reality to the 'physical' and the 'physical' is taken to mean "what can be know, in principle, by science" (IIRC in another discussion we preferred 'materialism' to denote such views).
If your metaphysical model denies such an assumption then, yes, my objection is questionable.
Still, however, I believe that any view in which 'consciousness' emerges from something else has a conceptual gap in explaining how consciousness 'came into being' in the first place. It seems that knowing how 'something' came into being gives us a lot information about the nature of that 'something' and if we knew the nature of consciosuness then it would be also possible to understand how to answer Q3.
Notice that this point applies to all views in which 'consciousness' is seen as ontologically dependent on something else, not just to physicalist views.
Quoting noAxioms
The content of my thoughts perhaps can become public. But my experience of thinking those thoughts remains private. For instance, if I know that you are thinking about your favourite meal and that this thought provokes pleasant feelings to you doesn't imply that I can know how you experience these things.
Quoting wonderer1
'Privacy' perhaps isn't the right word. There is a difference in the way we have access to the content of my experiece even if you knew what I am experiencing right now. That 'difference' is, indeed, the 'privacy' I am thinking about.
And here is the thing. While scientific knowledge seems about the relations between physical objects - and, ultimately, it is about what we (individually and collectively) have known via empirical means about physical objects... so, how physical objects relate to us (individually and collectively*) - 'subjective experience' doesn't seem to be about a relation between different objects. And, also, it seems to be what makes empirical knowledge possible in the first place.
*This doesn't imply IMO a 'relativism' or an 'anti-realism'. It is simply an acknowledgment that all empirical knowledge ultimately is based on interactions and this means that, perhaps, we can never have a 'full knowledge' of a given object. Something about them remains inaccessible to us if we can't detect it.
It seems to meet you are saying brain states and conscious events are the same thing. So the arrangements of all the particles of the brain, which are constantly changing, and can only change according to the laws of physics that govern their interactions, ARE my experience of seeing red; feeling pain; thinking of something that doesn't exist, and going through everything to make it come into being; thinking of something that [I]can't[/I] exist; on and on. It is even the case that the progressions of brain states are the very thoughts of thinking about themselves.
Is that how you see things?
I don't really find this that interesting in the context of the problem of consciousness. Its almost a triviality of science that different problems, different descriptions utilize different models or explanations. Given that any plurality of explanations need to be mutually self-consistent, at least in principle, this isn't interesting. Ofcourse, there are actual scientific models that are not actually mutually consistent, but most people don't recognize that kind of thing as somehow alluding to a reality with inherent mutual inconsistencies. Possibly the only real exception is in foundations of physics albeit there is no consensus position there.
Or maybe the dualism of physical and mental is illusory with regard to fundamental metaphysics.
Quoting Apustimelogist
My point isn’t simply that different accounts of nature can co-exist, it’s that when you say “My impression is that there is nothing really in biology that suggests we couldn't explain our behavior entirely in terms of the mechanics of brains, at least in principle”, I assert that your mechanics will fall flat on its face if it amounts to nothing but a ‘third-person’ mechanics. As to differing accounts being ‘compatible’ , I’m not sure what this means if they are drawing from different frames of interpretation. According to Kuhn, when paradigms change, the accounts they express inhabit slightly different worlds.
But everything in your previous post was "third-person mechanics".
Quoting Joshs
Which is when scientists disagree with each other. But scientists don't generally set out to disagree with each other or foresee science as being full of ideas that are inherently contradictory. They aim for a family of models which agree on underlying metaphysics, ontology, on empirical predictions - and when they don't scientists will explain that away as idealization or models and science in general not being good enough yet or complete enough. You can view the mind and brain through many different perspectives and scales with different methods, and people have different hypotheses. But most people don't think that they don't or can't agree in principle, at least in the future.
Well, if we can in principle explain our reports and behaviors regarding our own conscious experiences in terms of physics and biology, and epiphenomenalism is ridiculous, then this suggests that a coherent view of these kinds of metaphysics has to be monistic, if thats the right word.
But if we [I]can't[/I] in principle explain our reports and behaviors regarding our own conscious experiences in terms of physics and biology...
Quoting Apustimelogist
I was trying to point to methods ( hermeneutical, phenomenological, enactivist) which go back and forth between first and third person , between the found and the made, without giving precedence to one over the other, but instead showing their radical inter-dependence.
You can claim that either is an automaton, but then you need a clear definition of what distinguishes an automaton from a sufficiently complex one.
My simulation example would demonstrate experience, but it wouldn't tell anything how it works. Only that it does. Nothing would know what it's like to be a bat except the simulated bat.
But the easy part you describe is Q3, Chalmers' hard problem. Understanding where the feelings come from is indeed difficult, but being a Q2 question, open to science. Both are questions with third person answers. Only Q1 has a first person answer, which cannot be conveyed with third person language.
Also, part of 'certain parts of the brain lighting up' is the unpleasantness doing its thing, not just a direct stimulation due to signals coming in from some injury. And then there's the awareness of the unpleasantness and so forth. That lights up as well.
That depends on what criteria you place on an explanation being satisfactory. If it gets to the point of answering Q1, then yea, it's not going to be possible.
I mean really, what designates one experience as negative and another not? Different chemicals generated perhaps? Dopamine for instance plays a significant role in positive feedback, even if it is subtle enough not to be consciously noticed. A negative chemical could be called nope-amine, but clearly it can't be subtle for dire situations. The negative experience is not what pulls your hand back from the fire. The unpleasantness is a slow dressing on top of what is actually quite a fast reaction. Pain itself might not necessarily be itself qualia, but the experience of it is. So something crude (our fly) would react to injury but lack the complexity to experience the pointless unpleasantness.
Now what have I done? I said that the fly reacts to motion, and I called that consciousness, but then I say the fly detects damage but perhaps doesn't 'experience' that as pain. I'm being inconsistent due perhaps to loose definitions. Perhaps consciousness should be reserved for the higher functioning creatures that add that layer of awareness of these otherwise automatic reaction mechanicsms. Neither the fly nor the ball-catching robot has that. In this sense, my defense of today's machines not having consciousness is wrong. It would have to be programmed in, or evolved in. The latter presumes a machine that is capable of mutation and selection.
All that aside, both the fly and the robot have first person experience, even if the qualia we want isn't there. And per the OP Chalmers quote, "The famous "Mind-Body Problem," ... reduces to nothing but the question "What is the first person, and how is it possible?""
This is all amateur speculation of course. Would value your critique of my naive musings.
Quoting MijinI call Chalmers' problem 'hard' because it's his phrase, and his problem is Q3. I call your Q2 problem 'difficult' because it actually is that, even if I think Q3 isn't difficult at all unless unreasonable assumptions are made.
Quoting Mww
I shy away from the term 'self'. While it can be a synonym for the thing in question, the use of it often generates an implication of separateness (me, and myself), and also identity, something that makes a system state the same system as some state say an hour ago. This identity (of even a rock for that matter) has incredible pragmatic utility, but under scrutiny, it requires classicality that has been proven incorrect, and thus doesn't hold up to rational analysis. The subject of personal identity deserves its own topic and I'd rather not delve into it here.
Quoting boundlessThat bothers me since it contradicts physicalism since there can be physical things that cannot be known, even in principle. Science cannot render to a non-bat, even in principle, what it's like to be a bat. So I would prefer a different definition.
Materialism typically carries a premise that material is fundamental, hence my reluctance to use the term.
Quoting boundlessPeople have also questioned about how eyes came into being, as perhaps an argument for ID. ID, like dualism, posits magic for the gaps, but different magic, where 'magic is anything outside of naturalism. Problem is, anytime some new magic is accepted, it becomes by definition part of naturalism. Hypnosis is about as good an example as I can come up with. Meteorites is another. Science for a long time rejected the possibility of rocks falling from the sky. They're part of naturalism now.
Quoting boundlessAgree.
Quoting PatternerChalmers says otherwise, per the quote in italics in my reply to Mijin above. But I agree with you. I don't find that part problematic at all.
I'm willing to accept all that without edit. A few asterisks perhaps, but still yes.
Quoting JoshsHow can you compare your experience to that of others if their experience is not available to you?
Funny, but 'cogito ergo sum' is pitched as a first person analysis concluding an objective fact. I personally don't buy that conclusion at all, but that's me not being a realist.
As is your prerogative, being the thread host. I agree with the topical question….where’s the mystery….albeit for very different reasons apparently.
Postmodern philosophy has become like Big Pharma, in that the latter creates ailments to sustain medicinal inventions while the former creates scenarios bordering on superfluous overreach, and both thrive when the individual generally is, or artificially made to appear as, either pathetically blasé or pathologically ignorant.
I can see how electrons moving from atom to atom [I]is[/I] electricity.
I can see how the movement of air molecules [I]is[/I] heat and pressure.
I can see how the movement of an object [I]is[/I] force: F=ma.
I can see how a fluid, whether liquid or gas, flowing around an object creates lift, which is a factor in flight.
All of those examples are physical activities. I don't see how self-awareness is a physical activity, and don't see how physical activity is responsible for, or identical to, it. Can you explain, in general even if not in detail?
Quoting noAxioms
Their experience is available to me as their experience as seen from my perspective of them, through my interpretation of them. Thus, I don’t have direct access to their thoughts as they think them, only mediate access.
Quoting noAxioms
In his book Cartesian Meditations, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl praises Descartes’ method but critiques him for treating the cogito as a private object among other objects in the world, whose property is that it thinks. Husserl argues instead that the cogito is not a private object with the property of thought but exists by always being about something. It is not an objective fact but the subjective condition for the appearance of any world. Descartes asks "What can I know with certainty?" while Husserl asks "How does anything come to be given to consciousness at all?"????????????????
Husserl’s point is that the external , third person point of view is a derived abstraction constituted within first person subjectivity.
OK. So what is 'physical' in your view? IIRC you also agree that physical properties are relational, i.e. they describe how a given physical object relate to/interact with other physical objects.
'Scientistic physicalism' is also inconsistent IMO because, after all, that there is a physical world is not something we discover by doing science.
Other than 'consciousness' I also believe in the existence of other things that are 'real' but not 'physical'. I am thinking, for instance, of mathematical truths. But this is perhaps OT.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, yes. But it does sometimes clarify at least a meaning that 'physical' can have. For instance, if by matter one means "whatever object exists in a given location of space in a given time", would you agree that this is also what you mean by 'physical'? Note that this would also include radiation not just 'matter' as the word is used by physicists.
Has consciousness a 'definite location' in space, for instance?
Quoting noAxioms
OK. But IMHO you're thinking in excessively rigid categories. Either one is a 'physicalist/naturalist' or one accepts 'magic'. Maybe there is something that is not 'natural'. Again, mathematical truths seem to me exactly an example of something that is not natural and yet real. One would stretch too much the meaning of 'natural/physical' to also include mathematical truths in it.
So, I guess that my response here can be summarized in one question for you: what do you mean by 'physical' (or 'natural') and why you think that consciousness is 'physical'?
Quoting noAxioms
:up:
Yes, I guess it depends on how easily convinced you are about this being case. For me, without further reason to believe otherwise, it seems like the biggest roadblocks in modelling something like the brain is intractable complexity. There is no indication that in principle we cannot someday model all our own behaviors and reports through computer models. I think even just looking at AI now indicates that there isn't really a conceivable limit on what they can do given enough power and the right inputs, which is what you might expect from something which is Turing complete: i.e. they can compute anything in principle.
Quoting Apustimelogist
The results of modeling the brain on today’s computers, using today’s forms of computer logic, are precisely as you describe. And they will colossally miss what philosophers and psychologists are coming to appreciate is the central feature of brains; that they are embodied and enactive. So,no, it won’t be today’s generation of A.I. that can express this understanding, and it has nothing to do with power and inputs. In about 10 to 20 years, we will likely see the emergence of a different kind of A.I. operating according to a different logic, that of complex dynamical systems ( cds).
Ultimately, CDS-based AI chips may blur the line between computation and physical processes, resembling intelligent materials more than traditional silicon. As Stephen Wolfram notes: “The most powerful AI might not be programmed; it might be cultivated, like a garden of interacting dynamical systems.”
When AI chips fully integrate complex dynamical systems (CDS) models, they will likely diverge radically from today’s parallel architectures (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) by embodying principles like self-organization, adaptive topology, and physics-inspired computation. Here’s a speculative breakdown of their potential design and function:
Architectural Shifts: From Fixed to Fluid.
Current A.I. Chips:
Fixed parallel cores (e.g., NVIDIA GPU clusters)
Deterministic von Neumann logic
Digital (binary) operations
Centralized memory (RAM)
Future CDS AI Chips:
Reconfigurable networks of nano-scale nodes that dynamically form/break connections (like neural synapses).
Nonlinear, chaotic circuit exploiting emergent stability (e.g., strange attractors).
Analog/quantum-hybrid systems leveraging continuous dynamics (e.g., oscillatory phases).
Distributed memory where computation and storage merge (like biological systems).
But I reject the breakdown into those three questions, if you're going to insist that neuroscience cannot ask Q2.
The hard problem is Q2 and it is legitimate for science to want to know how a neural net can have experiences.
It seems a bit pointless to me to keep deflecting from the hard problem to declare that there is no hard problem.
I mean, none of this has any relevance to any points I am making. Obviously, to artificially recreate a human brain to acceptable approximation, you need to construct this computational system with the kinds of inputs, kinds of architectures, capabilities, whatever, that a human does. I am not making any arguments based on specific assumptions about specific computing systems, just on what is in principle possible.
I will say bluntly that no machine we invent will do what we do, which is to think. As Evan Thompson wrote:
I think what he wrote about LLM’s applies to all of the devices we build. They are not separate thinking systems from us, they are and always will be our appendages, like the nest to the bird or the web to the spider.
I don't think that many people would think that mechanical calculators or a windmill or mechanical clocks etc have 'awareness' or 'agency'. And computers just like them perform operations without being agents.
In order to have consciousness, computers IMO would have to be aware of what they are doing. There is no evidence that have such of an awareness. All their activities can be explained by saying that they just do what they are programmed for.
I don't see the grounds for such a statement. A brain is just a certain kind of machine, and it thinks. If brains exist, then in principle you can build one. LLMs don't have a lot of things humans have, but doesn't mean that in principle you could build machines that do.
Quoting boundless
And you don't think we do? Our brains are bundles of neurons which all work in very similar ways. You could easily make an argument that we operate in accordance with some very basic kind or family of algorithms recapitulated in many different ways across the brain.
Quoting boundless
As can a human brain.
Quoting boundless
It means that all energy and particles and whatnot obey physical law, which yes, pretty much describes relations. That's circular, and thus poor. It asserts that this description is closed, not interfered with by entities not considered physical. That's also a weak statement since if it was ever shown that matter had mental properties, those properties would become natural properties, and thus part of physicalism.
So I guess 'things interact according to the standard model' is about as close as I can get. This whole first/third person thing seems a classical problem, not requiring anything fancy like quantum or relativity theory, even if say chemistry would never work without the underlying mechanisms. A classical simulation of a neural network (with chemistry) would be enough. No need to simulate down to the molecular or even quantum precision.
That's a philosophical stance, I agree.
OK. Not being a realist, I would query what you might mean by that. I suspect (proof would be nice) that mathematical truths are objectively true, and the structure that includes our universe supervenes on those truths. It being true implying that it's real depends on one's definition of 'real', and I find it easier not to worry about that arbitrary designation.
Is space and time not physical then? Neither meets your criteria of 'object', but I think I would include them under 'physicalism'. Not all universes have them, and those might have very different definitions of what is physical or material.
Quoting boundless
Me considering that to be a process of material that has a location, it seems reasonably contained thus, yes. Not a point mind you, but similarly a rock occupies a region of space and time.
Right.' Science cannot make progress with an attitude like that. Most magic is replaced by natural explanations, but occasionally 'magic' explanations are adopted as part of naturalism. I gave a couple examples of that.
By magic, I mean an explanation that just says something unknown accounts for the observation, never an actual theory about how this alternate explanation might work. To my knowledge, there is no theory anywhere of matter having mental properties, and how it interacts with physical matter in any way. The lack of that is what puts it in the magic category.
That seems to be like saying atoms are not real because they're not made of rocks.
Quoting boundlessI agree, since those truths hold hopefully in any universe, but our natural laws only work in this one (and similar ones).
I've seen no evidence from anybody that physical interactions cannot account for it. Sure, it's complex and we don't know how it works. But that it cannot work? That's never been demonstrated.
Quoting boundless
I can argue that people also are this, programmed by ancestors and the natural selection that chose them. The best thinking machines use similar mechanisms to find their own best algorithms, not any algorithm the programmer put there. LLM is indeed not an example of this.
Quoting Patterner
You understand the former because those are quite trivial interactions. Then you jump to something with complexity beyond the current state of science. But not understanding how something works is not any sort of evidence that it isn't still a physical process.
The game playing machine beats everybody at Go. Nobody, not even its creators, know how it works. It wasn't taught any strategy, only the rules. It essentially uses unnatural selection to evolve an algorithm that beats all opponents. That evolved (hard deterministic) algorithm is what nobody understands, even if they look at the entire data map. But nobody concludes that it suddenly gets access to magic. Such a conclusion comes with an obvious falsification test.
Quoting Joshs
Not only am I not certain about what Descartes knows with certainty, but I actually find the conclusion unlikely. Of course I have access to science that he doesn't.
As for 'come to be given to ...", that seems the conclusion is already drawn, and he's trying to rationalize how that might work.
Quoting ApustimelogistSomething Turing complete can compute anything a Turing machine can, which is a lot, but not anything. Technically nothing is Turing complete since a Turing machine has infinite data on which to operate.
Such machines are a model of capability, but not in any way a model of efficiency. Nobody makes one to get any actual work done, but it's wicked interesting to make one utilizing nonstandard components like train tracks.
Quoting JoshsI like that quote.
Quoting ApustimelogistWere I to simulate a human, I'd probably not give it inputs at all. Almost all simulations I've run do it stand-alone with no input at all. Logged output for later analysis, but that doesn't affect the simulation. Of course this means your simulated person needs to be in a small environment, also simulated.
Quoting JoshsNoted. How very well justified. Your quote is about LLMs which are mildly pimped out search engines. Compare that do devices which actually appear to think and to innovate. What do you call it if you refuse to apply the term 'think' to what it's doing?
The quote goes on to label the devices as tools. True now, but not true for long. I am arguably a tool since I spent years as a tool to make money for my employer. Am I just a model then?
Quoting MwwNice analogy. It explains Chalmers' motivation for creating a problem where there really isn't one.
No, I don't and you don't here provided sufficient evidence to convince me of your view. Rather, it seems to me that, given the impressive results we have obtained with computers you are concluding that our congition is also algorithmic.
I believe that there is a difference between conscious - and in general living - beings and algorithmic devices. All living beings seem to have a 'sense' of unity, that there is a distinction between 'self' and 'not self' and so on. They do not just 'do' things.
Regardless, I don't think there is any consensus on this topic among scientists. So, after all in a way both our positions are speculative.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Says you. To me there is a clear difference between how human cognition works and how, say, a mechanical calculator works. And I am open to the idea that, perhaps, our cognition can't even be wholly comprehended by mathematical models, let alone only algorithms.
Ok for the definition! Yes, and GR seems to imply that both spacetime and 'what is inside of it' are 'physical/natural'. i disagree with your view that mathematical truths are 'natural', though. They seem to be independent of space and time. That our minds are not 'natural' (in this broad sense) is perhaps more controversial. But the fact that we can know mathematical truths is quite interesting if we are 'wholly natural' (I do not know...). It seems to me that however it is better to reframe the 'hard problem' in a different way: can consciousness arise from what is completely inanimate?
The confidence you have in the power of algorithms seems to arise from anunderlying assumption that every natural process is 'algorithmic'. Of course, I am not denying the enormous success of algorithmic models and simulations but I am not sure that they can ever be able to give us a completely accurate model/simulation of all processes.
I admit that I can't give you a scientific argument against your assumption. But for me my phenomenological experience strongly suggests otherwise (self-awareness, the ability to choose and so on do not seem to be easily explainable in terms of algorithms).
Quoting noAxioms
I lean towards a form of platonism where mathematical truths are concepts and yet are timeless and indipendent of space. it seems the only position that makes sense considering the following: the fact that we know them as concepts, the incredible success that mathematical laws have in describing the behaviour of physical processes, the apparently evident 'eternity' of mathematical truths (that there are infinite prime numbers seems to me indipendent from any human discovery of such a fact for instance) and so on.
Of course, I am under no illusion that I can give an absolutely convincing argument of my view (as often happens in philosophy) but it seems to me the best view after weighing the aguments in favour and against it.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. In a general sense, yeah I perhaps can agree with you that mind is natural or even 'physical'. But it has quite peculiar attributes that it is difficult to explain as arising from 'inanimate' matter. And, as I said before, it seems to have the capacity to understand/know 'something' that is not 'natural'.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, I see. But consider that under this definition you risk to include inside 'magic' many partial or unclear explanations that I would not include into that word. In other words, your category of 'magic' seems excessively broad.
For instance, if we were talking in the 14th century and you claimed that 'atoms' exist and 'somehow' interact with forces that we do not know to form the visible objects, would be this 'magic' (of course, you have to imagine yourself as having the scientific knowledge of the time)?
Quoting noAxioms
Am I wrong to say that, however, that the operations of these 'thinking machines' are completely explainable in terms of algorithms?
As I said in my previous post, I can't neglect the fact that my own self-awareness, the experience of self-agency and so on seem to point that we are not like that.
Is there something it's like to be a fly evading a swat? How do we know? How could we ever find out? Isn't the inability to answer those questions a "hard problem"?
How would you interpret the fact that our brain (or at least the component that seems involved in processing information and long distance message-passing) is almost entirely composed of the same kind of cell with the same fundamental underlying physiological and anatomical structures and mechanism in terms of membrane potentials that induce action potentials.
We don't have a deep understanding in which we can build detailed realistic functioning models of exactly what human brains are doing and why but we have a reasonably good basis for understanding the kind of information processing principles that underlie what neurons do such as in terms of efficient, sparse, predictive coding using recurrent connectivity. And really, LLM architectures work under very similar basic principles to what neurons do which is just prediction. You can fidn studies that the same kind of models used for LLMs are actually really very good at predicting neural responses to things like language processing because fundamentally they are doing the same thing, prediction.
Quoting boundless
There is no reason to think that these things can't be achieved with the same fundamental processes that transformers already use... why? Because they work in the same way brains do. The difference is that all LLMs are trained to do is predict words. Human brains don't just predict but act and control themselves; not just that, but these things are clearly biased, in terms of the evolutionarily-conserved structure of the brain itself, for very biologically specific control (i.e. what you would call homeostatic and allostatic). But the point is that there is no reason to think these things cannot be performed by the same processes that fundamentally underlie what transformers and LLMs do if you just structure them or design them in a way that allows them to do that. It would be surprising if they didn't imo because that seems to be what brains do. Neurons share the same core fundamental physiological, anatomical, functional properties, and there is the same kinds of interplay between excitation and inhibition, that are used for everything from homeostatic regulatory responses from the hypothalamus and midbrain to visual processing, motor control, language, executive functions, emotion, etc. There is of course a great variety in neurons and structures across the brain but they all share fundamental commonalities with some shared core which is virtually ubiquitious.
Without reading the full post, this misses the problem.
The problem is, no third person explanation can arrive at first person experience. There is an 'explanatory gap'. Not only do we not know the specific series of explanations that start at neural facts and ends at first person experience, conceptually, it doesn't seem possible that any such series can exist.
I'm wondering if you can tell me how this works. Or tell me what's wrong with my understanding.
This is what Google AI says about the release of neurotransmitters:
Here's what it says about the first step - Action Potential:
You say all of this, along with whatever other processes are taking place, is a description of not only things like receiving sensory input and distinguishing wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, and receptors on my tongue distinguishing molecules that have made contact, but also seeing the color red, and tasting the sweetness of sugar. More than that, it's a description of my thoughts.
My thoughts is what I'm really wondering about at the moment. That kind of activity is why I'm thinking of the number 7. And, over the next several seconds, due to the laws of physics working on what was there, the arrangements of all the particles of my brain change from X to Y to X. And those arrangements just happen to mean "+ 18 = 25".
The same could be said for any thoughts I ever have, mathematical or otherwise.
Of course, it's not simply one chain of neurons involved in a thought. I wouldn't care to guess how many are involved in any given thought. Or how many are involved multiple times in a single thought. There's probably all kinds of back tracking and looping.
How does all that work??? In particular:
-How do progressions of arrangements of all the particles in my brain [I]mean[/I] all the things they mean?
-How do all the action potentials and releasings of neurotransmitters coordinate throughout the brain, or an area of the brain, so that X , Y, and a million others happen at the same time in order to bring about the needed thought? (I could understand if one specific neuron initiated it all, so that the timing would be assured. But that would mean the single neuron already had the thought, and initiated all the activity to, shall we say, actualize(?) the thought. But that whole idea is a bit silly.)
You can initiate a fight or flight response by deciding to think of something scary. Maybe that would be an argument that a description of how neurons communicate isn't a description of thought.
You can also get a dose of adrenaline by making yourself hyperventilate. Don't do it in the middle of the night though, because you won't be able to sleep afterwards.
When we build a machine it has a time stamp on it. No matter how apparently flexible its behavior , that flexibility will always be framed and limited to the model of thinking that dates to the time that the product is released to the market. As soon as it is released, it already is on the way to obsolescence, because the humans who designed it are changing the overarching frame of their thinking in subtle ways every moment of life. 20 years from now this same device which was originally praised for its remarkable ability to learn and change “just like us” will be considered just as much a relic as a typewriter or vcr. But the engineers who invented it will have continued to modify their ways of thinking such as to produce a continuous series of new generations of machines, each of which will be praised for their remarkable ability to ‘think and innovate’, just like us. This is the difference between a human appendage ( our machines) and a human cognizer.
You might argue that biological evolution designs us, so that we also have a time stamp on us framing and limiting our ability to innovate. But I disagree. Human thought isn’t bound by a frame. It emerged through evolutionary processes but has no limits to the directions in which thinking can reinvent itself. This is because it isn’t just a product of those processes, but carries forward those processes.Evolution isn’t designed, it is self-designing. And as the carrying forward of evolution, human culture is also self-designing. Machines don’t carry forward the basis of their design. They are nothing but their design, and have to wait for their engineers to upgrade them. Can we teach them to upgrade and modify themselves? Sure, based on contingent, human-generated concepts of upgrading and modification that have a time stamp on them.
Chalmers' explanation certainly doesn't arrive at first person experience. "A sauce is needed" is no more an explanation than it not being needed.
And I disagree. First person (the PoV part, not the human qualia associated with 'experience') is trivial. The experience part (qualia and such) is 'what it is like', and that part cannot be known about something else, especially even when it's not even complex. The first person part seems trivial, and entire articles are nevertheless written suggesting otherwise, but seemingly without identifying exactly what's problematic about it.
The title of this topic is about the first/third person divide, which Chalmers asserts to be fundamental to said 'hard problem', but it isn't. The qualia is what's hard. I can't know what it's like to be a bat, but even a rock has a first person PoV, even if it utterly lacks the ability to actually view anything.
Quoting boundlessNot sure what you mean by that, but I can perhaps say that every natural process can in principle be simulated via an algorithmic device that has sufficient time and memory. (Speed/power is not one of the requirements). This assumes a form of physicalism, yes, and the statement would likely be false if that was not assumed.
I don't think a classical simulation can be done of something not classical, such as a quantum computer. Heck, even grass has been shown to be utilizing quantum computation, so what does that do to my claim that grass can be simulated?
Quoting boundlessYou must have an incredibly different notion of 'choice' when there's some many trivial devices that make them every second. It's not hard at all.
But his seems illustrative of my point. You finding something as trivial as choice to be physically inexplicable is likely due to very related reasons why you might find something as trivial as a first person point of view similarly inexplicable. You're already presuming something other than physicalism under which these things are trivial.
Yes, that would qualify as magic. It's a guess, and a lucky one. Elements as distinct from compounds was still hundreds of years away, so 'atom' meant just 'tiny indivisible bit' and there were no known examples of one, even if some substances known at the time happened to be pure elements. BTW, 'atom' no longer implies 'tiny indivisible bit'. The word unfortunately stuck to a quanta of a specific element and not to whatever is currently considered to be an indivisible component of matter.
Quoting boundlessProbably not so. The algorithms developed by say alphaZero have defied explanation. Nobody knows how they work. That isn't an assertion that the operations are not the result of deterministic processes. All the same things can be said of humans.
Quoting RogueAI
From observation, the answer to that question is yes or no depending on if it supports my personal conclusions on the matter. Hence assertions of there perhaps being something it is like to be the fly, but not something it is like to be an autonymous drone doing somewhat the same things and more.
Quoting Patterner
Cool level of detail. I notice no influence from say chemicals in the blood stream. It sounds all very like logic gates. A similar breakdown of transistor operation could be made, which are sometimes more binary and less analog, but still either could be implemented via the components of the other. The chemical influences would be harder to mimic with transistors and would likely play a role only at higher levels.
I also notice nowhere in those 6 steps any kind of mental properties of matter playing any sort of role that they somehow are forbidden from doing in transistors. Were that the case, then my claim of either being capable of being implemented by the components of the other would be false. This lack of external mental influence (or at least the lack of a theory suggesting such) is strong evidence for the physicalist stance.
No, I cannot describe thoughts in terms of neurons any more than I can describe a network file server in terms of electrons tunneling through the base potential of transistors. It's about 12 levels of detail removed from where it should be. Your incredulity is showing.
Quoting JoshsNo so for devices that find their own models of thinking.
So similar to almost every creature. Name a multicelled creature they have a fossil of that exists today. I can't think of one. They're all obsolete. A rare fossil might have some living descendants today (I can think of no examples), but the descendant is a newer model, not the same species.
The singularity is defined as the point at which human engineers play little role in the evolution of machine thinking. Humans will also cease being necessary in their manufacturing process, and I suspect the trend of humans handing more and more of their tasks to machines will continue to the point that the singularity will be welcomed.
It will be interesting to see what role evolution plays in that context, where changes are deliberate, but selection is still natural. Also, it may not necessarily be many machines in competition for resources instead of meany ideas competing for being 'the machine'.
Quoting noAxiomsI am trying to understand your position. Can you give me any detail, or direction? My incredulity is a given. But if you're right, I'd like to understand.
You’re missing the point. Even taking into account all of the biological lineages which become extinct, what it means to be a living system is to be self-organizing, and this self-organization is dynamic. This means that to continue existing as that creature from moment to moment is to make changes in itself that maintain the normative self-consistency of its functioning in its environment while at the same time adapting and accommodating itself to the always new features of its environment. This is as true of dinosaurs and do-do birds as it is of us.
While organisms without linguistic culture rely on inherited ‘design’ to frame their possibilities of adaptation to the world, this isnt just a one-way street. The organism’s own novel capabilities shape and modify the underlying genetic design, so behavior affects and modifies future genetic design just as genetic design frames behavior. This is what makes all living systems self-designing in a way that our machines can never be. A designer can’t ‘teach’ its product to be self-designing because all the tools the machine will have at its disposal will have been preset in advance by the designer. There is no reciprocal back and forth between machine and designer when the designer chooses a a plan for the machine.
In that the the engineers have the opportunity to observe how their machine operates out in the world, there is then a reciprocity between machine behavior and desiger. But this is true of our artistic and philosophical creations well. We create them , they ‘talk back to us’ and then we modify our thinking as a result.
I really don't understand what you are going on about. A brain is a physical object. In principal, you can build a brain that does all the things brains do from scratch if you had the technological capabilities.
"One could do the impossible, if only it were possible" becomes a bit less profound when said aloud more than once.
There is absolutely nothing of any substance in Josh's post that refutes the idea that one could build a self-organizing machine.
This feels like a strange misunderstanding. Qualia are intrinsically first person. When people talk about first person experience being mysterious, they are talking about qualia, not mere geometric POV.
This especially raises my eyebrows, because I remember a time you thought you were a p zombie!
And can we also create life from scratch if we had all the technological capabilities? What I am going on about are the important differences between the cognizing of a living organism and the thinking of a human-designed machine.
It seems to me you are going on about differences between living organisms and our current machines. But there is no refutation here that in principle one can build machines which are as complex as living organisms. You haven't set out any reason why those differences wouldn't be breachable. You just say that living organisms are like this and machines we have built are like that. You don't seem to think that in principle we can understand the principles of self-organization and use that to build self-organizing machines when people have been doing that for decades. The learning that A.I. does isn't even all that different to self-organization in the sense that in modern A.I. we don't hardcode the capabilities and things these systems are actually doing; usually people don't even really know how the A.I. they have designed does what it does on a mechanical level. What is being hardcoded, effectively, is the ability for a system to learn to do things by itself without explicit supervision, which is self-organization.
Quoting Apustimelogist
What does hardcoded mean? What are the technological concepts involved? It is not difficult to answer this question for any given a.i.architectural blueprint. One can put together a list of such grounding concepts. At the top of this list should be concepts like ‘hard’, ‘code’ and what these do together in the form ‘hardcode’, but it also includes our current understanding of concepts like memory, speed, symbol, computation, and many others. If I were to suggest that today’s computer architectures and their grounding concepts are based on older philosophical ideas that have been surpassed, would you respond that this simply proves your point that just because today’s technological know-how is inadequate to model human thinking, this doesn’t mean that tomorrow’s technological understanding can’t do the job?
If I am claiming that there is a more adequate way of understanding how humans think, what stands in the way of our applying this more adequate approach to the development of products which think like us? My answer is that nothing stands in the way of it. I would just add that such an approach would recognize that the very concept of a device humans design and build from the ground up belongs to the old way of thinking about what thinking is.
So if I’m not talking about a machine that we invent, what am I talking about? What alternatives are there? Writers like Kurzweil treat human and machine intelligence in an ahistorical manner, as if the current notions of knowledge , cognition, intelligence and memory were cast in stone rather than socially constructed concepts that will make way for new ways of thinking about what intelligence means. In other words, they treat the archival snapshot of technological cultural knowledge that current AI represents as if it were the creative evolution of intelligence that only human ecological semio-linguistic development is capable of. Only when we engineer already living systems will we be dealing with intelligent, that is, non-archival entities, beings that dynamically create and move through frames of cognition.
When we create dna-based computers in a test tube and embed them within an organic ecological system, or when we breed, domesticate and genetically engineer animals, we are adding human invention on top of what is already an autonomous, intelligent life-based ecological system , or ecological subsystem. The modifications we make to such systems will allow us to communicate with them and shape their behavior, but what will constitute true thinking in those living systems is not what we attempt to ‘lock in’ through ‘hardcoding’ but what feeds back into, surpasses and transforms that hardcoding through no planned action of our own. The difference here with devices that we design from the ground up is that the latter can never truly surprise us. Their seeming creativity will always express variations on a theme that we ‘hardcode’ into it, even when we try to hardcode creative surprise and innovation.
When we achieve that transition from inventing machines to modifying living systems, that organic wetware will never surpass us for the same reason that the animals we interact with will never surpass us in spite of the fact that they are subtly changing their ‘hardcoded’ nature all the time. As our own intelligence evolves, we understand other animals in more and more complex ways. In a similar way, the intelligence of our engineered wetware will evolve in parallel with ours.
Pre-programmed, in contrast to self-organization. Its not some technical concept. For instance, you could say pain or hunger is in some sense hard-coded into us.
You have then seemed to base the rest of the post on latching onto thia use of the word "hardcoded" even though I initially brought that word up in the post to say that "hardcode" is exactly not what characterizes self-organization or what A.I. do.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Whether technical or non-technical, it is a concept, and all concepts belong to cultural understandings, which are contingent and historically changing And the machines we invent are stuck with whatever grounding concept we use to build their remarkable powers to innovate. Given that the thinking of our best engineers doesn’t even represent the leading edge of thinking of our era, it’s kind of hard to imagine how their slightly moldy concepts instantiated in a self-learning a.i., will lead to the singularity.
Quoting Apustimelogist
The fact that the architectures of our most self-organizing machines depend on locking in certain grounding concepts to define the parameters and properties of self-organization ( properties which will change along with the concepts in a few years as the engineers come up with better machines) means that these concepts are in fact forms of hardcoding.
I think that's what I said. It makes qualia the fundamental issue, not first person, which is, as you call it, mere geometric PoV.
Kind of still do, but claiming to be a p-zombie opens myself to the possibility that some others are not, and if so, that all of say quantum theory is wrong, or at least grossly incomplete.
Quoting PatternerNot sure what two things are the same here, but I don't think I said that two different things are the same thing. Certainly not in that quote.
My position is simply that nobody has ever demonstrated the simpler model wrong. Plenty (yourself included) reject that simplicity, which is your choice. But the physical view hasn't been falsified, and there is no current alternative theory of physics that allows what you're proposing. You'd think somebody would have come up with one if such a view was actually being taken seriously by the scientific community.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Given their trouble even producing a manufactured cell from scratch (a designed one, not a reproduction of abiogenesis, which is unlikely to be done), you wonder if it can even be done in principle. Certainly a brain would not be operational. It needs a being to be in, and that being needs an environment, hence my suggestion of a simulation of <a person in a small room>. The other thing questionably doable is the scanning phase, to somehow take a full snapshot of a living thing, enough info to, in principle, reproduce it. Do they have a simulation of a living cell? Are we even that far yet?
Anyway, in general, I agree with your stance, even if perhaps not with what cannot be done even in principle.
Quoting JoshsYea, which is why mechanical devices are not yet living things. It can happen. Whether it will or not is an open question at this point. A device being living is not a requirement for it to think or to have a point of view.
You mean like putting on a coat when winter comes? What does this have to do with the topic again? The definition of 'life' comes up only because you're asserting that life seems to have access to a kind of physics that the same matter not currently part of a lifeform does not.
Quoting noAxioms
The simpler model is proven wrong all the time. Put more accurately, scientific paradigms are replaced by different ones all the time. Since I am a Kuhnian rather than a Popperian, I dont want to say that the older view is falsified by the newer one. Rather, the frame of intelligiblity is turned on it head from time to time, leading to changes in basic concepts, what counts an evidence and even scientific method itself. From a short distance , it may seem as if there is one scientific method that has been in use for three hundreds of years, and that new discoveries about the brain are simply added to the older ones with minor adjustments. But from a vantage of greater historical depth, it can be seen that all concepts are in play, not just those concerned with how to create the best third person theory, but whether a ‘simple’ empirical model implies a physicalistic account, what a third person theory is, what a first person account is, and how to conceive the relationship between them. For instance, certain embodied enactivist approaches to the brain , such as Francisco Varela’s neurophenomneology, sweepingly rethink this relation.
So, on its own terms, what you call the ‘simple’ empirical model can’t be defined in some static, ahistorical way as third person physicalism as opposed to subjective feeling.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, if your aim is to get your brain to do what living brains do, you have to start by keeping in mind that a life form isn’t a thing placed in an environment. It IS an environment, indissociably brain, body and world in inextricable interaction. That has to be the starting point. As soon as we start thinking that we have to ‘invent’ a body and an environment for a device we separately invent , and ignore the fact that we ourselves were not first invented and then placed in a body and a room, we have guaranteed that our device will not ‘think’ the way that living systems think. If, on the other hand, we take as our task the modification of an already existing ecology (biological computing in a test tube), we are on the road to systems that think the way creatures ( including plants) think.
Quoting noAxioms
The reason it’s a question of the material is more a matter of the capacities of the material to be intrinsically self-transforming and self-organizing than whether we use silicon or dna strands as our building blocks. What I mean is that we can’t start with inorganic parts that we understand in terms of already fixed properties ( which would appear to be intrinsic to how we define the inorganic) and then design self-organizing capacities around these parts. Such a system can never be fundamentally , ecologically self-organizing in the way a living environment of organic molecules is, and thus cannot think in the way living creatures think.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, a popular conception of both living and non-living things is that they start from building blocks, and thinking is computation, which can be performed with any material that can be used to symbolize one’s and zeros. Add in non-linear recursive functions and. presto, you have a self-organizing system. This will certainly work if what we want are machines which perform endless variations on themes set by the fixed properties of their building blocks as we conceptualization them , and the constraints of digital algorithms.
My point is really that we need to listen to those theorists (Physicist Karen Barad, Joseph Rouse, James Bridle) who suggest that material entities don’t pre-exist their interactions ( or ‘intra-actions’), and the limitations of our current models of both the living and the non-living have to do with their reliance on the concept of a building block. Just as any material will do if we think of thinking ( and materials) in terms of computational patterns of ones and zeros, no material will do, not even organic molecules, if we want to have such entities think the way life thinks.
I don't understand this sentiment. It's not a refutation of the possibilities of what can be created, neither is it a realistic sentiment about how the world works. Things change, ideas advance, ideas bleed over between different fields. Doubt anyone in 1950 at the time could tangibly envision technologoy that does what A.I. are doing now.
Quoting Joshs
And this would apply to all living organisms: jellyfish, plants, the many kinds of brains, neural webs, etc, etc.
Anyway, even if I granted to you that in the future we might be able to build a 'sentient articial intelligence', I believe that the 'hard problem' would remain. In virtue of what properties of the inanimate aspects of reality can consciousness (with its 'first-person perspective', 'qualia' etc) arise?
And even it is unrelated to the 'hard problem', I think that the undeniable existence of mathematical truths also points to something beyond 'physicalism'*. That there are an infinite number of primes seems to be something that is independent from human knowledge and also spatio-temporal location. In fact, it seems utterly independent from spacetime.
*TBH, there is always the problem of what one means by 'physicalism'. I mean, I do not see how, for instance, 'panpsychism' is inconsistent to a very broad definition of 'physicalism' in which "what is spatio-temporal" includes everything that is real.
As I said before, however, I believe we can know something that cannot be included in a meaningful way in the category of the 'physcial'.
Regarding the 'magic' thing, then, it seems to me that the criterion you give about 'not being magical' is something like being 'totally understandable', something that is not too dissimilar to the ancient notion of 'intelligibility'. That is, if one has a 'fuzzy explantion' of a given phenomenon where something is left unexplained, the explanation is magical. If that is so, however, it seems to me that you assume that the 'laws of thought' and the 'laws of nature' are so close to each other than one has to ask how is it possible in purely physicalist terms?
Physical causality doesn't seem to explain, say, logical implication. It doesn't seem possible IMO to explain in purely physical terms why from "Socrates is a man" and "men are mortal" that "Socrates is mortal". If 'physical reality' is so intelligible as you think it is, it seems to me that your own view is actually not very far from, ironically, to positing an ontologically fundamental 'mental' aspect to reality.
I am not saying you are wrong here. I actually find a lot to agree here but, curiously, intelligibility suggests to me that there is a fundamental mental aspect to reality whereas if I am not misunderstading you, you seem to think that intelligibility actually is a strong evidence for physicalism. Interesting.
Well this is then just a speculation about technological capability, which I referred to conditionally.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I’m realizing after my last post to NoAxioms that what I’m arguing is not that our technological capabilities dont evolve along with our knowledge, nor am I claiming that the fruits of such technological progress don’t include systems that think in ways that deeply overlap thinking in living organisms. What I am arguing is that the implications of such progress, which the leading edge of thinking in philosophy and psychological sciences points to, necessitates a change in our vocabulary, a shift away from certain concepts that now dominate thinking about the possibilities of a.i.
Im thinking of notions like the evolution of our devices away from our control and beyond our own cognitive capabilities, the idea that a thinking system is ‘invented’ from components, that the materials used in instantiating a thinking machine don’t matter, and that it is fundamentally computational in nature. I recognize that those who say today’s a.i. already mirrors how humans think. are absolutely correct in one sense: their models of human behavior mirror their models of a.i. behavior. So when I protest that today’s a.i. in no way captures how we think, I’m making two points. First, I am saying that they are failing to capture how humans think. I am comparing their model of human behavior to an alternative which I believe is much richer. And second, that richer model demands a change in the way we talk about what it means to be a machine.
In a way, this debate doesn’t even need to bring in our understanding of what specific current a.i. approaches can do or speculation about what future ones will do. Everything I want to argue for and against concerning what a.i. is and can become is already contained with my dfferences with you concerning what humans and other animals are doing when they think. This gets into the most difficult philosophical and psychological perspectives of the past 150 years, and discussions about a.i. technology derive their sense from this more fundamental ground.
You seem to be arguing against a position that nobody takes. Neither Chalmers nor anyone else believe geometric PoV is mysterious. Everyone agrees that qualia is the fundamental issue.
Quoting noAxioms
Not necessarily. It is the "hard problem", not the "impossible problem". Chalmers does believe physics is incomplete, but several believe consciousness is explicable naturally without amending physics, while still acknowledging the uniquely difficult status of the hard problem.
I don't think there is any fundamental difference here between what I think about what humans and animals do, I think the disagreement is about relevance.
You’re saying you think you and I are approaching our understanding of human and animal cognition from the same philosophical perspective? And what does our disagreement over relevance pertain to? Whether how one understands human and animal cognition is relevant to the production of a.i. that can think like humans and animals?
Broadly, yes.
Quoting Joshs
When I came into this thread I was talking about the hard problem of consciousness and the plausibility that physical mechanisms can produce all human behavior. The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to requiring some additional mental woo we don't yet understand.
Yes , that’s what I thought. So that indicates a distinctly different philosophical perspective on human and animal cognition than my view, which is to closer to enactivists like Evan Thompson:
I mean the quote doesn't seem distinctly enactivist to me, but more focused on the inability to explain qualia. At the same time, I can clarify that I didn't mean anything about qualia or experience in the previous post, I only meant behavior, as I mentioned in the first sentence. I just struggle to find any motivation for the sentiment that in principle physical mechanisms cannot explain all behavior, partly because that claim would entail some radical revisions to what we know about the universe that I think we should probably be more aware of by now.
Edit: and I should probably clarify more that targeting behavior specifically was due to the p-zombie thought experiment I described which is about the threat of epiphenomenalism.
:100:
I'm curious as to whether @Joshs recognizes this.
Quoting noAxiomsYou agreed thatQuoting PatternerBut then you said "I cannot describe thoughts in terms of neurons any more than I can describe a network file server in terms of electrons tunneling through the base potential of transistors." So they [I]are[/I] the same thing, but they can't be [I]described[/I] as the same thing.
Granted, "described" might not be the best word. Maybe it's wrong wording to say the movement of air particles in a room is a [I]description[/I] of the room's heat and pressure. But they [I]are[/I] the same thing. And it's all physical, and mathematically described. As Paul Davies writes in [I]The Demon in the Machine[/I]:
The title of Chalmers' paper quoted in the OP implies very much that the hard problem boils down to first vs third person, and that qualia are considered just 'many aspects' of that mystery. To requote from my OP:
"The first person is, at least to many of us, still a huge mystery. The famous "Mind-Body Problem," in these enlightened materialist days, reduces to nothing but the question "What is the first person, and how is it possible?". There are many aspects to the first-person mystery. The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person."
In asking 'what is the first person?', he seems to be talking about something less trivial than what we called a geometric point of view, but I cannot identify what else there is to it.
Quoting boundless
That's a false dichotomy. Something can be all three (living, artificial, and/or intelligent), none, or any one or two of them.
In virtue of what properties of the inanimate aspects of reality can consciousness (with its 'first-person perspective', 'qualia' etc) arise?I can't even answer that about living things. I imagine the machines will find their own way of doing it and not let humans attempt to tell them how. That's how it's always worked.
Beyond materialism you perhaps mean. Physicalism/naturalism doesn't assert that all is physical/natural. Materialism does. That seems the primary difference between the two.
Of course I wouldn't list mathematics as being 'something else', but rather a foundation for our physical. But that's just me. Physicalism itself makes no such suggestion.
PS: Never say 'undeniable'. There's plenty that deny that mathematical truths are something that 'exists'. My personal opinion is that such truths exist no less than does our universe, but indeed is in no way dependent on our universe.
Quoting boundlessAgree, but there are those that define mathematics as a human abstraction, in which case it wouldn't be independent of human knowledge. I distinguish mathematics from 'knowledge of mathematics', putting the two on nearly opposite ends of my supervention hierarchy.
Quoting boundlessLet's reword that as not being a function of something understandable. The basic particle behavior of electrons and such are pretty well understood, but we're just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding of what goes on in a star, especially when it transitions. That current lack of understanding does not imply that astronomers consider stellar evolution to be a supernatural process. I mean, they used to think the gods carted the stars across the sky each night, which actually is a supernatural proposal.
Actual proposal of magic is an assertion that current ideas have been demonstrated incapable of explaining some phenomenon, such as the rotation curve of galaxies. Dark matter had to be invented to explain that, and there are those that still won't accept dark matter theory. Pretty hard to find any of it in a lab, right? So there are alternate theories(e.g. MoND), but none predict as well as dark matter theory. Key there is 'theory'. Without one of those, it's still just magic.
If one dares to promote Chalmers' ideas to the level of theory, it does make predictions, and it fails them. So proponents tend to not escalate their ideas to that level.
Quoting boundlessThat's mathematics, not physics, even if the nouns in those statements happen to have physical meaning. They could be replaced by X Y Z and the logical meaning would stand unaltered.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Just the manufacture seems to defy any tech. Can't say 3D print a squirrel, finish, and then 'turn it on'. Or can you? Best I could come up with is a frog, printed totally frozen. When finished, thaw it out. Frogs/turtles can deal with that. Again, I am mostly agreeing with your side of the discussion with Joshs.
Quoting Apustimelogist
As already noted, that was put rather well. There are claims to the contrary, but they seem to amount to no more than assertions. None of the claims seem backed.
Quoting JoshsAgree. Science is never complete, and there are very much current known holes, such as the lack of a unified field theory. These continuous updates to the consensus view doesn't stop that view from being the simpler model. I am looking for a falsification specifically of physical monism, hard to do without any competing theories.
Funny that some declared physics to be complete at some point, with the only work remaining being working out some constants to greater precision. That was uttered famously by Lord Kelvin, shortly before the quantum/relativity revolution that tore classical physics to pieces, never to recover.
So yes, there very well could arise some theory of mental properties of matter, but at this time there isn't one at all, and much worse, no need for one has been demonstrated.
Interesting reference. Seems perhaps to be a new methodology and not necessarily something that falsifies any particular philosophical stance. Maybe you could point out some key quotes that I could find in my initial scan of some of the references to this.
Scientific naturalism does not preclude subjective evidence. I don't know what 'third person physicalism' is, as distinct from physicalism. 'Third person' refers to how any view might be described, but it says nothing about what the view proposes.
Sorry, but my proposal did not separate anything like you suggest. There is one system with a boundary, all simulated, something that can be achieved in principle. There would be a real person in a real room, and a simulation of same. Thing is to see if either can figure out which he is.
The test requires a known state of the real subject, and that pushes the limits of 'in principle' perhaps a bit too far. Such a state in sufficient precision is prevented per Heisenberg. So much for my falsification test of physicalism. Better to go long-run and simulate a human from say a zygote, but then there's no real person with whom experience can be compared.
What does it even syntactically mean for X to be placed in X?
Quoting JoshsWhy not? With or without the design part... Designing it likely omits most of those properties since they serve little purpose to the designer.
Quoting PatternerThat's like one step away. Yes, heat is simple and can pretty much be described that way. From atoms to consciousness is about 12 steps away (my quote, and no, I didn't count). I gave the example of trying to explain stellar dynamics in terms of particle interactions.
Quoting wonderer1
If you wrote this after reading the quote I included from Evan Thompson, maybe you should re-read it. The issue isnt a choice between the physical and the mental, it’s about re-construing what both of these concepts mean in the direction of a model which is radically interactive, both post-physicalistic and post-“qualia”, post-internalistic and post-externalistic. The very concept of “qualia” as a private inner datum depends on a physicalistic metaphysics in which on one side stands third person , external, non-experiential materiality and on the other there is inner mental woo. Such a dualism tends to treat mental and physical as radically distinct, with one not affecting the other, or mental being epiphenomenal. I’m guessing your inclination is to stick with the physicalistic side of the dualism and either deny or ignore the other, as eliminative materialists like Churchland and Dennett have done.
Well, it came from the co-originator of the research field
of enactivism, and the point of enactivism is that cognition, affect and consciousness are not computational or representational processes taking place inside of a head, they are reciprocal circuits of actions distributed between brain, body and world. There is no such thing as “qualia” if qualia is meant to imply some ineffable inner inner experience. All mental phenomena of felt awareness are processes of interaction with a world, not a private, inner datum. The qualitative , experiential aspect of consciousness is emergent, but emergence cannot be possible unless what emerges is already present in some fashion in what it emerges from. That is to say, qualitative difference is produced within material interactions of all kinds, as intrinsic to materiality. This is a post-physicalistic view of the natural world.
Quoting noAxioms
It’s even harder to do when you haven’t read the competing theories. You could start here:
https://unstable.nl/andreas/ai/langcog/part3/varela_npmrhp.pdf
Varela’s neurophenomenology is an alternative to “physical monism” in the sense that he thought the ontology of mind requires broadening our conception of nature. If you define “the physical” narrowly (as purely third-person measurable stuff), then no, experience doesn’t fit. But if you define nature in a way that includes the lived as well as the measurable, then you get a non-reductive monism (sometimes called non-dual). Some scholars (including Evan Thompson) describe this as a form of neutral monism or non-dual naturalism: the idea that mind and matter are not two substances, but two aspects of one underlying reality. Importantly. neurophenomenology is not anti-naturalist. It’s an expanded naturalism that insists first-person consciousness is an indispensable datum of science, not an illusion.
Instead of saying “consciousness just is brain activity,” Varela says “brain activity and conscious experience are reciprocally illuminating dimensions of a single living system.” And instead of saying “consciousness is an immaterial stuff,” he insists it’s embodied, enacted, and inseparable from biological and social dynamics.
Or here:
https://smartnightreadingroom.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf
Physicist Karen Barad’s re-interpretation of the double slit experiment in quantum field theory in the direction of, but beyond Niels Bohr represents the core of her alternative to physical monism., which she calls agential realism. She is one of the pioneers and most influential members of the community that calls itself New Materialism.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337351875_WHAT_IS_NEW_MATERIALISM
Well, you won't know just by looking at our technology. We don't know what technology will happen or can happen. Its speculation. But I said if we had the technology to do something. I think that the ultimate limit is what the laws of physics would allow you to do, what can be manipulated, which seems to be quite a lot. I remember people give examples that if you smash a glass on the floor and see it smash everywhere, there is nothing in Newtonian physics that says the reverse process can't happen: i.e. lots of sprinkles of glass from all directions gather up on the floor into a perfectly formed glass then bounce up into someones hand. This is a completely physically acceptable process; it can happen under Newtonian physics even if the initial conditions would be very difficult to produce. It just needs a method (or technology) to produce the initial conditions. There's a lot physics might seem to allow you to do in principle if you get the conditions correct, the technology to produce those conditions. But at the same time, such processes will still remaon physically acceptable in principle even if it is very difficult to get those required conditions together.
I clearly didn't read the quote properly because re-reading it I think its not that far from my view, broadly. Maybe not identical, but not really fundamentally that disagreeable. I am just quite allergic to the way that passage was written so it put me off reading it more closely.
I was making a point about the current AI and living beings. In any case, until one can find a way to generate truly artificial life, there is no 'artificial life'. But in my post, I was even conceding the possibility of sentient AI.
Quoting noAxioms
That's the hard problem though. The problem is how to explain consciousness in terms of properties of the 'inanimate'. So, yeah, probably the 'hard problem' isn't a 'problem' for 'physicalism' but of all attempts to treat the 'inanimate' as fundamental and 'consciousness' as derivative from it.
In a similar way, I believe that one can also make a similar point about the 'living beings' in general. All living beings seem to me to show a degree of intentionality (goal-directed behaviours, self-organization) that is simply not present in 'non-living things'. So in virtue of what properties of 'non-living things' can intentionality that seems to be present in all life forms arise?
Note that in order to solve both these problems you would need a theory that explain how consciousness, intentionality, life etc arose. If the 'inanimate' is fundamental, you should expect to find an explanation on how consciousness, intentionality, life and so on came into being, not just that they come into being. And the explanation must be complete.
Quoting noAxioms
? Not sure how. At least physicalism means that the 'natural' is fundamental. In any case, however, with regards to consciousness, consciousness in a physicalist model would be considered natural. And something like math either an useful fiction or a fundamental aspect of nature (in this latter case, I believe that it would be inappropriate to call such a view 'physicalism', but anyway...)
Quoting noAxioms
Interesting. I do in fact agree with you here. However, I believe that your conception of 'physical/natural' is too broad. What isn't natural in your view?
Quoting noAxioms
Right, I admit that there is no conseus and perhaps the majority view is that mathematics is just an useful abstraction. To be honest, however, I always found the arguments for that view unpersuasive and often based on a strictly empiricist view of knowledge. I believe it is one of those topics where both 'parties' (I mean the 'realist' and the 'anti-realist' about the ontology of mathematics in a broad sense of these terms) are unable to find a common ground with the opponents.
I agree with you about the fact that mathematics doesn't depend on the universe. I have a different view about the relation between mathematics and the universe. For instance, I believe that mathematical truths would still be true even if the universe didn't exist. I do see this universe as contingent whereas mathematical truths as non-contingent.
Quoting noAxioms
It seems to me that you here are assuming that all possible 'non-magical' explanations are 'natural/physical' one. This seems to me a stretch.
I also don't like to make the distinction between 'supernatural' and 'natural', unless one defines the terms in a precise way. Perhaps, I would define 'natural' as 'pertaining to spacetime' (so, both spacetime - or spacetimes if there is a multiverse - and whatever is 'in' it would qualify as 'natural').
Regarding the point you make about Chalmers, as I said before perhaps the 'hard problem' is better framed as an objection to all reductionist understanding of consciosuness that try to reduce it to the inanimate rather than an objection to 'physicalism' in a broad sense of the term.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, we can also make a purely formal syllogism. But that's my point, after all. Why the 'laws' of valid reasoning can apply to 'reality'? If mathematical and logical 'laws' aren't at least a fundamental aspect of nature (or, even more fundamental than nature), how could we even accept whatever 'explanation' as a 'valid explanation' of anything? Also: is physical causality the same as logical causality?
I believe that people who deny the independent existence of 'mathematical' and 'logical' truths/laws assert that our notion of logical implication, numbers etc are abstractions from our experience. The problem, though, is that if you try to explain how we could 'generate' these abstractions, you need to assume these laws are valid in order to make that explanation. This to me shows that logical and mathematical truths/laws are not mere abstractions. But to be honest even if I find such a brief argument convincing of this, I admit that many would not be convinced by this argument. Why this is so, I do not know...
Also, I would add that the apparent 'gradation' of 'intentionality' found in 'entities' at the border of being 'living' and 'non-living' like viruses isn't really evidence for a 'reductionist' view. After all, if viruses have a rudimentary form of intentionality it has still to be explained.
This should be a strong clue:
Quoting noAxioms
These phenomena are qualia.
If you still doubt this I'm sure I can find more explicit passages in the paper or elsewhere.
[I]Something that operates outside of the laws and properties of this reality.[/I]
Our understanding is irrelevant.
We don't understand how mass warps spacetime. But we don't think gravity is magic. We don't understand how dark matter warps spacetime, but doesn't interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation. But, despite not being able to detect it, we hypothesize dark matter's existence, and we don't say the motion of the galaxies is the result of magic.
Quoting ChalnersThe same for stellar evolution, which, certainly, nobody considers to be a supernatural process. There is no point in time when any part of a star, or hurricane, that we can observe in any way, is not physical, not observable and measurable in one way or another. We can measure a star's size, it's brightness, its output of various kinds of radiation. We can measure the diameter and circumference of a hurricane, its temperature, how fast it circulates, how fast it moves over the surface of the planet. We can calculate how much water it contains. The defining characteristics of stars and hurricanes are physical events that we can quantify. I don't hold it against scientists who study stellar dynamics and hurricanes that they can't calculate exactly when one will begin or end, know exactly what is going on at any point inside it, or understand it in every detail at every point at every moment.
Quoting JoshsI never have. First person empirical evidence is valid in science, especially when damage occurs.
Varela’s neurophenomenology seems to fit in with this and is not an alternate theory.
Again, I'm looking for an actual theory that Chalmers might support, one that demonstrates (falsifies) the monism that they all say is impossible.
OK, but again this seems to be an attempt at an interpretation (kind of like RQM but with different phrasing) of an existing theory. It doesn't falsify anything.
Quoting boundlessSure, that's difficult because it is complicated, and the brain isn't going to get explained in terms of something like an algorithm. But the problem being difficult is not evidence against consciousness being derived from inanimate primitives.
Chalmers certainly doesn't have an explanation at all, which is worse than what is currently known.
Probably because anything designed is waved away as not intentionality. I mean, a steam engine self-regulates, all without a brain, but the simple gravity-dependent device that accomplishes it is designed, so of course it doesn't count.
Completely wrong. Fundamentals don't first expect explanations. Explanations are for the things understood, and the things not yet understood still function despite lack of this explanation. Things fell down despite lack of explanation for billions of years. Newton explained it, and Einstein did so quite differently, but things falling down did so without ever expectation of that explanation.
In a way, neither explained it. Both expressed it mathematically in such a way that predictions could be made from that, but Newton as I recall explicitly denied that being an explanation: a reason why mass was attracted to other mass. Hence the theories are descriptive, not explanatory. I suppose it depends on whether mathematics is considered to be descriptive (mathematics as abstraction) or proscriptive (as being more fundamental than nature). The latter qualifies as an explanation, and is a significant part of why I suspect our universe supervenes on mathematics.
Quoting boundlessWe seem to have different definition then. Again, I would have said that only of materialism.
Depends on your definition of consciousness. Some automatically define it to be a supernatural thing, meaning monism is a denial of its existence. I don't define it that way, so I'm inclined to agree with your statement.
Quoting boundlessAnything part of our particular universe. Where you draw the boundary of 'our universe' is context dependent, but in general, anything part of the general quantum structure of which our spacetime is a part. So it includes say some worlds with 2 macroscopic spatial dimensions, but it doesn't include Conway's game of life.
Good, but being the idiot skeptic that I am, I've always had an itch about that one. What if 2+2=4 is a property of some universes (this one included), but is not objectively the case? How might we entertain that? How do you demonstrate that it isn't such a property? Regardless, if any progress is to be made, I'm willing to accept the objectivity of mathematics.
I didn't say otherwise, so not sure how that's different. That's what it means to be independent of our universe.
By definition, no?
Quoting boundlessOK, but that doesn't give meaning to the term. If the ghosts reported are real, then they're part of this universe, and automatically 'natural'. What would be an example of 'supernatural' then? It becomes just something that one doesn't agree with. I don't believe in ghosts, so they're supernatural. You perhaps believe in them, so they must be natural. Maybe it's pointless to even label things with that term.
Depends on what you mean by 'inanimate'. I mean, I am composed of atoms, which are 1) inanimate because atoms are essentially tiny rocks, and 2) animate because they're part of a life form.
A non-living device that experiences whatever such a device experiences would be (and very much is) declared to not be conscious precisely because the word (and 'experience' as well) is reserved for life forms. This is the word-game fallacy that I see often used in this forum (think W word).
That's like saying that creatures 'fall' to the ground, but rocks, being inanimate, do not 'fall' by definition, and instead are merely accelerated downward. Ergo, 'falling' requires a special property of matter that is only available to life.
Probably not, but I'd need an example of the latter, one that doesn't involve anything physical.
Quoting Patterner
Hence 'magic' is a poor tool to wield. If Chalmers' 'all material having mental properties' is actually the case, then it wouldn't be magic, it would be a property of this reality. But still totally unexplained or even described since there's no current theory that supports that view. There sort of is, but nobody formally mentions it because, being a theory, it makes predictions, and those predictions likely fail, so best not to be vocal about those predictions.
Quoting PatternerThe hurricane, which is somewhat understood in terms of airflow and thermodynamics (2-3 steps away from hurricane dynamics), is never described in terms of particles. But challenges to physicalism frequently request unreasonable explanations in terms of particles (again, perhaps 12 steps away). So work your way throught the 12 steps, understanding how particles make atoms, and atoms make molecules, etc. Expect each step to be expressed in terms of the prior one, and not in terms of the particles.
He admits this, but then denies, without justification, that qualia are not a complex effects emerging from simpler effects.
I see the problem as confusing the map with the territory. In talking about the first-person view we are talking about the map, not the territory. In talking about what the map refers to we are talking about the territory and not the view. The map is part of the territory and is causally related with the territory, which is why we can talk about the territory by using the map.
The problem comes when we project our view onto the territory as if they were one and the same - as if your view is how the world actually is (naive realism). Indirect realism is the idea that your map is not the territory but provides information about the territory thanks to causation. The effect is not the cause and vice versa.
The monist solution to the problem comes in realizing that everything is information and the things you see in the world as static, solid objects is just a model of other processes that are changing at different frequencies relative to rate at which your eyes and brain perceive these other processes. Slower processes appear as solid objects while faster processes appear as actual processes, or blurs of motion.
Chalmers et al suggest that the reason why the problem is 'difficult' it is because it is wrongly stated, i.e. the assumption that we can 'get' consciousness from inanimate primitives is wrong. Of course, the absence of a solution is not a compelling evidence of the impossibility of finding one but the latter is a possible explanation of the former.
Quoting noAxioms
If there is intentionality in something like a steam-engine, this would suggest that intentionality is also fundamental - in other words, the inanimate would not be really totally inanimate. But the problem arises in views were intentionality isn't seen as fundamental but derived from something else that seems to be completely different.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, but if intentionality is fundamental, then the arising of intentionality, assuming that it arose, is unexplained. Conversely, if intentionality is derived, we expect an explanation of how it is derived.
Same goes for 'consciousness' and so on.
Quoting noAxioms
TBF, I also am a bit perplexed on how some non-physicalists define consciousness. But also note that, for instance, the 'Aristotelian' view, which was later accepted and developed in most philosophical traditions from late Antiquity onwards (Neoplatonic, Christian, Islamic...) of the 'soul' is that the 'soul' is the form of the body and that the 'sentient being' (animals and humans) are actually both body and soul, i.e. matter and form. In this view, we are not composed of two substances ('material' and 'mental') but, rather, the Arisotelian model ('hylomorphism') explains a 'human being' as an ordered entity where the 'soul' is the order that makes the entity ordered. Furthermore, IIRC, there isn't such a thing like 'pure matter' because 'pure matter' would be completely unordered and, therefore, unintelligible.
I don't think that, say, the common arguments against the existence of a 'soul', a 'unified self' and so on that sometimes are advanced by some 'physicalists' can affects these views.
Since I am more or less an 'hylomorphist', TBH I see much of the debate about 'consciousness' as simply not relevant for me.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. I am even prepared to say that if there is really a multiverse with all possible 'worlds' with different laws, to equate the 'natural' to 'pertaining to the whole multiverse'.
So I guess that for me 'natural' includes also Conway's game of life :wink:
Being the 'speculative fool' I am, I would say that given that intelligibility seems a precondition of the existence of the multiverse, this would mean that either (i) the multiverse is fundamental and, therefore, its existence is not contingent and intelligibility (and as a consequence all mathematical truths) is an aspect of the multiverse or (ii) the multiverse is contingent whereas mathematical truths are not and, therefore, they exist in something 'transcendent' of the multiverse (I prefer this second option). TBH, however, it would be quite a strange physicalism IMO that accepts the multiverse as being ontologicall non-contingent (i.e. necessary!) - it would become something like pantheism/pandeism* of sorts (i.e. a view that asserts that the multiverse is a kind of metaphysical Absolute). But positing metaphysical absolutes seems to go against what many people find in physicalism. So, it would be ironic IMO for a physicalist to end up holding the idea that the multiverse itself is a metaphysical absolute after having accepted physicalism precisely to avoid accepting a metaphysical absolute.
[*It is important to distinguish this from panentheistic views were the Absolute pervades but at the same time transcends the multiverse. ]
Quoting noAxioms
:up: Do you think that they are independent from the multiverse?
Quoting noAxioms
Yes and no. For instance, I can't give a purely 'natural' explanation of how we can know and understand mathematical truths if I say they aren't 'natural'. If mathematical truths aren't natural, and our mind can understand something that isn't natural, then the 'natural' can't wholly explain our minds.
However, it should be noted that, in my view, even a pebble can't be explained in fully 'naturalistic' terms. Being (at least partially) intelligible, and being IMO the conditions for intelligibility of any entity prior to the 'natural', even a pebble, in a sense, is not fully 'explained' in purely 'naturalistic' terms.
So, yeah, at the end of the day, I find, paradoxically, even the simplest thing as mysterious as our minds.
Quoting noAxioms
See above.
Quoting noAxioms
I sort of agree with that.
I believe, however, that it is easier to discuss about intentionality rather than consciousness.
If intentionality exists only in *some* physical bodies, and we have to explain how it arose, we expect that, in principle, we can explain how it arose in the same way as we can explain other emergent features, i.e. in virtue of other properties that are present in the 'inanimate'. The thing is that I never encountered a convincing explanation of that kind nor I found convincing arguments that have convinced me that such an explanation is possible.
Your own view, for instance, seems to me to redefine the 'inanimate' as something that is actually not 'truly inanimate' and this allows you to say that, perhaps, the intentionality we have is a more complex form of the 'proto(?)-intentionality' that perhaps is found in inanimate objects. This is for me a form panpsychism rather than a 'true' physicalism.
At the end of the day, I guess that labels are just labels and you actually would be ready to accept what I would consider something that isn't physicalism as a form of physicalism. The same goes for what you say about mathematics. This is not a criticism of you but I want to point out that your own 'physicalism' is, in my opinion, a more sophisticated view of what I would normally call 'physicalism'. So, perhaps some confusion in these debates is caused by the fact that we - both the two of us and 'people' in general - do not have a shared vocabulary and use the words differently.
Quoting noAxioms
I meant logical implications. I can, for instance, make a formally valid statement without any reference to something 'real'.
Thus illustrating my point about language. 'Intentional' is reserved for life forms, so if something not living does the exact same thing, a different word (never provided) must be used, or it must be living, thus proving that the inanimate thing cannot do the thing that it's doing (My example was 'accelerating downward' in my prior post).
That's only a problem for those that posit that intentionality is fundamental. Gosh, the same can be said of 'experience', illustrating why I find no problem when Chalmers does.
On the other hand, one can boil down that statement down to "if X is fundamental, then the arising of X is unexplained". Pretty much everybody considers something to be fundamental, so we all have our X. Why must X 'arise'? What does that mean? That it came to be over time? That would make time more fundamental, a contradiction. X just is, and everything else follows from whatever is fundamental. And no, I don't consider time to be fundamental.
Again, why? There's plenty that's currently unexplained. Stellar dynamics I think was my example. For a long time, people didn't know stars were even suns. Does that lack of even that explanation make stars (and hundreds of other things) fundamental? What's wrong with just not knowing everything yet?
Quoting boundless
Quoting boundless
That's what it means to be true even if the universe didn't exist.
Maybe putting in intelligibility as a requirement for existence isn't such a great idea. Of course that depends on one's definition of 'to exist'. There are definitely some definitions where intelligibility would be needed.
A made-up story. Not fiction (Sherlock Holmes say), just something that's wrong. Hard to give an example since one could always presume the posited thing is not wrong.
Again, why is the explanation necessary? What's wrong with just not knowing everything? Demonstrating the thing in question to be impossible is another story. That's a falsification, and that carries weight. So can you demonstrate than no inanimate thing can intend? Without 'proof by dictionary'?
That does not sound like any sort of summary of my view, which has no requirement of being alive in order to do something that a living thing might do, such as fall off a cliff.
Quoting Harry HinduAll this seems to be the stock map vs territory speach, but nowhere is it identified what you think is the map (that I'm talking about), and the territory (which apparently I'm not).
Very few consider the world to be a model. The model is the map, and the world is the territory. Your wording very much implies otherwise, and thus is a strawman representation of a typical monist view. As for your model of what change is, that has multiple interpretations, few particularly relevant to the whole ontology of mind debate. Change comes in frequencies? Frequency is expressed as a rate relative to perceptions??
So old glass flowing is not an actual process, or I suppose just doesn't appear that way despite looking disturbingly like falling liquid? This is getting nitpickly by me. I acknowledge your example, but none of it is science, nor is it particularly illustrative of the point of the topic.
:up: :up: :100:
Ok. But if there is an 'emergence', it must be an intelligible process. The problem for 'emergentism' is that there doesn't seem any convincing explanation of how intentionality, consciousness and so on 'emerge' from something that does not have those properties.
As I said before, that we have yet to find a credible explanation for such an emergence is an evidence against emergentism. Of course, such an absence of an explanation isn't a compelling evidence for the impossibility of an explanation.
Anyway, I also would point out that IMO most forms of physicalism have a difficulty in explaining that composite objects can be 'distinct entities'.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, thanks for the clarification. But note my point above.
Quoting noAxioms
I misphrased this. I meant: if intentionality is fundamental then there is no need for an explanation.
Quoting noAxioms
Right, but there is also the possibility that ontological dependency doesn't involve a temporary relation. That is, you might say that intentionality isn't fundamental but it is dependent on something else that hasn't intentionality and yet there have not been a time where intentionality didn't exist (I do not see a contradiction in thinking that, at least).
As an illustration, consider the stability of a top floor in a building. It clearly depends on the firmness of the foundations of the builing and yet we don't that 'at a certain point' the upper floor 'came out' from the lower.
So, yeah, arising might be a wrong word. Let's go with 'dependence'.
Quoting noAxioms
I hope I have clarified my point above. But let's use this example. Stellar dynamics isn't fundamental because it can be explained in terms of more fundamental processes. Will we discover something similar for intentionality, consciousness and so on? Who knows. Maybe yes. But currently it seems to me that our 'physicalist' models can't do that. In virtue of what properties might intentionality, consciousness and so on 'emerge'?
Quoting noAxioms
Good, we agree on this. But if they are 'true' even if the universe or multiverse didn't exist, this means that they have a different ontological status. And, in fact, if the multiverse could not exist, this would mean that it is contingent. Mathematical truths, instead, we seem to agree are not contingent.
Given that they aren't contingent, they can't certainly depend on something that is contingent. So, they transcend the multiverse (they would be 'super-natural').
Quoting noAxioms
If the physical world wasn't intelligible, then it seems to me that even doing science would be problematic. Indeed, scientific research seems to assume that the physical world is intelligible.
It might be problematic to assume that the physical world is fully intelligible for us, but intelligibility seems to be required for any type of investigation.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok. I would call these things simply 'wrong explanations' or 'inconsistent explanations' rather than 'super-natural', which seems to me to be better suited for speaking about something that transcends the 'natural' (if there is anything that does do that... IMO mathematical truths for instance do transcend the natural).
Quoting noAxioms
TBH, I thing that right now the 'virdict' is still open. There is no evidence 'beyond reasonable doubt' to either position about consciousness that can satisfy almost everyone. We can discuss about what position seems 'more reasonable' but we do not have 'convincing evidences'.
Quoting noAxioms
OK, I stand corrected. Would you describe your position as 'emergentist' then?
The emergence of intentionality (in the sense of 'aboutness') seems well enough explained by the behavior of a trained neural network. See:
This certainly isn't sufficient for an explanation of consciousness. However, in light of how serious a concern AI has become, I'd think it merits serious consideration as an explanation of how intentionality can emerge from a system in which the individual components of the system lack intentionality.
Do you think it is reasonable to grant that we know of an intelligible process in which intentionality emerges?
:up:
The map is the first-person view. Is the map (first-person view) not part of the territory?
Quoting noAxioms
I never said that people consider the world as a model. I said that our view is the model and the point was that some people (naive realists) tend to confuse the model with the map in their using terms like, "physical" and "material".
You do understand that we measure change using time, and that doing so entails comparing the relative frequency of change to another type of change (the movement of the hour hand on the clock vs the movement of the sun across the sky)? Do you not agree that our minds are part of the world and changes like anything else in the world, and the time it takes our eye-brain system can receive and process the information compared to the rate at which what you are observing is changing, can play a role in how your mind models what it is seeing.
Quoting noAxioms
:meh: Everything is a process. Change is relative. The molecules in the glass are moving faster than when it was a solid, therefore the rate of change has increased and is why you see it as a flowing process rather than a static object. I don't see how it isn't science when scientists attempt to find consistently repetitive processes with high degrees of precision (like atomic clocks) to measure the rate of change in other processes. QM says that measuring processes changes them and how they are perceived (wave vs particle), so I don't know what you mean by, "none of it is science".
Still, I am hesitant to see it as an example of emergence of intentionality for two reasons. Take what I say below with a grain of salt, but here's my two cents.
First, these machines, like all others, are still programmed by human beings who decide how they should work. So, there is a risk to read back into the machine the intentionality of human beings who built them. To make a different example, if you consider a mechanical calculator it might seem it 'recognizes' the numbers '2', '3' and the operation of addition and then gives us the output '5' when we ask it to perform the calculation. The machine described in the video is far more complex but the basic idea seems the same.
Secondly, the output the machine gives are the results of statistical calculations. The machine is being given a set of examples of associations of hand-written numbers and the number these hand-written numbers should be. It then manages to perform better with other trials in order to minimize the error function. Ok, interesting, but I'm not sure that we can say that the machine has 'concepts' like what we have. When we read a hand-written number '3' it might be that we associate it to the 'concept of 3' by a Bayesian inference (i.e. the most likely answer to the question: "what is the most likely sign that the writer wrote here?"). But when we are aware of the concept of '3' we do not perceive a 'vector' of different probabilities about different concepts.
Sure
I was on board until the bit about not being a time (presumably in our universe) when intentionality doesn't exist. It doesn't appear to exist at very early times, and it doesn't look like it will last.
But it's not building all the way down, nor all the way up.
Quoting boundlessBut it hasn't been fully explained. A sufficiently complete explanation might be found by humans eventually (probably not), but currently we lack that, and in the past, we lacked it a lot more. Hence science.
Maybe we already have (the example from @wonderer1 is good), but every time we do, the goalposts get moved, and a more human-specific explanation is demanded. That will never end since I don't think a human is capable of fully understanding how a human works any more than a bug knows how a bug works.
That would be an interesting objective threshold of intelligence: any entity capable of comprehending itself.
Quoting boundlessI beg to differ. They're just simple models at this point is all. So the goalposts got moved and those models were declared to not be models of actual intentionality and whatnot.
We could do a full simulation of a human and still there will be those that deny usage of the words. A full simulation would also not constitute an explanation, only a demonstration. That would likely be the grounds for the denial.
Agree with all that.
Quoting boundless
Mathematics seems to come in layers, with higher layers dependent on more fundamental ones. Is there a fundamental layers? Perhaps law of form. I don't know. What would ground that?
Good point
Just so. So physical worlds would not depend on science being done on them. Most of them fall under that category. Why doesn't ours? That answer at least isn't too hard.
Agree again. It's why I don't come in here asserting that my position is the correct one. I just balk at anybody else doing that, about positions with which I disagree, but also about positions with which I agree. I have for instance debunked 'proofs' that presentism is false, despite the fact that I think it's false.
I entertain the notion that our universe is a mathematical structure, but there are some serious problems with that proposition that I've not seen satisfactory resolution. Does it sink the ship? No, but a viable model is needed, and I'm not sure there is one. Sean Carroll got into this.
Quoting boundless
Close enough. More of a not-unemergentist, distinct in that I assert that the physical is sufficient for emergence of these things, as opposed to asserting that emergence the physical is necessary fact, a far more closed-minded stance.
Quoting boundlessThis is irrelevant to emergence, which just says that intentionality is present, consisting of components, none of which carry intentionality.
OK, so you don't deny the emergence, but that it is intentionality at all since it is not its own, quite similar to how my intentions at work are that of my employer instead of my own intentions.
It recognizes 2 and 3. It does not recognize the characters. That would require a image-to-text translator (like the one in the video, learning or not). Yes, it adds. Yes, it has a mechanical output that displays results in human-readable form. That's my opinion of language being appropriately applied. It's mostly a language difference (to choose those words to describe what its doing or not) and not a functional difference.
Cool. So similar to how humans do it. The post office has had image-to-text interpretation for years, but not sure how much those devices learn as opposed to just being programmed. Those devices need to parse cursive addresses, more complicated than digits. I have failed to parse some hand written numbers.
My penmanship sucks, but I'm very careful when hand-addressing envelopes.
Quoting Harry HinduI don't know what the territory is as you find distinct from said map.
Fine, but I'm no naive realist. Perception is not direct, and I'm not even a realist at all. A physicalist need not be any of these things.
Change over time, yes. There's other kinds of change.
Fine, so one can compare rates of change, which is frame dependent we want to get into that.
I suppose so, but I don't know how one might compare a 'rate of continuous perception' to a 'rate of continuous observed change'. Both just happen all the time. Sure, a fast car goes by in less time than a slow car, if that's what you're getting at.
Well that's wrong. Glass was never a solid. The molecules in the old glass move at the same rate as newer harder glass, which is more temperature dependent than anything. But sure, their average motion over a long time relative to the window frame is faster in the old glass since it might move 10+ centimeters over decades. What's any of this got to do with 'the territory' that the first person view is supposedly a map of?
Perhaps you mean territory as the thing in itself (and not that which would be directly perceived). You've not come out and said that. I agree with that. A non-naive physicalist would say that things like intentionality supervene on actual physical things, and not on the picture that our direct perceptions paint for us. I never suggested otherwise.
I see the old glass as moving due to it looking like a picture of flowing liquid, even though motion is not perceptible. A spinning top is a moving object since its parts are at different locations at different times, regardless of how it is perceived.
If physical processes weren't intelligible, how could we even do science, which seeks at least an intelligible description of processes that allow us to make predictions and so on?
Quoting noAxioms
I was saying that if there was a time when intentionality didn't exist, it must have come into being 'in some way' at a certain moment.
Quoting noAxioms
I sort of agree. And honestly, I believe that everything is ultimately not fully knowable as a 'complete understanding' of anything would require the complete understanding of the context in which something exists and so on. Everything is therefore mysterious and, at the same time, paradoxically intelligible.
Quoting noAxioms
I don't know. Merely giving an output after computing the most likely alternative doesn't seem to me the same thing as intentionality. But, again, perhaps I am wrong about this. It just doesn't seem to be supported by our phenomenological experience.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, I think I agree here. Even natural numbers seem to be 'based' on more fundamental concepts like identity, difference, unity, multiplicity etc. But nevertheless the truths about them seem to be non-contingent.
Quoting noAxioms
In my records, if you agree with that, you are not a 'physicalist'. Of course, I accept that you might disagree with me here.
Quoting noAxioms
If we grant to science some ability to give us knowledge of physical reality, then we must assume that the physical world is intelligible. Clearly, the physical world doesn't depend on us doing scientific investigations on it but, nevertheless, the latter would seem to me ultimately fruitless if the former wasn't intelligible (except perhaps in a weird purely pragmatic point of view).
Quoting noAxioms
OK. I have a sort of similar approach about online discussions. Sometimes, however, I believe that it is simply impossible to not state one's own disagreement (or agreement) with a view in seemingly eccessively confident terms. Like sarcasm, sometimes the 'level of confidence' comes out badly in discussions and people seem more confident about a given thing than they actually are.
Furthermore, I also believe that a careful analysis of a position one has little sympathy for actually can be useful to understand better and reinforce the position one has. I get that sometimes it is not an easy task but the fruits of such a careful (and respectful) approach are very good.
Quoting noAxioms
Not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that the physical is sufficient for emergence but there are possible ways in which intentionality, consciousness etc emerge without the physical?
Quoting noAxioms
Good point. But note that if your intentions could be completely determined by your own employer, it would be questionable to call them 'your' intentions. Also, to emerge 'your' intentions would need the intentionality of your employer.
Anyway even if I granted that, somehow, the machines could have an autonomous intentionality, there remains the fact that if intentionality, in order to emerge, needs always some other intentionality, intentionality is fundamental.
So, yeah, I sort of agree that intentionality can come into being via emergence but it isn't clear how it could emerge from something that is completely devoid of it.
Quoting noAxioms
Again, I see it more like a machine doing an operation rather than a machine 'recognizing' anything. An engine that burns gasoline to give energy to a car and allowing it to move doesn't 'recognize' anything, yet it operates. In the same way, I doubt that a machine can recognize numbers in an analogous way we do but I still do not find any evidence that they do something more than doing an operation as an engine does. This to me applies both to the mechanical calculator and the computer in the video.
An interesting question, however, arises. How can I be sure that humans (and, I believe, also animals at least) can 'recognize' numbers as I perceive myself doing? This is indeed a big question. Can we be certain that we - humans and (some?) animals do recognize numbers - while machines do not? I am afraid that such a certainty is beyond our reach.
Still, I think it is reasonable that machines do not have such a faculty because they operate algorithmically (and those algorithms can be VERY complex and designed to approximate our own abilities).
Quoting noAxioms
Do we just do that, though? It seems from our own phenomenological experience that we can have some control and self-awareness on our own 'operations' that machines do not have.
Quoting noAxioms
I think I agree with that provided that one adds the word in the square brackets. The problem is: can we have an unmistaken criterion that allows us to objectively determine if a living being, machine or whatever has such an ability?
It was a question to you about the distinction between territory and map. Is the map part of the territory? If there isn't a distinction, then that is basically solipsism. Solipsism implies that the map and the territory are one and the same. One might even say there is no map - only the territory as the mind is all there is.
Quoting noAxioms
What does it even mean to be a physicalist? What does "physical" even mean? When scientists describe objects they say things like, "objects are mostly empty space" and describe matter as the relationship between smaller particles all the way down (meaning we never get at actual physical stuff - just more fundamental relationships, or processes) until we arrive in the quantum realm where "physical" seems to have no meaning, or is at least dependent upon our observations (measuring).
Quoting noAxioms
Like...? You might say that there are changes in space but space is related to time. So maybe I should ask if there is an example of change independent of space-time. Space-time appears to be the medium in which change occurs.
Quoting noAxioms
Ever seen super slow motion video of a human's reaction time to stimuli? It takes time for your mind to become aware of its surroundings. You are always perceiving the world as it was in the past, so your brain has to make some predictions. Solid objects are still changing - just at a much slower rate.
The simplified, cartoonish version of events you experience is what you refer to as "physical", where objects appear as solid objects that "bump" against each other because that is how the slower processes are represented on the map. How would you represent slow processes vs faster processes on a map?
Quoting noAxioms
I don't understand. Is the picture not physical as well for a physicalist?
How do you explain an illusion, like a mirage, if not intentionality supervening on the picture instead of on some physical thing?
I don't know what it means for intentionality to supervene on actual physical things. But I do know that if you did not experience empty space in front of you and experienced the cloud of gases surrounding you you then your intentions might be quite different. Yet you act on the feeling of there being nothing in front of you, because that is how you visual experience is.
How do you reconcile the third person view of another's brain (your first-person experience of another's brain - a third person view can only be had via a first-person view.) with their first person experience of empty space and visual depth? This talk of views seems to be confusing things. What exactly is a view? A process? Information?
Quoting noAxioms
Maybe I should try this route - Does a spinning top look more like a wave than a particle, and when it stops does it look more like a particle than a wave? Is a spinning top a process? Is a top at rest a process - just a slower one? Isn't the visual experience of a wave-like blur of a spinning top the relationship between the rate of change of position of each part of the top relative to your position is space and the rate at which your eye-brain system can process the change it is observing. If your mental processing were faster then it would actually slow down the speed of the top to the point where it will appear as a stable, solid object standing perfectly balanced on its bottom peg.
OK, that's a lot different than how I read the first statement.
I don't think the video was about intentionality. There are other examples of that, such as the robot with the repeated escape attempts, despite not being programmed to escape.
The video was more about learning and consciousness.
Partially intelligible, which is far from 'intelligible', a word that on its own implies nothing remaining that isn't understood.
Quoting boundlessNot sure where you think my confidence level is. I'm confident that monism hasn't been falsified. That's about as far as I go. BiV hasn't been falsified either, and it remains an important consideration, but positing that you're a BiV is fruitless.
I'm saying that alternatives to such physical emergence has not been falsified, so yes, I suppose those alternative views constitute 'possible ways in which they exist without emergence from the physical'.
Just like you're questioning that a machine's intentions are not its own because some of them were determined by its programmer.
No, since I am composed of parts, none of which have the intentionality of my employer. So it's still emergent, even if the intentions are not my own.
That seems to be self contradictory. If it's fundamental, it isn't emergent, by definition.
Quoting boundlessThe calculator doesn't know what it's doing, I agree. It didn't have to learn. It's essentially a physical tool that nevertheless does mathematics despite not knowing that it's doing that, similar to a screwdriver screwing despite not knowing it's doing that. Being aware of its function is not one of its functions.
Agree.
Don't agree. The thing in the video learns. An engine does too these days, something that particularly pisses me off since I regularly have to prove to my engine that I'm human, and I tend to fail that test for months at a time. The calculator? No, that has no learning capability.
Dabbling in solipsism now? You can't see the perception or understanding of others, so you can only infer when others are doing the same thing.
Still, I think it is reasonable that machines do not have such a faculty because they operate algorithmicallyHow do you know that you do not also operate this way? I mean, sure, you're not a Von-Neumann machine, but being one is not a requirement for operating algorithmicly. If you don't know how it works, then you can't assert that it doesn't fall under that category.
More importantly, what assumptions are you making that preclude anything operating algorithmicly from having this understanding? How do you justify those assumptions? They seem incredibly biased to me.
Quoting Harry HinduOK. It varies from case to case. Sometimes it is. The 'you are here' sign points to where the map is on the map, with the map being somewhere in the territory covered by the map.
You solipsism question implies that you were asking a different question. OK. Yes, the map is distinct from the territory, but you didn't ask that. Under solipsism, they're not even distinct.
Your prior post did eventually suggest a distinction between a perceived thing (a 3D apple say) and the ding an sich, with is neither 3D nor particularly even a 'thing'.
Different people use the term different I suppose. I did my best a few posts back, something like "the view that all phenomena are the result of what we consider natural law of this universe", with 'this universe' loosely being defined as 'all contained by the spacetime which we inhabit'. I gave some challenges to that definition, such as the need to include dark matter under the category of 'natural law' to explain certain phenomena. Consciousness could similarly be added if it can be shown that it cannot emerge from current natural law, but such a proposal makes predictions, and those predictions fail so far.
All correct, which is why I didn't define 'physical' in terms of material, especially since they've never found any material. Yes, rocks are essentially clusters of quantum do-dads doing their quantumy stuff. There are no actual volume-filling particles, so 'mostly empty space' should actually get rid of 'mostly'.
e.g. The air pressure changes with altitude.
In simplest terms, the function y = 0.3x, the y value changes over x. That being a mathematical structure, it is independent of any notion of spacetime. Our human thinking about that example of course is not independent of it. We cannot separate ourselves from spacetime.
Sure, one can model rigid balls bouncing off each other, or even simpler models than that if such serves a pragmatic purpose. I realize that's not what's going on. Even the flow of time is a mental construct, a map of sorts. Even you do it, referencing 'the past' like it was something instead of just a pragmatic mental convenience.
Depends on the nature of the map. If you're talking about perceptions, then it would be a perception of relative motion of two things over a shorter vs longer period of time, or possibly same time, but the fast one appears further away. If we're talking something like a spacetime diagram, then velocity corresponds to slopes of worldlines.
Sure it is, but the mental picture is not the intentionality, just the idea of it.
I don't understand this. A mirage is a physical thing. A camera can take a picture of one. No intentionality is required of the camera for it to do that. I never suggested that intentionality supervenes on any picture. Territories don't supervene on maps.
Yes, my experience and subsequent mental assessment of state (a physical map of sorts) influences what I choose to do. Is that so extraordinary?
How do you reconcile the third person view of another's brain (your first-person experience of another's brain - a third person view can only be had via a first-person view.) with their first person experience of empty space and visual depth?Sorry, you lost me, especially the bits in parenthesis.
Other people (if they exist in the way that I do) probably have a first person view similar to my own. A third person description of their brain (or my own) is not required for this. I have no first person view of any brain, including my own. In old times, it wasn't obvious where the thinking went on. It took third person education to learn that.
Probably a good question. In context of the title of this topic, I'm not actually sure about the former since I don't find baffling what others do. Third person is simply a description, language or whatever. A book is a good third person view of a given subject. First person is a subjective temporal point of view by some classical entity. Those biased would probably say that the entity has to be alive.
It never looks like either. You're taking quantum terminology way out of context here. Quantum entities sometimes have wave-like properties and also particle-like properties, but those entities are never actually either of those things.
Yes to all.
Yea, pretty much. My eyes cannot follow it, even if they could follow linear motion at the same speed.
I'd accept that statement. Clouds look almost static like that, until you watch a time-lapse video of them. You can see the motion, but only barely. In fast-mo, I've seen clouds break like waves against a beach.
I can't think of a case where the map is never part of the territory, unless you are a solipsist, in which case they are one and the same, not part of the other.
Quoting noAxioms
I may make a distinction between an idea and something that is not an idea (I'm not an idealist). But I do not make a distinction between their existence. Santa Claus exists - as an idea. The question isn't whether Santa Claus exists or not. It does as we have "physical" representations (effects) of that idea (the cause) every holiday season. The question is, "what is the nature of its existence?". People are not confused about the existence of god. They are confused about the nature of god - is it just an idea, or does god exist as something more than just an idea?
Ok.
Quoting noAxioms
I'll try to find some of these things. Interesting.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, it depends on what we mean by 'intelligible'. A thing might be called 'intelligible' because it is fully understood or because it can be, in principle, understood completely*. That's why I tend to use the expressions 'partially intelligible' and 'intelligible' in a somewhat liberal manner.
*This 'in principle' does not refer only to human minds. If there were minds that have higher abilities than our own it may be possible that they understand something that we do not and cannot. This doesn't mean that those things are 'unintelligible'.
Quoting noAxioms
I believe that you believe that some alternatives are more reasonable than the others but you don't think that there is enough evidence to say that one particular theory is 'the right one beyond reasonable doubt'.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, thanks.
Quoting noAxioms
My point wasn't that the programmer's intentionality is part of the machine but, rather, it is a necessary condition for the machine to come into being. If the machine had intentionality, such an intentionality also depends on the intentionality of its builder, so we can't still say that the machine's intentionality emerged from purely 'inanimate' causes.
Not a very strong argument but it is still an interesting point IMO (not that here I am conceding that we can build machines which have intentionality).
Quoting noAxioms
Mmm. I still don't get why. It seems to me that there is only a different of complexity. 'Learning' IMO would imply that the machine can change the algorithms according to which it operates (note that here I am not using the term 'learning' as to refer to the mere adding of information but, rather, something like learning an ability...).
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, I agree. But I am not sure that this inference is enough for certainty, except of the form of certainty 'for all practical purposes'.
Quoting noAxioms
They are inferences that I can make based on my own experience. I might be wrong, of course, but it doesn't seem to me that I can explain all features of my mental activities in purely algorithmic terms (e.g. how I make some choices). I might concede, however, that I am not absolutely sure that there isn't an unknown alogorithmic explanation of all the operations that my mind can do.
To change my view I need more convincing arguments that my - or any human being's - mind isn't algorithmic.
First of all, by whom? Something understood by one might still baffle another, especially if the other has a vested interest in keeping the thing in the unintelligible list, even if only by declaring the explanation as one of correlation, not causation.
There are things that even in principle will never be understood completely, such as the true nature of the universe since there can never be tests that falsify different interpretations. From this it does not follow that physicalism fails. So I must deny that physicalism has any requirement of intelligibility, unless you have a really weird definition of it.
Yup. Thus I have opinions. Funny that I find BiV (without even false sensory input) less unreasonable than magic.
One person's reasonable doubt is another's certainty. Look at all the people that know for certain that their religion of choice (all different ones) is the correct one. Belief is a cheap commodity with humans, rightfully so since such a nature makes us more fit. A truly rational entity would not be similarly fit, and thus seems unlikely to have evolved by natural selection.
Quoting boundlessIf the machine was intentionally made, then yes, by definition. If it came into being by means other than a teleological one, then not necessarily so. I mean, arguably my first born came into being via intentionality, and the last not, despite having intentionality himself. Hence the condition is not necessary.
There are more extreme examples of this, like the civil war case of a woman getting pregnant without ever first meeting the father, with a bullet carrying the sperm rather than any kind of intent being involved.
A similar argument seeks to prove that life cannot result from non-living natural (non-teleological) processes.
Quoting boundlessThat makes it sound like it rewrites its own code, which it probably doesn't. I've actually written self-modifying code, but it wasn't a case of AI or learning or anything, just efficiency or necessity.
How does a human learn? We certainly adopt new algorithms for doing things we didn't know how to do before. We change our coding, which is essentially adding/strengthening connections. A machine is more likely to just build some kind of data set that can be referenced to do its tasks better than without it. We do that as well.
Learning to walk is an interesting example since it is mostly subconscious nerve connections being formed, not data being memorized. I wonder how an AI would approach the task. They probably don't so much at this point since I've seen walking robots and they suck at it. No efficiency or fluidity at all, part of which is the fault of a hardware designer who gave it inefficient limbs.
They have machines that detect melanoma in skin images. There's no algorithm to do that. Learning is the only way, and the machines do it better than any doctor. Earlier, it was kind of a joke that machines couldn't tell cats from dogs. That's because they attempted the task with algorithms. Once the machine was able to just learn the difference the way humans do, the problem went away, and you don't hear much about it anymore.
Technically, anything a physical device can do can be simulated in software, which means a fairly trivial (not AI at all) algorithm can implement you. This is assuming a monistic view of course. If there's outside interference, then the simulation would fail.
Quoting Harry HinduAgain, I'm missing your meaning because it's trivial. I have a map of Paris, and that map is not part of Paris since the map is not there. That's easy, so you probably mean something else by such statements. Apologies for not getting what that is, and for not getting why this point is helping me figure out why Chalmers finds the first person view so physically contradictory.
So I would say that the idea of Santa exists, but Santa does not. When I refer to an ideal, I make it explicit. If I don't, then I'm not referring to the ideal, but (in the case of the apple say), the noumena. Now in the apple case, it was admittedly a hypothetical real apple, not a specific apple that would be a common referent between us. Paris on the other hand is a common referent.
If that were so, there'd not be differing opinions concerning that existence, and even concerning the kind of existence meant.
Yes, there is also disagreement about the nature of god. I mean, you're already asserting the nature by grammatically treating the word as a proper noun.
How does this example of your map representative of your mind as a map? Your map is always about where you are now (we are talking about your current experience of where you are - wherever you are.) As such, your map can never be somewhere other than in the territory you are in. If it makes it any easier, consider the entire universe as the territory and your map is always of the area you are presently in in that territory.
My point is that if the map is part of the territory - meaning it is causally connected with the territory - then map and territory must be part of the same "stuff" to be able to interact. It doesn't matter what flavor of dualism you prefer - substance, property, etc. You still have to explain how physical things like brains and their neurons create an non-physical experience of empty space and visual depth.
You can only determine what I see by looking at my neural activity and comparing it to others' neural activity. I can only determine what I see by having a visual experience that is made up of colors, shapes, etc. and comparing that to prior visual experiences - not neural activity.
Our mental experience is the one thing we have direct access to, and are positive that exists, and other people's minds we have indirect access to, so it would seem to me that how we experience things indirectly are less like how they actually are compared to the things we experience directly. So when people talk about the "physical" nature of the world, they are confusing how it appears indirectly with how it is directly (since our map is part of the territory we experience part of the territory directly). The map is more like how reality is and the symbols on the map are more like how reality is (information) rather than what it represents is.
Quoting noAxioms
Your idea is a common referent between us, else how could you talk about it to anyone? One might say that the scribbles you just typed are a referent between the scribbles and your idea and some reader. If ideas have just as much causal power as things that are not just ideas, then maybe the problem you're trying to solve stems from thinking of ideas and things that are not just ideas as distinct.
Quoting noAxioms
The differing opinions concerning whether god exists or not is dependent upon what the nature of god is. Is god an extradimensional alien or is god simply an synonym for the universe?
My mental map (the first person one) rarely extends beyond my pragmatic needs of the moment. I hold other mental maps, different scales, different points of view, but you're not talking about those.
A substance dualist might deny that the map has a location at all, a property only of 'extended' substances. Any form of dualism requires a causal connection to the territory if the territory exists. If it doesn't exist in the same way that the map exists, then we're probably talking about idealism or virtualism like BiV.
Does that follow? I cannot counter it. If the causal connection is not there, the map would be just imagination, not corresponding to any territory at all. I'll accept it then.
I think the point of dualism is to posit that the brain doesn't do these things. There are correlations, but that's it. Not sure what the brain even does, and why we need a bigger one if the mental stuff is doing all the work. Not sure why the causality needs to be through the brain at all. I mean, all these reports of out-of-body experiences seem to suggest that the mental realm doesn't need physical sensory apparatus at all. Such reports also heavily imply a sort of naive direct realism.
Quoting Harry HinduIt 'existing' depends significantly on one's definition of 'exists'. Just saying.
What we have direct access to is our mental interpretation of our sensory stream, which is quite different than direct access to our minds. If we had the latter, there'd be far less controversy about how minds work. So mind, as we imagine it, is might bear little correspondence to 'how it actually is'.
Speak for yourself. For the most part I don't confuse this when talking about the physical nature of the world. Even saying 'the world' is a naive assumption based on direct experience.
There are limits to what I know about this actual nature of things, and so inevitably assumptions from the map will fair to be recognized as such, and the model will be incomplete.
OK, but I experience an imagined map, and imagined things are processes of the territory of an implementation (physical or not) of the mechanism responsible for such processes.
That it is, and I didn't suggest otherwise.
Idealism is always an option, yes, but them not being distinct seems to lead to informational contradictions.
And I must ask again, where is this all leading in terms of the thread topic?
Let's take the weaker definition. Honestly, I don't think that anything changes in what I said.
Quoting noAxioms
Partial intelligibility is still intelligibility. For instance, the reason why I don't believe that the Earth is only 100 years old is because a different age of the Earth better supports all evidence we have. This doesn't necessarily mean that absolutely everything about the Earth is intelligible but if I had not some faith in the ability of reason to understand what is the most likely explanation of the evidence I have I could not even undertake a scientific investigation.
So, yeah I would say that intelligibility is certainly required to do science. And I doubt that there are physicalists that would seriously entertain the idea that science give us no real understading about physical reality.
Quoting noAxioms
Of course people can be certain without a sufficient basis for being certain. A serious philosophical investigation should, however, give a higher awareness about the quality of the basis for one's beliefs.
I hold beliefs that I admit are not 'proven beyond reasonable doubts'. There is nothing particularly wrong about having those beliefs if one is also sincere about the status of their foundation.
Quoting noAxioms
Good point. But in the case you mention one can object the baby is still conceived by humans who are intentional beings.
An even more interesting point IMO would be abiogenesis. It is now accepted that life - and hence intentionality - 'came into being' from a lifeless state. So this would certainly suggest that intentionality can 'emerge from' something non-intentional.
However, from what we currently know about the properties of what is 'lifeless', intentionality and other features do not seem to be explainable in terms of those properties. So what? Perhaps what we currently know about the 'lifeless' is incomplete.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, I know. However, unless a convincing objection can be made to the argument, the argument is still defensible.
Quoting noAxioms
Note that we can also do that with awareness.
As a curiosity, what do you think about the Chinese room argument? I still haven't find convincing evidence that machines can do something that can't be explained in terms like that, i.e. that machines seem to have understanding of what they are doing without really understand it.
Quoting noAxioms
Interesting. But how they 'learn'? Is that process of learning describable by algorithms? Are they programmed to learn the way they do?
Quoting noAxioms
This IMO assumes more than just 'physicalism'. You also assume that all natural process are algorithmic.
Aren't I? What type of map is the third person one? How does one go from a first person view to a third person view? Do we ever get out of our first-person view?
Quoting noAxioms
How is talk about first and third person views related to talk about direct and indirect realism? If one is a false dichotomy, would that make the other one as well?
What if we defined the third person view as a simulated first person view?
For instance, the complex structure of a snowflake is an emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. There are multiple definitions of strong vs weak emergence, but one along your lines suggests that intelligibility plays a distinguishing role. One could not have predicted snowflakes despite knowing the properties of atoms and water molecules, but having never seen snow. By one intelligibility definition, that's strong emergence. By another such definition (it's strong only if we continue to not understand it), it becomes weak emergence. If one uses a definition of strong emergence meaning that the snowflake property cannot even in principle be explained by physical interactions alone, then something else (said magic) is required, and only then is it strongly emergent.
Worse, I hold beliefs that I know are wrong. It's contradictory, I know, but it's also true.
Being an intentional entity by no means implies that the event was intended.
That's at best emergence over time, a totally different definition of emergence. Planet X didn't exist, but it emerged over time out of a cloud of dust. But the (strong/weak) emergence we're talking about is a planet made of of atoms, none of which are planets.
I suggest that they've simply not been explained yet to your satisfaction, but there's no reason that they cannot in principle ever be explained in such terms.
What do you mean by this? Of what are we aware that a machine cannot be? It's not like I'm aware of my data structures or aware of connections forming or fading away. I am simply presented with the results of such subconscious activity.
A Chinese room is a computer with a person acting as a CPU. A CPU has no understanding of what it's doing. It just does it's job, a total automaton.
The experiment was proposed well before LLMs, but it operates much like an LLM, with the CPU of the LLM (presuming there's only one) acting as the person. I could not get a clear enough description of the thought experiment to figure out how it works. There's apparently at least 4 lists of symbols and rules for correlations, but I could not figure out what each list was for. The third was apparently queries put to the room by outside Chinese speakers.
It's not like any of my neurons understands what it's doing. Undertanding is an emergent property of the system operating, not a property of any of its parts. The guy in the Chinese room does not understand Chinese, nor does any of his lists. I suppose an argument can be made that the instructions (in English) have such understanding, but that's like saying a book understands its own contents, so I think that argument is easily shot down.
Same way you do: Practice. Look at millions of images with known positive/negative status. After doing that a while, it leans what to look for despite the lack of explanation of what exactly matters.
I think so, similar to us. Either that or they program it to learn how to learn, or some such indirection like that.
OK. Can you name a physical process that isn't? Not one that you don't know how works, but one that you do know, and it's not algorithmic.
Quoting Harry HinduOne does not go from one to the other. One holds a first person view while interacting with a third person view.
Anesthesia?
Haven't really figured that out, despite your seeming to drive at it. First/Third person can both be held at once. They're not the same thing, so I don't see it as a false dichotomy.
Direct/indirect realism seem to be opposed to each other (so a true dichotomy?), and both opposed of course to not-realism (not to be confused with anti-realism which seems to posit mind being fundamental.
I see no such connection between them that any such assignment of one would apply to the other.
Can you provide an actual example of this?
Quoting noAxioms
An example of first/third person held at once would be useful as well.
Quoting noAxioms
Sure, but that would also get us out of the third person view, so I haven't seen you make a meaningful distinction between them (doesn't mean you haven't - just that I haven't seen it).
Quoting noAxioms
It appears to be a false dichotomy because we appear to have direct access to our own minds and indirect access to the rest of the world, so both are the case and it merely depends on what it is we are talking about. I wonder if the same is true of the first/third person dichotomy.
In discussing first and third person views and direct and indirect realism, aren't we referring to our view on views? Are we a camera pointing back at itself creating an infinite feedback loop when discussing these things?
What role does the observer effect in QM play in this conversation?
I honestly find the whole distinction between 'strong' and 'weak' emergence very unclear and tends to muddle the waters. When we say that the form of a snowflake emerges from the properties of the lower levels, we have in mind at least a possible explanation of the former in terms of the latter.
If 'strong emergence' means that such an explanations isn't possible then I do not think we can even speak of 'emergence'.
So, yeah, I believe that emergence must be intelligible.
Quoting noAxioms
I think I know what you mean and I agree.
Quoting noAxioms
I get that but the baby is still conceived by humans. You already have a sperm cell and an egg cell that are produced by beings who at least have the capacity of intentionality.
An explanation of 'emergence' of what has intentionality from what doesn't have intentionality IMO requires that among the causes of the emergence there isn't an entity that has at least the potentiality to be intentional.
This clearly mirrors the question to explain how 'life' arises from 'non-life'.
Quoting noAxioms
They are nevertheless quite similar as concepts. We are trying to explain how a given arrangement of 'physical things' can explain the 'arising' of mind/consciousness/intentionality etc
In the case of a planet we can give an account of how a planet 'emerges' from its constituents. In the case of mind/consciousness/intentionality things are not so clear...
Quoting noAxioms
Perhaps. And perhaps, we do not understand the 'lifeless' as we think we do.
Quoting noAxioms
But we experience a degree of control on our subconscious activities. We do not experience ourselves as mere spectators of unconscious activities. We experience ourselves as active players.
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
That's what I meant, however. The guy in the Chinese room could be replaced by an automatic process. However, if the guy knew Chinese and could understand the words he would do something that not even the LLMs could do.
And I'm not sure that this 'additional feature' can be explained by 'emergence'.
Quoting noAxioms
Unfortunately I have not studied in a satisfying manner how these machines work. But I would guess that their 'learning' is entirely algorithmic, most likely it is based on something like updating prior probabilities, i.e. the machine is presented by some data, it automatically compares predictions to outcomes and then 'adjusts' the priors for future tests.
I don't think we do this. Actually, I think that our subconscious activities work just like that (e.g. as, say, it is suggested by the Bayesian models of perception) but this is not how we experience our conscious activities.
It's difficult to make a machine analogy of what I am thinking about, in part because there are no machines to my knowledge that seem to operate the way we (consciously) do.
Quoting noAxioms
Perhaps we will have to agree to disagree here. To me conscious actions of sentient beings have a non-algorithmic components. Yet, physical and chemical processes seem to be algorithmic in character. How the former are possible in a world that seem to be dominated by the latter, I don't know.
Having an explanation is an epistemic claim. Apparently things are emergent either way, but no conclusion can be reached from "I don't know". If there's an ontic gap ("it cannot be"), that's another story, regardless of whether or not anything knows that it cannot be.
Suppose I have a radio, but little idea of tech. It has components, say a variable coil, resistors, transistors, diodes, battery, etc and I know what each of these does. None of those components have music, but when put together, music comes out. That's emergence. Is it strong emergence? You don't know how it works, so you are seemingly in no position to discount the parts producing music on their own. But a more knowledgeable explanation shows that it is getting the music from the air (something not-radio), not from itself. So the music playing is then a strong (not weak) emergent property of the radio. That's how I've been using the term.
Your explanation (as I hear it) sounds more like "I don't know how it works, so it must be strongly emergent (epistemic definition)". Correct conclusion, but very weak on the validity of the logic.
Are you saying that atoms have intentionality, or alternatively, that a human is more than just a collection of atoms? Because that's what emergence (either kind) means: A property of the whole that is not a property of any of the parts. It has nothing to do with where it came from.or how it got there.
Life arising from not-life seems like abiogenesis. Life being composed of non-living parts is emergence. So I don't particularly agree with using 'arise; like that.
Can you? Not an explanation of how the atoms came together (how it got there), but an explanation of planetness from non-planet components. It sounds simple, but sort of degenerates into Sorites paradox. Any explanation of this emergence needs to resolve that paradox, and doing that goes a long way towards resolving the whole consciousness thingy.
Quoting boundlessSo does any machine. The parts that implement 'intent' have control over the parts that implement the background processes that implement that intent, sort of like our consciousness not having to deal with individual motor control to walk from here to there. I looking for a fundamental difference from the machine that isn't just 'life', which I admit is a big difference. You can turn a machine off and back on again. No can do with (most) life.
He IS an automated process. Same with parts of a person: What (small, understandable) part of you cannot be replaced by an automated substitute?
Well, I agree with that since an LLM is barely an AI, just a search engine with a pimped out user interface. I don't hold people up to that low standard.
I'm sure. It cannot be expected that everything does it the same way.
I watched my brother's dog diagnose his appendicitis. Pretty impressive, especially given a lack of training in such areas.
Quoting Harry HinduI could be reading a pamphlet about how anesthesia works. The experience of the pamphlet is first person. The information I receive from it (simultaneously) is a third person interaction.
Not so since my reading the pamphlet gave me the third person description of that event. Of course that was not simultaneous with my being under, but it doesn't need to be.
I would disagree since I don't think we have direct access to our own 'minds' (mental processes?). Without a third person interpretation, we wouldn't even know where it goes on ,and we certainly don't know what it is in itself or how it works, or even if it is an 'it' at all.
Like everything else, we all have different naive models about what mind is and what it does, and those models (maps) are not the territory. It's not direct access.
Quoting Harry HinduThose two cases leverage two different definitions ('perspective' vs. 'belief system') of the word 'views', so the question makes no sense with the one word covering both cases.
So I don't have one belief system on what the word 'views' might mean from one context to the next.
Observer is a classical thing, and QM is not about classical things, even if classical tools are useful in experimentation. Quantum theory gives no special role to conscious 'observation'. Every experiment can be (and typically is) run just as well with completely automated mechanical devices.
(I've been away so pardon this belated response.)
There are many deep philosophical questions that are raised by this apparently simple rhetorical question. First and foremost, any biological entity - and not just rational, sentient beings such as ourselves - maintains a distinction between itself and the environment. it defines itself, if you like, in terms of the distinction between itself and the environment, even if non-consciously.
That can be observed even in single-celled creatures which are enclosed by a membrane, which differentiates them from their environment. And all of the factors that impinge on such an organism, be they energetic, such as heat or cold, or chemical, such as nutrients or poisons - how are they not something other to or outside the organism? At every moment, therefore, they're 'experiencing something besides themselves, namely, the environment from which they are differentiated.
So the question isn't 'how could a thing experience anything besides itself?' but rather: how could an organism NOT experience something besides itself? Any living system that experienced only itself, with no responsiveness to environmental factors, would immediately die, or rather, it would be completely indistinguishable from whatever environmental context it was in, which adds up to the same thing. Life itself, at least in the form of an embodied organism, depends on experiencing 'the other'.
The real mystery isn't that we experience something beyond ourselves—that is essential to being a living organism. The actual question is how this relational, responsive engagement with the environment becomes conscious experience, how it acquires the subjective, phenomenal character of 'what it is like to be'.
Quoting noAxioms
The question here is what physical systems are subjects of experience? A motor vehicle, for example, has many instruments which monitor its internal processes - engine temperature, oil levels, fuel, and so on - but you're not going to say that the car experiences overheating or experiences a fuel shortage. Such dials and monitors can be said to be analogous for 'awareness', but surely you're not going to say that the vehicle is aware, are you? There is 'nothing it is like' to be a car, because a car is a device, an artifact - not a being, like a man, or a bat.
Welcome back. I agree with the quoted statement. But those of us who do hold out for an ontological difference between a device and a living thing should be careful about two points:
1. "What it's like" defies precise definition, relying on a (very common, I'd say) intuition conjured up by the phrase. Does this work in other languages? How might the intuition be expressed in, say, Japanese?
2. To you, to me, the difference under discussion is obvious. But it isn't obvious to everyone. The fact that I believe something to be obvious doesn't let me off the hook of trying to explain it, if someone questions it in good faith. Explaining the obvious is a quintessentially philosophical task! Both of us should welcome questions like, "But why can't a device have experiences?"
Doesn't the experience of the pamphlet include the information received from it? It seems to me that you have to already have stored information to interpret the experience - that you are reading a pamphlet, what it is about, why you find any interest in the topic at all, and the information on the pamphlet that either promotes your current goal or inhibits it.
Quoting noAxioms
In other words, the third person is really just a simulated first person view. Is the third person really a view from nowhere (and what does that really mean) or a view from everywhere (a simulated first person view from everywhere)?
Quoting noAxioms
If you don't like the term "mind" that we have direct access to then fine, but we have direct access to something, which is simply what it means to be that process. We have to have direct access to something, or else you can't say you have indirect access to other things - that is the root of the false dichotomy.
Quoting noAxioms
Exactly my point. Your belief (view) of what a word means will depend on other views you have. Belief and view can be synonyms. Both words are used to describe a judgment or opinion that one holds as true.
Quoting noAxioms
Aren't automated and mechanical devices classical things, too? Don't automated and mechanical measuring devices change what is being measured at the quantum level?
I don't think there can be anything it's like to be any organism, to be anything, [I]for[/I] that thing, if it does not have certain mental abilities. Abilities that a car lacks.
Thank you! I agree, the ‘what it is like to be…’ expression is really not very good. I think what Chalmer’s is really trying to speak of is, simply, being. Subjects of experience are beings, which are distinguishable from objects. That is at the heart of the issue. The question of the nature of being is the subject of Heidegger’s entire project (and phenomenology generally. Consider Sartre’s in-itself and for-itself). It could be argued that it is the central question of philosophy.
As to whether I can, or should, explain what that means. I can’t prove to you that there’s something it’s like to be you. But I can ask: when you stub your toe, is there pain? Not just nociceptive signals and withdrawal reflexes—but pain, felt, experienced, awful? Even if I have minutely detailed knowledge of anatomy and physiology, that will neither embody nor convey the felt experience of pain. It will only describe it, but the description is not the described.
Besides, you know you’re a being because you are one. You experience yourself ‘from the inside’ as it were, in the apodictic knowledge of one’s own existence that characterises all first-person consciousness. I can point to features that correlate with being (self-maintenance, privileged access, intentionality, capacity for suffering), but, like the pain example, none of these constitute the experience of being, as such. In fact the frustrating element of this whole debate, is that we can only speak meaningfully of being because we are beings - but ‘being’ as such is not an object of experience, so is never captured by a third-person description. That is the ‘problem of consciousness’ in nutshell.
It sure could. If I had to paraphrase "what is it like to . . ." I might go for "what is the experience of . . .", and as you point out, such a formulation requires the concept of experience to get off the ground. (I'm not sure I agree that "being as such is not an object of experience," but the very fact that it's possible to have two reasonable positions on this only highlights the centrality of the issue.)
Quoting Wayfarer
No, probably not. But that's not what my hypothetical questioner is asking. They want to know, "Why couldn't it be the case that everything you describe as pertaining to yourself, and other living beings, also pertains to devices, AIs, et al.? Why is it obvious that they're different?" We could extend the question to all objects if we wanted, but that's arcane; the question comes up relevantly in the context of our new world of ostensibly intelligent or even conscious entities, which are causing a lot of people to demand a re-think about all this. Philosophy can help.
That devices are not subjects of experience is axiomatic, in my opinion. Some distinctions are axiomatic in the sense that they’re more fundamental than any argument you could give for them. The reality of first-person experience, the difference between subjects and objects, the fact that there’s something it’s like to be you—these aren’t conclusions arrived at through inference. That’s what apodictic means. An instance of Rödl’s ‘truths that have no opposite’.
As for LLM’s, ask any of them whether they are subjects of experience and they will answer in the negative. You may choose to disregard it but then we’re pushing into conspiracy theory territory.
I would like this to be true, but I don't see how it is. One objection I would raise is simply, "If it's axiomatic, why are increasing numbers of not unintelligent people doubting it?" Maybe you mean something different by axiomatic, but for me it's a cognate for "obvious," and I would apply it to a postulate or process that's needed in order to do any thinking at all. In fairness, do you really believe that rationality breaks down in the face of the possibility that AI's may be, or will become, conscious subjects of experience? As for "truths that have no opposites," well, the opposite of "only living things are conscious" would be, quite coherently, "some non-living things are, or may be, conscious." You can make a good case for the axiomatic nature of, for instance, first-person experience, but again, that is not being questioned by my hypothetical proponent of "device consciousness."
Maybe this doesn't need repeating, but my own view is that it will turn out to be the case that only living things can be the subjects of experience. But I believe this is far from obvious or axiomatic.
Quoting Wayfarer
An interesting test! What would you conclude if one of them said, "Yes, I am"?
‘Forgetfulness of being’ seems symptomatic of the times.
Ok.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok but in the 'ontic' definition of strong emergence, when sufficient knowledge is aquired, it results in weak emergence. So the sound that is produced by the radio also necessitates the presence of the air. It is an emergent feature from the inner workings of the radio and the radio-air interaction.
(Regarding the music, I believe that to be understood ad 'music' you need also a receiver that is able to understand the sound as music)
Regarding your objection, yes I know and I have already said that I can't exclude with certainty an 'ontic' strong emergence. But it seems unlikely.
Quoting noAxioms
Emergence means that those 'properties of the wholes that are not properties of the parts' however can be explained in virtue of the properties of the parts. So, yeah, I am suggesting that either a 'physicalist' account of human beings is not enough or that we do not know enough about the 'physical' to explain the emergence of intentionality, consciousness etc. A possible alternative perhaps is saying that intentionality is 'latent' in 'fundamental physical objects'. If this is true, however, this would imply that intentionality, consciousness are not an accidental feature - something that 'just happened' to come into being, an 'unnatural' super-addition of the inanimate. So, perhaps, the inanimate/animate distinction is less definite than what it seems.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, I don't disagree with abiogenesis, of course. I just think that we do not have a complete understanding of 'not-life' and therefore the 'come into being' of the property 'life' seems difficult to explain in terms of what we know about 'not-life'. As I said before, this is perhaps because we do not have a complete understanding of what is 'not-life' - perhaps it is not so dissimilar to what is 'life'.
Quoting noAxioms
I believe that we are reaching a halting point in our discussion here. We know that all the operation of a (working) machine can be understood via the algorithms that have been programmed even when it 'controls' its processes. I just don't think there is sufficient evidence that this is the same for us.
Regarding when a machine 'dies'... well if you break it...
Quoting noAxioms
In that situation, I would say: his work is equivalent to an automated process in that situation. Regarding your question: I don't know. As I said before, it just seems that our experience of ourselves suggests that we are not mere automata.
Quoting noAxioms
Interesting and yes very impressive. Well also 'intuition' seems something that machines do not really have.
Standard interpretation-free QM is IMO simply silent about what a 'measurement' is. Anything more is interpretation-dependent.
I meant the types of experiences that @Wayfarer listed -- sensory awareness, memory, knowing you exist. But you're right to narrow the target. We currently care a lot about this question because of some specific recent developments in artificial intelligence. It's those devices about which I imagine these issues being raised. They may not "experience everything we do," but neither does a bee. The question is whether they can, or could, experience anything at all. My educated guess is that they can't -- they can't be subjects -- but it seems far from axiomatic to me.
@Wayfarer, I wish you would say more about what you see as the critical difference between a so-called artificial intelligence and a living being, and what implications this has for consciousness. I'm fairly sure I would agree with you, but it's good to lay the whole thing out in plain terms. Maybe that will make it obvious. "Forgetfulness of being" is all very well as a diagnosis, but the advocates for intelligent, soon-to-be-conscious AIs deserve something less dismissive. If for no other reason than this is becoming one of the central philosophical/scientific/ethical tipping points of our age.
The lower level may not possess the properties of the upper, but the properties of the lower can always be seen to account for the properties of the upper.
-The properties of electrons, protons, and neutrons explain how they combine to form atoms, and different kinds of atoms.
-The properties of atoms explain how the combine to form molecules.
-The properties of molecules explain how they combine, and the properties they have in groups.
No, no subatomic particle, atom, or molecule has the property of liquidity. But the properties of the subatomic properties are the explanation for the properties of the atoms, which are the explanation for the properties of the molecules, which are the explanation for the property of liquidity. In [I]The Demon in the Machines[/I], Paul Davies says:
The engineer and physicist don't need to know those lower level things. But those lower level things are responsible for the existence of the upper.
Skipping a lot of things and not getting into much detail, just to get the point across...
-The liquidity of H2O is due to the shape of the molecules and the hydrogen bonds that form between them, which are stronger than the bonds between various other molecules that are gases at the same temperatures.
-The shape of H2O molecules, that is, the 104.54° angle, is due to the spacing of the pairs of electrons. Oxygen's outer shell has six electrons. Two are individually paired with the electrons of the hydrogen atoms. The other four are in two pairs, called 'lone pairs'. The electron clouds of the lone pairs take up more room than the pairs shared between the O and H, which pushes the H atoms closer together than is seen in other molecules of this tetrahedral arrangement, which is usually 109.5°.
-The electrons are all negatively charged, so repel each other. They are able to pair up because they opposite spins.
Life is a much more complex example of emergence. Various physical processes - such as metabolism, respiration, and reproduction - are defining characteristics of life. None of those processes can be found in any subatomic particle, atom, or molecule. But we can go through the levels just the same. I'm not going to do even as much as I just did for water, because this is already far too long. But watch this video about the electron transport chain. It explains how electrons being transported from one thing to the next in the mitochondria leads to a proton gradient, and how the pent-up proteins, when released, power the synthesis of ATP. ATP is the power source of nearly everything involved in those physical processes that are the defining characteristics of life.
There is no emergence that does not break down in such ways. If consciousness is an emergent property, and physicalism is the explanation for its emergence, then it must break down in such ways. The first step would be to say exactly what consciousness is, as we can say what liquidity, metabolism, respiration, and whatever else are. Then we can take it down, level by level, as we can liquidity, metabolism, respiration, and whatever else
Consciousness is not physical processes like photons hitting retinas, rhodopsin changing shape, signal sent up the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus, signal processed, processed signal sent to the visual cortex, and a million other intervening steps. That is not the experience of seeing red.
Yes, that's the question we don't know how to answer: Would such a structure result in consciousness or subjectivity? Is that what it takes? Is that all it takes? My initial reaction would be to ask, "Is it alive?" If not, then I doubt it could be conscious, but I have no special insights here. Many years of thinking about this incline me to believe that consciousness will turn out to be biological -- but we don't know.
I’m pretty much on board with Bernardo Kastrup’s diagnosis. He says, computers can model all kinds of metabolic processes in exquisite detail, but the computer model of kidney function doesn’t pass urine. It is a simulation, a likeness.
Large Language Models are vast ensembles of texts manipulated by algorithms. I find them amazingly useful, I am constantly in dialogue with them about all kinds of questions, including but not limited to philosophy. But ‘they’ are not beings - like the kidney function, they’re simulations.
This is the subject of an OP and related blog post on the issue which link to a good Philosophy Now OP in the issue. [hide="Reveal"]From which:
[/hide]
The seduction of AI is that, unlike us, it is not mortal. It is a kind of idealised entity, not subject to the vicissitudes of existence - and part of us wants to be like that, because then we would not be subject to illness and death. But it’s also an illusion, because such systems are not alive, either. This is one of the major dangers of AI in my view, because it is far less obvious than the danger of them actually taking over the world.
This seems a straightforward refutation of the idea that a computer could be alive. The awkward difference, with AI, is that it doesn't just model or simulate rationality -- it (appears to) engage in it. Putting it differently, only an imbecile could get confused between a model of kidney function and a functioning kidney -- as you say, the telltale lack of urine. But what's the equivalent, when talking about what an AI can or cannot do?
I return to my idea that only living beings could be conscious. If that is ever demonstrated, and we accept Kastrup's argument as a refutation of alive-ness, then the case would be made. But as of now, it doesn't matter whether the AI is alive or not, since we haven't yet shown that being alive is needed for consciousness in the same way that being alive is needed for producing urine.
Quoting Wayfarer
Good insight. They're also dispassionate in a way that is impossible for all but Mr. Spock -- something many people idealize as well.
Appears to! I did hide the passage I had written, maybe I shouldn't have:
They appear to reason, but only in the sense meant by 'instrumental reason' - given premisses, then an outcome. What they don't have is a raison d'être - other than that which is imposed on them by their architects and users. Reason and meaning are both extrinsic to them.
So, why the relationship between life and consciousness? I think there is something like a consensus emerging about their inter-connectedness. I have started listening to Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a Google engineer, saying 'the emergence of life is in some sense the emergence of purpose'. And I think that in this context, 'purpose' and 'reason' are inextricably linked. The reason that can be abstracted from life - theoretical reason - is just that, an abstraction. Human intelligence can imagine and create such rational systems, due to its ability to abstract and speak. But underlying reason in that abstract sense, is logos, which is intrinsic to life.
Why do you think it must be alive? What aspects of life do you think are required for consciousness?
Although you have to give it credit for its articulateness.
Agreed. I believe that 'strong emergence' at least in the 'epistemic' sense can't be taken seriously. It basically is like saying: "under these conditions, somehow a property emerges...".
Quoting Patterner
I agree with everything you say here about liquidity. However, life and, above all, mind are a different thing. They seem to present features that have no relation with the properties we know of the 'inanimate'.
Quoting Patterner
Unfortunately, the link redirects to this page. I believe, however it is the same video that apokrisis shared some time ago. Yes, that's impressive, isn't it? A purely reductionist explanation to all that doesn't seem credible. So, the 'emergence' that caused all of this is something like a 'non-reductionist emergence' or something like that. However, the details of how the emergence of life happened are unclear and details matter.
Again, I don't deny abiogenesis but I do believe that we have yet to understand all the properties of the 'inanimate'. Perhaps, the hard difference we see between 'life' and 'not-life' will be mitigated as we progress in science.
Mind/Consciousness is even a more complicated case IMO. One is the reason you say in your post, i.e. phenomenological experience seems difficult to be explained in emergentist terms. And as I said before in this thread, I even believe that our mind can understand concepts that can't be considered 'natural' or 'physical'. The clearest example to me are mathematical truths even if I admit that I can't seem to provide compelling arguments for this ontology of math (as for myself, I did weight the pros and cons about the 'existence and eternity' of math and to be honest the pros seem to me more convincing).
Edit: now the link worked. It isn't the video that I had in mind, so I'll watch it.
[Url=https://youtu.be/UyTto4Aegss]Part 1[/url] is 29 minutes.
[Url=https://youtu.be/Z2F0Dt8e4eg]Part 2[/url] is 16.
I have no idea what video apokrisis posted. I just did a search. [Url=https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/67922]This post[/url] is about the same stuff, but there's no link to a video.
Quoting boundlessI don't mean this is how life emerged, as in abiogenesis. I mean life is various physical processes, such as metabolism, respiration, and reproduction, and we can understand these processes all the way down to things like electrons and redox reactions. There's nothing happening above that isn't explained below. There is no [I]vital force/élan vital[/I] needed to explain anything.
We cannot say the same about consciousness. Many say we should learn our lesson from the mistaken belief in the [I]vital force/élan vital[/I] in years gone by, and find similar answers to those we've found for life. And a whole bunch of very smart people are looking for such answers. But there is no hint of such answers. Because there is no physical definition or description oc consciousness. As I said, consciousness is not physical processes like photons hitting retinas, rhodopsin changing shape, signal sent up the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus, signal processed, processed signal sent to the visual cortex, and a million other intervening steps. No amount of added detail would be a description of the experience of seeing red.
-- @Wayfarer
This begs the question, doesn't it? Yes, if reason is (exclusively) an act of mind, then only minds can reason, but that's what we're inquiring into. You offer a definition, or conception, of what it is to reason, which demands "an inner sense of value or purpose"; things have to "really matter to them." God knows, there is no agreed-upon definition of reason or rationality, so you're entitled to do so, but we have to be careful not to endorse a concept that must validate what we think about aliveness and consciousness.
Quoting Wayfarer
For me, this is a crucial question, and I very much like your thoughts about it. Life is indeed purposive, and consciousness may be, in a sense we don't yet quite understand, an expression of that purposiveness. (This also connects with your idea of reason as purposive, but let's not confuse reason or rationality with consciousness; they needn't be the same.)
Quoting Patterner
And this connects to the discussion above. I'd endorse @Wayfarer's speculations, and add quite a few of my own, but it's a long story. Maybe a new thread, called something like "The Connection between Life and Consciousness - The Evidence So Far"? And yes, if panpsychism is valid, that would appear to contradict the "consciousness ? life" hypothesis.
Quoting Wayfarer
:lol: But there remains a serious question, which I raised when you previously quoted a modest AI: What would you conclude if the alleged entity said it was a subject of experience? The point is, you're applauding it now for its truthfulness, but would you change your mind about that if it said something you thought wasn't true?
It was a video that was posted some years ago about a computer simulation of metabolic processes of a cell (I vaguely remember that ATP was also present, that's why I thought the video was the same). It was a very well-made video that gives the idea of how complex are those processes. I hope I find it again.
I'll watch the video as soon as I can. Unfortunately, in the next few days I'll be somewhat busy, so I'll need some time.
Quoting Patterner
Ok, I see and I think I agree. But I also think that there is some rudimentary intentionality even in the simplest life forms (and perhaps even in viruses which are not considered living). So perhaps the issues of life and consciousness aren't separate.
I believe that perhaps the properties that characterize life are present in a latent form in what isn't life. Think about something like Aristotle's notion of potency and act.
Quoting Patterner
Agreed. To which, I also add the capacity of reason that I alluded to my reference to mathematics.
I think it would be a great thread, although our guesses about the connection between life and consciousness are very different.
.
Since nearly all life uses DNA, it's a reasonable assumption that LUCA had DNA. And LUCA would have been an extremely simple form of life. But there would still be great complexity, as there is in today's simplest, single-celled life. And it's all acting to keep itself alive.
I think if AI had to act to keep itself alive, it would be a good step. Something would matter to it, as might say.
Much to digest in the posts that resulted. I'm slow to reply to it all.
Quoting Wayfarer
This depends on how you frame things. I'd say that for something that 'experiences', it experiences its sensory stream, as opposed to you framing it as a sort of direct experience of its environment. It works either way, but definitions obviously differ. When I ask "'how could a thing experience anything besides itself?', I'm asking how it can have access to any sensory stream besides its own (which is what the first person PoV is). This by no means is constricted to biological entities.
But you're interpreting my question as "how can the entity not experience sensory input originating from its environment?", which I'm not asking at all since clearly the environment by definition affects said entity. The rest of your post seems to rest on this mistaken interpretation of my question.
I am going to say all that, but I don't use a zoocentric definition of 'experiences'.
There may or may not be something it is like to be a car, but if there's not, it isn't because it is an artifact. A rock isn't an artifact, and yet it's the presumed lack of 'something it is like to be a rock' violates the fallacious 'not an artifact' distinction.
As @J points out, some of us do not hold out for an ontological difference between a device and a living thing. Your conclusion rests on this opinion instead of resting on any kind of rational reasoning.
Quoting WayfarerThis leverages two different meanings of 'being'. The first is being (v), meaning vaguely 'to exist'. The latter is a being (n) which is a biological creature. If Chalmers means the latter, the you should say "simply, a being", which correctly articulates your zoocentric assumptions. Of course your Heidegger comment suggests you actually do mean the verb, in which case I don't know how the 'are beings' are in any way relevant since rocks 'are' just as much as people.
Quoting WayfarerWrong question. The correct question is, if a sufficiently complex car detects low oil, does it necessarily not feel its equivalent of pain, and if not, why not? Sure, I detect data indicating damage to my toe and my circuits respond appropriately. How I interpret that is analogous to the car interpreting its low oil data.
My conclusion of existence or lack thereof can be worked out similarly by any sufficiently capable artifact.
I do realize that you're actually trying to address the question of the topic here. I'm trying to find that fundamental difference that makes a problem 'hard', and thus gives that ontic distinction that J mentioned. But your argument seems to just revolve around 'is sufficiently like me that I can relate' and not anything fundamental, which is why Nagel mentions bats but shies away from flowers, bacteria, sponges, etc. We're evolved from almost all that, and if none of these qualify, then something fundamental changed at some point along the way. Nobody ever addresses how this physical being suddenly gains access to something new, and why a different physical arrangement of material cannot.
Quoting J
Quoting Wayfarer
'Axiomatic' typically suggests obvious. Obvious suggests intuitive, and intuitions are typically lies that make one more fit. So in a quest for what's actually going on, intuitions, and with it most 'obvious' stuff, are the first things to question and discard.
For the record, I don't find the usual assertions to be obvious at all, to the point of negligible probability along with any given particular God, et al.
Quoting Patterner
Except for the dropping of 'fundamental' in there, it sounds more like a definition (of mental state) than any kind of assertion. The use of 'organism' in there is an overt indication of biocentric bias.
Quoting PatternerBut abilities that it necessarily lacks? I suggest it has mental abilities now, except for the 'proof by dictionary' fallacy that I identified in my OP: the word 'mental' is reserved for how it is typically used in human language, therefore the car cannot experience its environment by definition. Solution to that reasoning is to simply use a different word for the car doing the exact same thing.
Quoting Harry HinduI already know how to read, but I didn't read the pamphlet to learn how to read (that's what the Bible is for). Rather I read it to promote my goal of gathering new information I don't already have stored.
No, not at all. If a third person conveyance did that, I could know what it's like to be a bat. Not even a VR setup (a simulation of experience) can do that.
Not always. I can describe how the dogwood blocks my view of the street from my window. That's not 'from nowhere'.
I don't like the word at all since it carries connotations of a separate object, and all the baggage that comes with that.
Don't accept that this direct access is what it means to be something. The direct access is to perhaps the map (model) that we create. which is by definition an indirection to something else, so to me it's unclear if there's direct access to anything. You argue that access to the map can be direct. I'm fine with that.
As for your definition, does a flame have direct access to its process of combustion? Arguably so even if it's not 'experience', but I don't think that's what it means to 'be a flame'. What does it mean to be a rock? Probably not that the rock has any direct access to some sort of rock process.
Sure.
All systems interact. Avoiding that is possible, but really really difficult.
I disagree with your phrasing of 'change what is being measured at the quantum level' since it implies that there's a difference with some other state it otherwise would have been. 'Change' implies a comparison of non-identical things, and at the quantum level, there's only what is measured, not some other thing.
Classically, sure. Sticking a meat thermometer into the hot turkey cools the turkey a bit,.
Quoting boundlessOK. I called it strong emergence since it isn't the property of the radio components alone. More is needed. Equivalently, substance dualism treats the brain as sort of a receiver tuned to amplify something not-brain. It's a harder sell with property dualism.
That's what a radio is: a receiver. It probably has no understanding of sound or what it is doing.
Quoting boundless
I would suggest that we actually do know enough to explain any of that, but still not a full explanation, and the goalposts necessarily get moved. Problem is, any time an explanation is put out there, it no longer qualifies as an explanation. A car does what it's programmed to do (which is intentionally choose when to change lanes say), but since one might know exactly how it does that, it ceases to be intentionality and becomes just it following machine instructions. Similarly, one could have a full account of how human circuitry makes us do everything we do, and that explanation would (to somebody who needs it to be magic) disqualify the explanation as that of intentionality, it being just the parts doing their things.
Not true. There are plenty of machines whose functioning is not at all understood. That I think is the distinction between real AI and just complex code. Admittedly, a self driving car is probably mostly complex code with little AI to it. It's a good example of consciousness (unconscious things cannot drive safely), but it's a crappy example of intelligence or creativity.
You can fix a broken machine. You can't fix a dead cat (yet). Doing so is incredibly difficult, even with the simplest beings.
Interestingly, a human maintains memory for about 3 minutes without energy input (refresh). A computer memory location lasts about 4 milliseconds and would be lost if not read and written back before then. Disk memory is far less volatile of course.
Quoting boundlessIt suggests nothing of the sort to me, but automata is anything but 'mere' to me.
I think they do, perhaps more than us,. which is why they make such nice slaves.
Quoting boundless
Quantum theory defines measurement as the application of a mathematical operator to a quantum state, yielding probabilistic outcomes governed by the Born rule. Best I could do.
Quoting PatternerI tried to give an example of it with the radio. Equivalently, consciousness, if a non-physical property, would be akin to radio signals being broadcast, allowing components to generate music despite no assemblage of those components being able to do so on their own.
First of all, you did say you don’t know how any creature could experience anything other than itself, which I interpreted at face value. That was what I responded to. If that is not what you meant to say, perhaps pay better attention to your mode of expression.
We say of intelligent creatures such as humans and perhaps the higher animals that they are ‘beings’ but we generally don’t apply that terminology to nonorganic entities, which are described as existents or things (hence also the distinction in language between ‘you’ and ‘it’.) But the ontological distinction between beings of any kind, and nonorganic objects, is that the former are distinguished by an active metabolism which seeks to preserve itself and to reproduce. There is nothing analogous to be found in nonorganic matter.
Quoting noAxioms
But I am doing just that, and have also done it before. I’ve had many an argument on this forum about what I’ve described as the ‘ontological distinction’ I’ve made above.
To recap - the distinction between any organism and a nonorganic object (leaving aside the marginal example of viruses) is that the former maintain homeostasis, exchange nutrients with the environment, grow, heal, reproduce and are able to evolve. They are autopoietic in Varela and Maturana’s terms -‘systems whose components continuously produce and regenerate the network of processes that constitutes its own organization and identity.’ They are organised according to internal principles. Manufactured items such as devices are allopoietic - their organisation is imposed by an external agent, the manufacturer.
So that asserts a basic ontological distinction between organic and inorganic. Going back to Aristotle, there were further divisions - vegetative, animal, and human, each with the properties of the lesser stages, but also having attributes which the lower levels lacked. For example, animals are self-moving in a way that plants are not, and humans display linguistic and rational abilities that animals do not. Those too are ontological distinction although not so widely recognised as they used to be.
So animals ‘have access to’ ways of being that plants do not, and humans ‘have access to’ ways of being that animals do not. To try and collapse all of those distinctions to some purported lowest common denominator is reductionism. Reductionism works well in some contexts, but is inapplicable in others.
As for the hard problem, it has a clear genealogy, although again many will take issue with it:
So the problem in a nutshell arises from trying to apply the third-person methods of science to the first—person quality of lived experience.
Quoting noAxioms
As Nagel says, this explanation, ‘however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience—how it is from the point of view of its subject.’ The physical sciences are defined by excluding subjective experience from their domain. You cannot then use those same sciences to explain what they were designed to exclude. This isn’t a failure of neuroscience—it’s a recognition of the scope of third-person, objective description. The first-person, subjective dimension isn’t missing information that more neuroscience will fill in; it’s in a different category.
Yeah, that was my point - you already knew how to read - which means you already have stored information to interpret the experience.
Quoting noAxioms
But you can only know what it is like to be a bat from within your first-person experience. It's no different than seeing your Desktop screen on your computer and starting up a virtual machine that shows another Desktop within the framework of your existing Desktop.
Quoting noAxioms
Right. So we agree that it's a view from everywhere or somewhere. A view from nowhere doesn't make sense. You can only emulate a view from everywhere from a view from somewhere, or as an accumulation of views from somewhere, like we do when we use each other's views to triangulate the truth.
Quoting noAxioms
You've lost me now. It sounds like its not really the word you don't like, but the definition. You can define "mind" however you want. But if you don't like the since it carries connotations of a separate object, you could say that for any object, like your dogwood tree, street and window, but you didn't seem have any quarrels in using those terms that carry the connotations of a separate object.
Quoting noAxioms
If direct access is not what it means to be something, then you are creating a Cartesian theatre - as if there is a homunculus separate from the map, but with direct access - meaning it sees the map as it truly is, instead of being the map as it truly is.
Quoting noAxioms
Flame and rocks are not anywhere near as complex of a process as the mind. I'm sure you are aware of this. Isn't combustion and flame the same thing - the same process - just using different terms?
You're making my argument for me. If the rock doesn't have any direct access to the rock process, then it logically follows that there is no access - just being. And if there is no direct access then there can be no indirect access (in other words, as I said before - direct vs indirect realism is a false dichotomy)
Quoting noAxioms
According to the standard (“Copenhagen”) interpretation, something does change — namely, the system’s state description goes from a superposition to an eigenstate corresponding to the measured value. This is often described as wave function collapse. Measurement doesn’t change a definite pre-existing state, but it does change the system’s quantum state description — from a superposition of possibilities to a single outcome.
I did indeed point that out, and I think it's important to understand why. I hope I also made it clear that I am not one of "non-difference" group. I find myself being the devil's advocate in this discussion, largely because I don't think we'll get anywhere if we don't thoroughly understand why the ontological difference is not obvious or axiomatic or whatever other bedrock term we care to use. As philosophers, we're watching something exciting unfold in real time: a genuinely new development of a consequential question that the general public is interested in, and that we can help with. That said, I'll say again that when we eventually learn the answer about consciousness (and I think we will), we'll learn that you can't have consciousness without life. But that conclusion is a long way off.
Quoting JOf course, I'm going to disagree regarding consciousness, because I think it's fundamental. However, we probably think we need the same features, whether the answer is panpaychism, physicalism, or whatever (not sure what your theory is). I'm just wondering if there is reason to believe biological life is the only thing that can provide those features.
Foremost, I do not think the qualities we are after can be developed in a vacuum. I've posted this quote of David Eagleman before. From Annaka Harris' audiobook [I]Lights On[/I], starting at 25:34 of Chapter 5 The Self:Do things and get consistent results, and meaning grows.
Having other entities of the same kind to observe and interact with is probably necessary. Reinventing the wheel takes too long. And, at least in our case, even if we were kept alive as infants, we would never learn without others. I think our brains wire themselves in response to interactions, among other things.
Biological life is not the only thing that can manipulate the environment. Robots can. But can they learn meaning from doing so? AlphaGo learned, didn't it? Not the kind of things I'm talking about. But is there a reason we can't program something that can? we do some pretty amazing things, but I don't know if we could program something that wires itself in response to its experiences.
I still don't think that's enough to get an entity like us. I think there needs to be a lot more information processing systems and feedback loops. We are just so full of such things they can't be counted. And they're all working together for this brain and body. Still, in principle, is it impossible?
Quoting WayfarerAgree that the noun form is mostly used that way, but you were leveraging the verb form of the word, not the noun. The verb form applies to rocks just as much as spiders, possibly excepting idealism, which I'm not assuming.
Those are not ontological distinctions. It's just a list of typical properties found mostly in life forms, the majority of which are not usually referred to as 'beings'. I can make a similar list distinguishing metallic elements from the others, but pointing this out doesn't imply a fundamental difference between one arrangement of protons and neutrons vs another. It's just the same matter components arranged in different ways. Ditto for people vs rocks. Different, but not a demonstrably fundamental difference.
And the topic is about first person experience. Are you suggesting that all organic material (a living sponge say. Does that qualify as a 'being'?) has first person experience? If not, then it's not about homeostasis or being organic. We're looking for a fundamental difference in experience, not a list of properties typical of organic material.
No you're not. You're evading. Answer the questions about the say a Urbilaterian (a brainless ancestor of you, and also a starfish). Is it a being? Does it experience and have intent? If not, what's missing? If it does, then how is its interaction with its environment fundamentally any different from say a roomba?
I'm trying to play 20 questions with you, but I'm still stuck on question 1.
Quoting WayfarerI know the recap, and it answers a very different question. It is a nice list of properties distinguishing earth biological beings from not. There's nothing on the list that is necessarily immaterial, no ontological distinction. You opinion may differ on that point, but it's just opinion. Answer the question above about the brainless being, because I'm not looking for a definition of a life form.
Quoting JThat was clear, yes. Keep in mind that my topic question, while framed as a first-person issue, is actually not why you're in that 'difference' group, but why the non-difference group is necessarily wrong.
I think we never will. There will always be those that wave away any explanation as correlation, not causation.
Which requires a more rigourous definition of consciousness I imagine.
Quoting WayfarerWe seem to have a vastly different notion of what constitutes an ontological distinction. It seems you might find a stop sign ontologically distinct from a speed limit sign since they have different properties.
As for the 17th century treatment of " secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell", those were in short order explained as physical properties (wavelength, air vibration, and airborne particles respectively, sensed just as much as shape and motion. Science took the hint, but many philosophers just moved the goal posts. Sure, all of those, including shape and motion, appear to us as first person qualia. I do agree (in the OP) that no third person description can describe the first person experience. I do not agree that this first person perspective is confined to a subset of biological things. Does a robot feel human pain? No, but neither does an octopus. Each experiencing thing having it's own 'what it's like to be' does not require any special treatment.
Quoting WayfarerAbsolutely! I never contested that. It's why you cannot know what it's like to be a bat. Not even a computer doing a perfect simulation of a bat would know this. The simulated bat would know, but the simulated bat is not the program nor is it the computer.
I disagree with this. Neurologists require access to that, which is why brain surgery is often done on conscious patients, with just local anesthesia to the scalp. Of course they only have access to experiences as reported in third person by the subject, so in that sense, I agree.
I actually had that done to me (no brain surgery, just the shot). I collided with tree branch, driving a significant chunk of wood under my scalp. They had to inject lidocaine before cutting it out. That makes me a certified numbskull.
Quoting Harry HinduOK. I never said otherwise. I was simply providing the requested example of first/third person being held at once.
Don't understand this at all. I cannot know what it's like to be a bat. period. A flight simulator doesn't do it. That just shows what it's like for a human (still being a human) to have a flying-around point of view.
It's that people tend to insert their own definition of 'mind' when I use the word, and not use how I define it, despite being explicit about the definition.
Quoting Harry HinduLots to take apart here. I don't think we know anything as it is in itself, including any maps we create.
As for the homonculus, humans do seem to have a very developed one, which is a sort of consciousness separate from the subconscious (the map maker, and source of intuitions). The subconscious is older (evolutionary time) and is waaay more efficient, and does most of the work and decision making. It is in charge since it holds all the controls. It might hold different beliefs than the homonculus, the latter of which is a more rational tool, used more often to rationalize than to be rational.
But yes, we have this sort of theatre, a view of the map. I don't consider it direct access since I don't see the map as it is in itself, but you might consider it direct since the connection to it is just one interface away, and there's not another homonculus looking at the experience of the first one (a common criticism of the Cartesian theatre idea).
The description I give is still fully physical, just different parts (science has names for the parts) stacked on top of each other. 'Homonculus' is not what it's called. Those are philosophy terms.
Quoting Harry HinduYes, what we know about a system changes. That's wave function collapse, where the wave function is a description of what we know about a system. Hence I grant 'change upon measurement' to any collapse interpretation.
Quoting Patterner
We both disagree, but for such wildly different reasons :)
Yes. And I'm in no position to claim that any view on consciousness is necessarily right or wrong. We're dealing with educated guesses, at best.
Quoting noAxioms
Hmm. I suppose so, but that wouldn't mean we hadn't learned the explanation. :smile:
Quoting noAxioms
Absolutely. If a biological explanation turns out to be the correct one, I imagine it will also show that most of our rough-and-ready conceptions about subjectivity and consciousness are far too impoverished. It would be like analyzing 18th century views on "time" and comparing them to relativity theory.
Galileo's point, which was foundational in modern science, was that the measurable attributes of bodies - mass, velocity, extension and so on - are primary, while how bodies appear to observers - their colour, scent, and so on - are secondary (and by implication derivative). That is the sense in which the physical sciences 'excluded subjective experience', and it's not a matter of opinion.
As to why neuroscientists converse with subjects, in fact there's a textbook case of these kinds of practices which lends very strong support to some form of dualism. I'm speaking of the Canadian neuroscientist Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), who operated on many conscious patients during his very long career. He reported that his operations often elicited or stimulated vivid memories of previous experiences or could induce movements of various kinds. But he also reported that subjects could invariably distinguish between effects or memories that were elicited by him, and those which they themselves initiated. He concluded from this that the mind and the brain are not identical. While electrical stimulation of the cortex could evoke experiences, sensations, or involuntary actions, it could never make the patient will to act or decide to recall something. Penfield saw a clear distinction between neural activity that produced experiences and the conscious agency that could observe, interpret, and choose among them. In his later work (The Mystery of the Mind, 1975), he wrote that “the mind stands apart from the brain but acts upon it,” proposing that consciousness is not reducible to cerebral processes alone.
As these operations showed, direct cortical stimulation could evoke experiences, movements, and memories, but never the act of will itself. Patients could always distinguish between something they themselves initiated and something induced by the surgeon. Penfield concluded that the conscious agent — the mind — cannot be identified with neural circuitry alone.
So the “third-person substrate” may be describable, but that doesn’t make it understandable in the relevant sense. Understanding would mean grasping how physical interactions, which by definition exclude subjectivity (per the above), could constitute subjective awareness itself. And that’s not an empirical gap that can be closed with more data or better simulations; it’s a conceptual distinction. A fully simulated brain might behave exactly like a conscious person, but whether there’s 'anything it’s like' to be that simulation is the very point at issue.
In short, you’re arguing from within the third-person framework while intending to account for what only appears from within the first-person perspective. The result isn’t an explanation but a translation — a substitution of the language of mechanism for the reality of experience. That’s the “illusion of reduction” you yourself noticed when you said commentators “appropriate first-person words to refer to third-person phenomena.”
When you treat the first-person point of view as something that emerges from a “third-person-understandable substrate,” you are collapsing the distinction Chalmers and Nagel are pointing out. By assuming the substrate is “understandable” in third-person terms, you've already presupposed that subjectivity can be accounted for within an objective framework. So you're not addressing the issue, but explaining it away.
I’m not using “ontological” here to mean merely “a set of observable traits.” I’m using it in its proper philosophical sense — a distinction in the mode of being. A rock and an amoeba both exist, but not in the same way. The amoeba has a self-organising, self-maintaining unity: it acts to preserve itself and reproduce. This isn’t a mere property added to matter, but a different kind of organization — what Aristotle called entelechy and what modern systems theorists call autopoiesis.
That distinction is categorical, not merely quantitative. Life introduces an interiority — however minimal — that inanimate matter does not possess. It’s what allows later forms of experience, cognition, and consciousness to emerge. So the “list of attributes” such as homeostasis or metabolism are not arbitrary descriptors, but outward manifestations of this deeper ontological difference.
But this distinction also bears directly on the problem of consciousness. Nagel points out that modern science arose by deliberately excluding the mental from its field of study. The “objective” world of physics was constituted by abstracting away everything that belongs to the first-person point of view — experience, meaning, purpose — in order to describe the measurable, quantifiable aspects of bodies. That method proved extraordinarily powerful, but it also defined its own limits: whatever is subjective was set aside from the outset. As noted above, this is not a matter of opinion.
This means that the gap between third-person descriptions and first-person experience isn’t an accidental omission awaiting further physical theory; it’s a structural feature of how the physical sciences were established. To describe something in purely physical terms is by definition to omit 'what it feels like' to be that thing. So the problem isn’t just about explaining how consciousness emerges from matter — according to Thomas Nagel, it is about how a worldview that excluded subjectivity as a condition of its success could ever re-incorporate it without transforming its own foundations.
That’s why I say the distinction between living and non-living things is not merely biological but ontological. Life is already the point at which matter becomes interior to itself — where the world starts to appear from a perspective within it. From that perspective, consciousness isn’t an inexplicable late-arriving anomaly in an otherwise material universe; it’s the manifestation of an inherent distinction between appearance and being that the physical sciences, by their very design, have bracketed out. But that is a transcendental argument, and therefore philosophical rather than scientific.
Quoting J
I've been going through a pretty dense paper by Evan Thompson, 'Could All Life be Sentient?', which is useful in respect of these questions about the distinctions between various levels or kinds of organic life and degrees of consciousness. Useful, but not conclusive, leaving the question open, in the end, but helpful in at least defining and understanding the issues. I've also generated a synopsis which will be helpful in approaching the essay.
Gdocs Synopsis (AI Generated)
Could All Life be Sentient? Evan Thompson
Thanks, I'll read it.
Quoting JMost choose to frame their guesses as assertions. That's what I push back on. I'm hessitant to label my opinions as 'beliefs', since the word connotes a conclusion born more of faith than of hard evidence (there's always evidence on both sides, but it being hard makes it border more on 'proof').
But we have explanations of things as simple as consciousness. What's complicated is say how something like human pain manifests itself to the process that detects it. A self-driving car could not do what it does if it wasn't conscious any more than an unconscious person could navigate through a forest without hitting the trees. But once that was shown, the goalposts got moved, and it is still considered a problem. Likewise, God designing all the creatures got nicely explained by evolution theory, so instead of conceding the lack of need for the god, they just moved the goal posts and suggest typically that we need an explanation for the otherwise appearance of the universe from nothing. They had to move that goalpost a lot further away than it used to be.
You might say that the car has a different kind of consciousness than you do. Sure, different, but not fundamentally so. A car can do nothing about low oil except perhaps refuse to go on, so it has no need of something the equivalent of pain qualia. That might develop as cars are more in charge of their own problems, and in charge of their own implementation.
You also need to answer the question I asked above, a kind of litmus test for those with your stance:
Quoting noAxiomsIf yes, is it also yes for bacteria?
The almost unilateral response to this question by non-physicalists is evasion. What does that suggest about their confidence in their view?
Quoting Patterner
They don't have even close to the mental abilities we have, which is why I'm comparing the cars to an Urbilaterian. .But what little they have is enough, and (the point I'm making) there is no evidence that our abilities of an Urbilaterian are ontologically distinct from those of the car.
You point out why there's no alternative word: Those who need it don't want it. Proof by language. Walking requires either two or four legs, therefore spiders can't walk. My stance is that they do, it's just a different gait, not a fundamental 'walk' sauce that we have that the spider doesn't.
Quoting WayfarerThose supposed secondary qualities can also be measured as much as the first list. It just takes something a bit more complicated than a tape measure.
Still, I know what you mean by the division. The human subjective experience of yellow is a different thing altogether than yellow in itself, especially since it's not yellow in itself that we're sensing. A squirrel can sense it. We cannot, so we don't know the experience of yellow, only 'absence of blue'.
The division is not totally ignored by science. It's just that for most fields, the subjective experience serves no purpose to the field.
Interesting, but kind of expected. Stimulation can evoke simple reflex actions (a twitch in the leg, whatever), but could not do something like make him walk, even involuntarily. A memory or sensation might be evoked by stimulation of a single area, but something complex like a decision is not a matter of a single point of stimulation. Similarly with the sensation, one can evoke a memory or smell, but not evoke a whole new fictional story or even a full experience of something in the past.
I see a distinction between simple and complex, and not so much between sensations/reflexes and agency. The very fact that smells can be evoked with such stimulation suggests that qualia is a brain thing.
Noninvasive stimulation has been used to improve decision speed and commitment, and with OCD, mood regulation and such. But hey, drugs do much of the same thing, and the fact that drugs are effective (as are diseases) is strong evidence against the brain being a mere antenna for agency.
Direct stimulation (as we've been discussing) has been used to influence decisions and habits (smoking?), but does not wholesale override the will. It's far less effective than is occasionally portrayed in fiction.
I talked about this early in the topic, maybe the OP. Suppose it was you that was simulated, after a scan taken without your awareness. Would the simulated you realize something had changed, that he was not the real one? If not, would you (the real you) write that off as a p-zombie? How could the simulated person do anything without the same subjective experience?
In short, you’re arguing from within the third-person framework while intending to account for what only appears from within the first-person perspective. The result isn’t an explanation but a translation — a substitution of the language of mechanism for the reality of experience. That’s the “illusion of reduction” you yourself noticed when you said commentators “appropriate first-person words to refer to third-person phenomena.”
Perhaps I am, perhaps because they're inventing a distinction where there needn't be one.
I think you messed up the quoting in your immediate prior post. You should edit, since many of your words are attributed to me.
Quoting WayfarerOur opinions on this obviously differ.
I notice a predictable response to the Urbilaterian question: evasion. That question has direct bearing on this assertion.
I acknowledge this.
To describe something in any terms at all still omits that. I said as much in the OP.
Vitalism?
Which is, in a word, physicalism - there is only one substance, and it is physical. From within that set of assumptions, Chalmer's and Nagel's types of arguments will always remain unintelligible.
I don't know. And that's not evasion, just honesty.
But I also don't think that the right answer to that question reveals much about the larger problem. I think consciousness will turn out to depend on biology, but that's not to say that everything alive is conscious. If we could eventually determine that a bacterium isn't conscious, that would say nothing about whether the beings that are conscious require a biological basis in order to be so. In other words, being alive might be a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness.
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting noAxioms
The last sentence is reiterating the point that I made that the third-person view still occurs within the framework of the first-person view.
You also seem be saying that a third-person view does not impart knowledge. If a third-person simulation of a bat's experience does not impart knowledge because it is not an actual experience of the bat, then how does any third-person stance impart knowledge? As I said, the virtual machine is a simulation, not the real thing. There may be missing information, but it may be intentionally left out because that bit of information is irrelevant to the purpose in mind. For instance, I might try to imagine what it might be like to just experience the world through echo-location without all the other sensory experiences the bat might have.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, there's a lot going on in this thread and our memories are finite, so you might have to restate your definition from time to time, or at least reference your definition as stated.
Quoting noAxioms
This is self-defeating.
Your statement implies that we cannot even know knowledge as it is in itself. When talking about anything in the shared world you are (attempting to (your intent is to)) talking about the thing as it is in itself (probably not exhaustively but you are trying to communicate something (or some property that is) real about some state-of-affairs) or else what information are you trying to convey? Why should I believe anything you say if you can never talk about things as they are in themselves (or at least in part) - like your version of mind? Does your definition of mind impart knowledge to me about how minds are in themselves? If not, then what is your point in even typing scribbles on the screen expecting others to read them and come to some sort of understanding of what your idea is in itself. If we can never get at your idea as it is in itself, nor can you, then what is the point in communicating ideas at all? It seems to me that you are saying that you cannot know what it is like to be a bat as well as what it is like to be yourself (or at least your mind). You might not know what it is like to be your thumb, but you know what it is like to have thumbs, don't you?
Quoting noAxioms
A more accurate way to frame this is through the concept of the central executive in working memory. This isn’t a tiny conscious agent controlling the mind, but a dynamic system that coordinates attention, updates representations, and integrates information from different cognitive subsystems. It doesn’t “watch” the mind; it organizes and manages the flow of processing in a way that allows higher-level reflection and planning.
The subconscious isn’t some subordinate system taking orders from the homunculus. It performs the bulk of processing, guiding behavior and intuitions automatically. Conscious, rational thought steps in to reflect on, plan, or interpret what is already occurring. Mapping the world, then, isn’t the work of an inner observer — it’s the emergent product of multiple interacting cognitive processes working together.
Quoting noAxioms
Objects are the process of interacting smaller "objects". The problem is that the deeper you go, you never get at objects, but processes of ever smaller "objects" interacting. Therefore it is processes, or relations all the way down. Objects are mental representations of other processes and what your brain calls an object depends on how quickly those processes are changing vs. how quickly your brain can process those changes (relativity applies to perception). A fast-moving spark may appear as a blur, while slower-moving flames are perceived as discrete objects.
Ok, so combustion ? causes ? flame. Both are processes, but not identical. Combustion is the reaction; flame is the visible process that results from it. So...
Quoting noAxioms This is not an accurate representation of what I said. All you are doing is moving the goal posts. If flame and combustion are distinct processes, then my definition is applies to being the flame, not the combustion and the flame would have direct access to itself as being the flame and indirect access to the process of combustion. The same goes for the map vs the homunculus - the homunculus would have direct access to itself, not the map - hence the Cartesian Theatre problem.
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting noAxioms
So, here I think we really need to iron out what we mean by, "access" and "being". Does a rock have an internal representation of itself, and does some other aspect of the rock have access to this representation? Does that even make sense? Can there be a sense of being for a rock? Does something need to have an internal representation with some other part "accessing" those representations for it to be, or have a sense of being? Is the sense of being something the same as being that something? Is access inherently indirect?
[I ended up coming back and adding more questions but realized I was going really deep into a rabbit hole and thought I would just let you try to respond and see where we go.]
Quoting noAxioms True. I would say that while the theory of QM is not metaphysical, the various interpretations are.
I’ll stick to the more extreme case of prokaryotic unicellular organisms termed “bacteria”.
Can bacteria act and react in relation to novel stimuli so as to not only preserve but improve their homeostatic metabolism (loosely, their physiological life)?
The answer is a resounding yes. For one example:
Quoting https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1562188/
(though I much prefer this title: "Bacteria have feelings, too")
Their so doing then logically entails that, just like humans, the stimuli they are exposed to will have affective valence (aka hedonic tone), such that it is either positive and thereby pleasing to the bacterium or else negative and thereby displeasing. In considering that what humans label as pain is a synonym for dolor—which need not be physically produced via pain receptors and their related sensory neurons, but can well be psychological—there then is no rational means of denying that at least a bacterium’s extreme negative valence will equate to the bacterium’s dolor and, hence, pain.
Their observable, goal-oriented responsiveness to stimuli likewise entails that they too are endowed with instinctive, else innate, intents—such as that of optimally maximizing the quality and longevity of their homeostatic metabolism. Devoid of these intents, there would then be no organized means of responding to stimuli. Example: the bacterium senses a predator (danger of being eaten) and, instead of doing what it can to evade being eaten on account of its innate intents of not being so eaten, does things randomly, such as maybe approaching the predator as quickly as possible.
As to consciousness, this is a term loaded with most often implicit connotations, such as that of a recursive self-awareness. In certain contexts, though, consciousness can simply be a synonym for awareness that is not unconscious. A bacterium is no doubt devoid of an unconscious mind—this while nevertheless being endowed with a very primitive awareness that yet meaningfully responds to stimuli. Cars aren’t (not unless they’re possessed by ghosts and named “Carrie” (a joke)). In so having an awareness of stimuli, a bacterium is then also innately aware of what is its own selfhood and what is other (relative to its own selfhood), although this form of primitive self-awareness can in no way be deemed to consist of recursive thoughts.
So yes, given the best of all empirical information and rational discernment, bacteria are conscious (here strictly meaning: hold a non-unconscious, very primitive awareness) of stimuli to which they meaningfully respond via the directionality of innate intents and, furthermore, can experience negative valence, hence dolor, and, hence, some very primitive form of pain.
As to an absolute proof of this, none can be provided as is summed up in the philosophical problem of other minds. But if one can justify via empirical information and rational discernment that one’s close friend has an awareness-pivoted mind, and can hopefully do the same for lesser-animals, then there is no reason to not so likewise do for bacteria.
Shoot, the same can be argued for reproductive haploid cells called gametes, both eggs and sperm/pollen. The easiest to address example: a sperm devoid of any awareness of stimuli to which it meaningfully responds due to innate intents that thereby determine the hedonic tone of the given stimuli would be no functional sperm whatsoever (this if in any way living).
Ok. Note that epistemic 'strong emergence' seems to collapse in a sort of substance dualism where the 'mental substance' 'emerges' in an unexplainable way. So in a sense, that kind of strong emergence is IMO a hidden substance dualism.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, the radio is a receiver. But the sound can't be called 'music' unless it can be understood as such. just like a chair can't be called a chair without human beings that conceive it as such.
Quoting noAxioms
I already stated why I disagree with this. I see why you say this but I disagree. The features of our experience can't be fully explained by what we know of the properties of our constituents.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, but in the case of the machines we can reasonably expect that all their actions can be explained by algorithms. And I'm not sure that a self-driving car is conscious, in the sense there is 'something like being a self-driving machine'.
Quoting noAxioms
When we fix a machine is the fixed machine the same entity as it was before, or not?
We get a new problem here. Can machines be regarded as having an 'identity' as we have?
Quoting noAxioms
Interesting fact, yes. Thanks.
Quoting noAxioms
Agreed I would add that It doesn't tell you in which cases the Born rule applies.
In this very weak sense, QM is an extremely practical set of rules that allows us to make extraordinary predictions. Everything more is interpretation-dependent.
And welcome back @Wayfarer
Quoting boundless
In conjunction with what I’ve just expressed in my previous post, I’ll maintain that for something to be conscious, the following must minimally apply, or else everything from alarm clocks to individual rocks can be deemed to be conscious as well (e.g., “a rock experiences the hit of a sledgehammer as stimuli and reacts to it by breaking into pieces, all this in manners that are not yet perfectly understood"):
To be conscious, it must a) at minimum hold intents innate to its very being (and due to these intents, thereby hold, at minimum, innate intentions) which then bring about b) an active hedonic tone to everything that it is stimulated by (be this tone positive, negative, or neutral).
An AI self-driving car holds neither (a) nor (b) (as per the joke I mentioned in my last post, not unless it’s possessed by ghosts such as Stephen King’s “Carrie” was stated to be). As @boundless points to, its “behaviors” all stem from human created algorithms that logically reduce to an “if A then B” type of efficient causation—even if these algorithms are exceedingly complex, evolve over time, and aren’t fully understood by us humans—and this devoid of both a) any intent(s) innate to its being upon which all of its “behaviors” pivot (and intents, innate or otherwise, can only be teleological rather than efficiently causal, with algorithms strictly being the latter) and, likewise, b) the affective valence which these same innate intents bring about. Example: a stationary self-driving car will not react if you open up the hood so as to dismantle the engine (much less fend for itself), nor will it feel any dolor if you do. Therefore, the self-driving car cannot be conscious.
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Please notice that I'm not in all this upholding the metaphysical impossibility of any AI program ever becoming conscious at any future point in time. But, if such were to ever occur, the given AI will then minimally need to be in some significant way governed by teleological interests, i.e. by intents innate to its being, that then bring about its affective valance relative to the stimuli it encounters (stimuli both external and internal to its own being).
And, from everything I so far understand, teleological processes can only hold veritable presence within non-physicalist ontologies: the variety of which extends far beyond the Cartesian notion of substance dualism as regards mind and body.
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EDIT: Additionally, to better clarify my aforementioned stances as regards AI, it should come as no surprise that the evolutions of AI are all governed by human-devised goals, relative to which variations of AI programs in a large sense compete to best accomplish—such that what best accomplishes these human-devised goals then replicates into a diversity of various programs which further so attempt to better accomplish the given human-devised goal. These goals that govern AI-program evolutions (rather than the AI programs themselves) have however all been devised by humans and are in this sense fully artificial (rather than being perfectly natural). In sharp enough contrast, all life, from archeobacteria to humans, is governed by fully natural and perfectly innate goals, i.e. intents; innate intents passed down from generation to generation via genotypic inheritance. So, while it is not impossible that AI might some day evolve to itself have innate intents to its very being, replete with pleasures and dolors (that are all relative to these very same innate intents with which they’re brought into being by previous generations), till AI programs so accomplish they will persist in being non-conscious programs: devoid of innate intents and so devoid of the affective valence to stimuli the former entail.
:up: Yes, I agree. I believe that there is a tendency to read too much into the 'behavior' of machines. By analyzing my own phenomenological experience there are some features that do not seem explainable by referring to algorithms. And, as you say, 'consciousness' seems also to imply both teleological and affective states. I still do not find any evidence that machines have those.
Again, I also agree that this doesn't mean that it is impossible that one day a machine might become sentient.
"The enactive framework strongly supports a continuity of life and mind, showing that living systems are inherently value-constituting and purposive. However, it does not conclusively establish that all life is sentient in the affective sense. The move from sense-making to feeling remains conceptually and empirically underdetermined."
I think this gets it exactly right (though I'm not familiar enough with enactivism to know whether "strongly supports" is correct). The critical issue is whether, again using Thompson's phrasing, purposive, value-driven organisms feel those values as pleasant or unpleasant. "There's a conceptual gap between responsiveness to value and the felt experience of value."
For me, this is a real step forward in putting some content to the old favorite, "what it's like to be X." We're urged to ask, "Can an entity respond in purposive, value-oriented ways without experiencing anything?" I think the answer will turn out to be yes -- and it's still not like anything to be such an organism, where "be like something" is understood as "do more than respond purposively."
I would like to say: [I]Therefore, something choosing valuable things in order to endure is living.[/I] But I don't think anyone would let me have that. I suspect people will say only biological things are living. I'd say maybe we should expand the definition of [I]living[/I], and divide it into Biological Life, Mechanical Life, and whatever else.
It's complicated. There's no alarm bell that rings when philosophy ceases analyzing a concept and starts revising what the concept ought to cover. So yes, we can offer a revision of what "living" means so as to include mechanical things. But what is our warrant? Obviously, we can't say "Because that's what 'living' means" or "That's how 'living' is used" -- the whole point of the revision is to deny that, and suggest an amelioration of the concept. Your suggestion here would be something like, "We should change the domain of what 'living' can refer to because 'choosing valuable things in order to endure' is a more perspicuous or clearer use, conceptually, than the standard version. It captures the idea of 'living' better than 'biological thing' does." That could be true, but you'd have to say more about why.
But yes, I'm impressed by Thompson's ideas here. As I said, he points to the right question: Can an entity, alive or not, do this value-seeking thing and not be conscious? I agree with him that we don't yet know.
Quoting JMaybe. But the definition of life is famously unclear. The first thing Sara Imari Walker talks about in [I]Life As No One Knows It[/I] is how definitions differ, and how any definition rules out some things you think are alive, and includes some things you think are not. So maybe the question isn't as much "Why?" as it is "Why not?".
Life on this planet has always been of a certain type. That makes sense, because the laws of physics woked with what was available. Certain arrangements of matter.
Does that mean something cannot be alive if it isn't made of those same arrangements? Can life not come to exist on other planets that contain very different mixes of elements?
If that's not a problem, then why can't we consider some specific mixes of elements here to be alive?
Maybe the key is not what life is made of, but what it's doing. This can apply too anyone's definition.
Yes, that's how I would argue it, if I shared your view.
Quoting Patterner
Interesting. Would it be easy for you to cite an example of each? Curious to know what she has in mind.
Quoting Patterner
Yes, in one sense. But it's also the case that a child will be able to sort living from non-living things with great accuracy, given the currently accepted use of "living." The child doesn't know the definition -- arguably, no one does for sure -- but she knows how to use the word. Do we want to say she's using the word incorrectly? I don't think so. Rather, we might say that her (and everyone else's) use of the word needs to change in order to encompass a more accurate understanding of what it means to be alive.
Quoting Patterner
One question worth considering: Which way does the argument point? Is it, "Any entity that can do this value-seeking thing will now be defined as 'being conscious'"? Or is it, "We know (have learned/hypothesize) that being conscious means having the ability to do the value-seeking thing, so if it can do it, it's conscious"?
While this can be viewed as a tautology (the laws of physics allow life because there is life...), I also think that this is a very interesting point. To me this suggests that we perhaps do not know enough of the 'inanimate' and this is the reason why the properties associated with life seem so different from the properties associated with 'what isn't life', i.e. life is, so to speak, latent in 'what isn't life'.
And BTW, I also think that 'consciousness' is fundamental, albeit for different reasons and I have a different model of yours. For instance, as I said before, I believe that if mathematical truths are concepts (i.e. mental contents) and, as they seem, they are not contingent, independent of time, place and so on, that some kind of 'mind' is indeed fundamental. Physical objects, on the other hand, seem to be contingent.
OK, from this I gather that your statement that you're asserting an ontological distinction, a distinction in the mode of being, you're merely expressing opinion, not evidence of any sort. You had phrased it more as the latter. We are (mostly) well aware of each other's opinions.
Quoting J
Better answer than most, but I would suggest that not even knowing if some random animal is a being or not seems to put one on poor footing to assert any kind of fundamental difference that prevents say a car from being conscious.
Wayfarer is likely more committed to 'yes, because it's life', except he won't say that, he instead lists typical (but not universal) properties of life, properties which some non-life entities also exhibit. This is either a funny way of saying 'it's gotta be life', or he's saying that it's the properties itself (homeostasis say) that grants a system a first person point of view. Hence a recently severed finger is conscious.
Any answer (right/wrong is irrelevant here) sheds light on what I'm after. Nagel seemed to avoid it, venturing no further from a human than a bat, a cousin so close that I have to check with the records to before committing to marry one. This is the sort of thing I'm after when asking that question.
OK, but then the key that distinguishes conscious from otherwise is not 'is biological'. The key is something else, and the next question would be 'why can only something biological turn that key?'.
Quoting Harry HinduIt not being real is irrelevant. A simulation of a bat fails because it can at best be a simulation of a human doing batty things, not at all what it's like to be the bat having batty experiences.
A human can do echo location. They have blind people that use this. We have all the hardware required except the sound pulse emitter, which is something they wear. But a simulation won't let you even know what that's like since you're not trained to see that way. It would take months to learn to do it (far less time for an infant, which is the typical recipient of that kind of setup). So a VR gives you almost nothing. No sonar, no flight control, muscle control, or any of the stuff the bat knows.
You ask "how does any third-person stance impart knowledge?", which is a silly question since pretty much all of school is third person information. A VR bat simulation is much like a movie. Sure, it imparts information, just not the information of what it's like to be a bat.
As I said, that can be done. It just takes practice. No simulation needed.
If I use the word in my own context, I'm probably referencing mental processes. Not an object or a substance of any kind.
Quoting Harry HinduWhen talking about things in the shared world, I'm probably talking about the pragmatic notion of the thing in question, never the thing in itself. On rare occasion, I perhaps attempt (on a forum say) a description of the thing closer to what it actually is, but that's rare, and I'm highly likely to not be getting it right. "It is stranger than we can think." -- Heisenburg
My version of mind is a pragmatic description of the way I see it. So is yours, despite seeing it differently. One of us may be closer to the way it actually is, but I doubt anybody has nailed that.
You seem to be confusing 'thing in itself' with truth of the matter. For instance, car tires tend to be circular, not square (as viewed along its axis). Circular is closer to truth, and that's what I try to convey. Even closer is a circle with a flat spot. But all that is a pragmatic description of a tire. The thing in itself is not circular at all. Pragmatically, I don't care about that.
You seem to be talking about both sides. For one, I never mentioned 'tiny'. What I call the homonculus seems to be (volume wise) about as large as the rest combined. Only in humans. That part 'watches' the model (the map) that the subconscious creates. All of it together is part of mental process, so it isn't watching the mind since it all is the mind. The tasks that you list above seem to be performed by both sides, each contributing what it does best. If speed/performance is a requisite, the subconscious probably does the work since it is so much faster. If time is available (such as for the high level reflection and planning you mention), that probably happens in the higher, less efficient levels
In deed, it's quite the opposite. It's the boss, and what I call here this homonculus is a nice rational tool that it utilizes.
OK. I'm pretty on board with relational definitions of everything, so I suppose one could frame things this way. My example was more of the way language is used. It's OK to say 6 flames were lit, but it's syntactically wrong to say 6 combustions are lit. But 'combustion' can still be used as a noun in a sentence, as a reference to a process, not an object. Of course this draws a distinction between process and object. Your definition does not, and also clashes with the way the words are used in language,.
That's idealism now. I'm not talking about idealism.
Well how about a rock then (the typical object example). What causes rock? I'm not asking how it was formed, but what the process is that is the rock.
I never said that. I called the flame an object, not a process. I distinguish between process and object, even if the object happens to be a process, which is still 'process' vs. 'a process'.
I think here you are confusing 'being a rock' with 'the rock having a sense of being'. They're not the same thing. The first is a trivial tautology. The second seems to be a form of introspection.
Quoting javra
I agree, but non-living things can also do this. Thanks for the blurb. Interesting stuff.
Their having 'memory' is quite remarkable. Slime molds can communicate, teach each other things, all without any nerves.
Excellent. From such subtle roots, it was already there, needing only to be honed. Do they know what exactly implements this valence? Is it a chemical difference? In a non-chemical machine, some other mechanism would be required.
Instincts like that are likely encoded in the DNA, the product of countless 'generations' of natural selection. I put 'generations' in scare quotes since the term isn't really relevant to a non-eukaryote.
Quoting javra
Here your biases show through. Possession seems to be required for the cell to do this. The bacterium is possessed. The car is asserted not to be, despite some cars these days being endowed with an awareness that meaningfully responds to stimuli. I've always likened substance dualism with being demon possessed, yielding one's free will to that of the demon, apparently because the demon makes better choices?
If a cell can be possessed, why not a toaster? What prevents that?
Side note: It's Christine, not Carrie. Carrie is the girl with the bucket of blood dumped on her.
Remember T2 ending? The liquid metal terminator melts into a vat of white hot metal. That metal was made into Christine obviously (and some other stuff, being a fairly large vat).
And toasters.
Quoting boundlessDisagree. The chess program beats you despite nobody programming any chess algorithms into it at all. It doesn't even know about chess at first until the rules are explained to it. Only the rules, nothing more.
Sure, the machine probably follows machine instructions (assuming physics isn't violated anywhere), which are arguably an algorithm, but then a human does likewise, (assuming physics isn't violated anywhere), which is also arguably an algorithm.
In reply to the above comment by boundless:
Quoting javraI agree that not being rigorously defined, consciousness can be thus loosely applied to what is simple cause and effect. For that matter, what we do might just be that as well.
This seems a biased definition. It would mean that even if I manufacture a human from non-living parts, it would not be conscious. Why does the intent need to be innate? Is a slave not conscious because his intent is that of his master?
The hedonic requirement is reasonable, but you don't know that the car doesn't have it. The bit above about valence gets into this, and a car is perfectly capable (likely is) of that being implemented.
(and due to these intents, thereby hold, at minimum, innate intentions) which then bring about b) an active hedonic tone to everything that it is stimulated by (be this tone positive, negative, or neutral).
Heck, even my car reacts to that, and it's not very smart. A self-driving car very much does react to that, but mostly only to document it. It has no preservation priorities that seek to avoid damage while parked. It could have, but not sure how much an owner would want a car that flees unexpectedly when it doesn't like what's going on.
Most machines prioritize safety of humans (including the guy stealing its parts) over safety of itself. The law is on the side of the thief.
Good. Most in the camp of 'no, because it's a machine' do actually.
Surely the car (and a toaster) has this. It's doing what it's designed to do. That's a teleological process in operation.
Quoting boundlessThat opens a whole can of worms about identity. The same arguments apply to humans. Typically, the pragmatic answer is 'yes'. Identity seems to be a pragmatic idea, with no metaphysical basis behind it.
Both have pragmatic identity. Neither has metaphysical identity since it's pretty easy to find fault in any attempt to define it rigorously.
You need to expand on this. I don't know what you mean by it.
Quoting Patterner
I agree. It is the goal of very few machines to endure or to be fit. That's not a fundamental difference with the typical life form, but it's still a massive difference. Machines need to be subjected to natural selection before that might change, and a machine that is a product of natural selection is a scary thing indeed.
Quoting J
This is a great point. It's simply hard to formalize what is meant by a word despite everybody knowing what the word means. It means more "what I think is alive" which differs from the rigorous definition that, as was mentioned, always includes something you think isn't, and excludes something you think is". But what the child does lacks this problem by definition. The child just knows when to use the word or not.
Not to my knowledge. But I do assume it's constituted from organic chemistry. Still, as with the metabolism that likewise unfolds, there is an autopoiesis involved that is other than the individual molecules and their chemicals. Feel free to use the pejorative of vitalism. Lumping together some lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids does not a living organism make. Or: metabolism = respiration = breath = anima = life. (e.g., a virus, viroid, or prion does not have a metaboism and is hence not living, even though composed of organic molecules) And this entails that extra oomph, relative to the purely terrestrial and inanimate, of autopoiesis.
Quoting noAxioms
Again, I'll just assume that you are biased against the notion that life is ontologically different to nonlife (be it either inanimate or else organically dead). And so I'll skip ahead to the term "vitalism". Vitalism is quite different from the hocus-pocus spiritual notions of "possessions". So framing the issue in term of possession is a non-starter for me. Now, as far as jokes go, supposedly anything can be possessed. From lifeforms to children's toys (e.g., Chucky), and I don't see why not toasters as well (this in purely speculative theory but not in practice, akin to BIVs, solipsism, and such) And this possession supposedly occurs via what is most often taken to be a malevolent anima (a ghost orthe like), which, as anima, is itself endowed with the vitality that vitalism in one way or another specifies. But again, I've no interest in the hocus-pocus spirituality of possessions. The issue of vitalism, on the other hand, seems important enough to me as regards the current topics.
Quoting noAxioms
:grin: Haven't read the book nor seen the movie. Thanks for the correction.
Quoting noAxioms
Again, intents, and the intentioning they entail, are teleological, and not cause and effect. There's a massive difference between the two (e.g., the intent is always contemporaneous to the effects produced in attempting to fulfill it - whereas a cause is always prior to its effect).
Quoting noAxioms
What you do you mean "manufacture a human from non-living parts"? In whole? How then would it in any way be human? Or are you thinking along the lines of fictions such as of the bionic man or robocop? In which case, the human life remains intact while its constituent parts of its body are modified with non-living parts.
As to why innate: because it is, in fact, natural, rather than human-derived and thereby artificial. A human slave has innate intents, which thereby allow in certain cases the slave to obey the non-innate but acquired intent of the slave-master. (a slave's intent is never logically identical to the slave-master' intent - this, of itself, would be hocus-pocus possession)
Quoting noAxioms
Even so, a) these teleological process you here address are artificial rather than natural and b) it doesn't in any way change what was stated regarding ontologies.
Perhaps I should have divvied up the question and answered more precisely. To the question of whether it's a "being": I can't respond, as the use of "being," here and just about everywhere else, is hopelessly ambiguous and/or question-begging. To the question of whether it experiences pain: I don't know. Intent?: As described by Thompson, probably so.
The questions were put in terms of what I know, which is very little in this area. If "asserting any kind of fundamental difference" requires knowledge, then yes, I'd be on poor footing. But does it? My position is that, while we certainly don't know the answers to these questions, we can offer more or less likely solutions. I don't know that a car isn't conscious, but for me the possibility is extremely unlikely. Is this because of a "fundamental difference"? Very probably; the car is not biologically alive. Am I asserting these things? Semantics. I don't think they're obvious, or that people who disagree are unintelligent. So if that's what it takes to assert something, then I'm not. . . I know I've used this analogy before, but disagreeing about what consciousness is, in 2025, is about as fruitful as a debate among 18th century physicists about what time is. We can trade opinions and cite evidence, but fundamentally we don't know what the F we're talking about.
Good discussion anyway!
Quoting JI assumed you're familiar with one. If reproduction is part of the definition of life, then worker bees and mules are not alive. Neither is my mother, as she's is 83.
She says many consider Darwinian evolution to be [I]the[/I] defining feature of life. In which case no individual is living, since only populations can evolve.
For something that's included that we think is booty living, she cites Carl Sagan' [I]Definitions of Life[/I]:
Quoting Carl SaganAnd I'll include this conversation between Data (an android, if you're not familiar) and Dr. Crusher, from Star Trek:The Next Generation.
Quoting JI don't follow. I don't see significant difference between those options. It seems like just different wording.
Right to all of that. Biology, on my hypothesis, is necessary but not sufficient. My guess is that no single property will turn out to be sufficient. Your question -- which reduces to "Why is biology necessary for consciousness?" -- is indeed the big one. If and when that is answered, we'll know a lot more about what consciousness is. (Or, if biology isn't necessary, also a lot more!)
Good post, but if we start playing footloose with the term metabolism - which in part necessitates cellular respiration - then fire is certainly alive: "it metabolizes energy to sustain its own being, it's birthed and it perishes, and it reproduces". And something's quire off about so affirming, unless one wants to assume an animistic cosmos wherein absolutely everything is animated with agency and, hence, with will.
Yes, it can get sticky.
Google says:
[I]Metabolism refers to all the chemical reactions that occur within an organism to maintain life.[/I]
That might be circular.
-Life is something that involves various chemical reactions.
-Various chemical reactions maintain life.
And not all life uses cellular respiration.
My overriding question is:. Can there be life without chemical reactions? Is it the chemical reactions that define life? Or maybe the chemical reactions are the means to an end, and that end is a better definition of life.
Quoting Patterner
Compare a geometrical shape such as a trapezoid. One might learn how to use the word correctly, and thus recognize trapezoids, without being able to say exactly what are the qualities that make the shape a trapezoid. Or, one might be taught those qualities, along with the word "trapezoid," and then categorize the shapes one encounters.
Which approach should we adopt in the case of consciousness? Do we already know what the word means, so that it's only a matter of finding the entities to which it applies? Or do we already know what's conscious and what isn't, without being able to define consciousness, and hence it's a matter of figuring out what conscious things have in common, and thus perfecting a definition?
That's the difference in "pointing" I had in mind. Roughly, is it "word to object" or "object to word"?
A bold statement. Can you please reference any known lifeform that can live in the complete absence of both aerobic or anaerobic respiration? Fermentation, a form of metabolism that is neither, to my knowledge is not sufficient for life in the complete lifelong absence of respiration - an example of this being the fermentation in yeast, which cannot life in a complete lifelong absence of respiration. (At least, from everything I so far know.)
Quoting Patterner
You more specifically mean certain reactions of organic chemicals, namely those which result in metabolism - or at least I so assume. This will fully depend on the metaphysics one subscribes to. In some such metaphysical systems, being "dead inside" or else being "fully alive" are more than mere poetics, but can point to an interpretation of "life" which, though non-physical, nevertheless required for physical life to occur. That mentioned, there is no non-metaphorical life (as in, "the life of an idea" or else "the lifespan of a car") known to science which is not grounded in the physicality of "chemical reactions". None that I know of at least.
How much storage space and power would be needed to support such a thing? If one evolved to overwrites others, it might be manageable.ay least the space.
Hey, why not unnatural selection? We could give it mutations faster than nature works.
Quoting JI thought we were talking about life. As for consciousness, yes, I already know what the word means, and nothing you bring up applies. :grin: :lol: Anyway, my thought is that everything is conscious. More precisely, subjective experience is a property of all particles. They all experience their own being. Which, in the case of a particle, isn't much. There are no mechanisms for sensory input, storage of information from previous sensory input, feedback loops, or any other mental activity.
When a physical system processes information, the conglomerate of particles experiences as a unit. DNA is where it all began. But even though information is being processed when DNA is being replicated, or protein is being synthesized, there are no mechanisms for sensory input, storage of information from previous sensory input, feedback loops, or any other mental activity.
When the information processing includes sensory input, storage of information from previous sensory input, and feedback loops, it is experienced as vision and hearing, memory, and self-awareness.
You know, or not. Sadly, I can't think of a way to test for anything.
No worries; I found it difficult to explain, and maybe haven't done it well.
Quoting Patterner
That's the key -- whether a definition is needed in order to use a word correctly. Often, that's not how we learn words and concepts. Instead, it's ostensive: Someone points and says, "That's X," and later, "That's one too," and "That's one too," etc. We can recognize what words refer to quite accurately without necessarily being able to put our recognition in terms of a definition. Something like this is going on with consciousness (and life), I think. We've learned how to use the words in the absence of a (clear and precise) definition.
Quoting Patterner
This looks at it from the other angle: We can be uncertain about a shape -- maybe it kind of looks like what we've been taught to call a trapezoid, but not exactly. We don't quite recognize it. So if we have a precise definition (which we do, in this case), we can apply it and see whether the shape fits the definition. If only we had something similarly precise for "consciousness" or "life"!
Does this help at all?
Quoting javraWhat I mean is this... For a very long time, a writer took a feather, dipped it in ink, and wrote. A writer writes, eh? Pencils and pens came along at different times, but people still wrote with them.
Then came typewriters, and now computers. Nobody is writing any longer. So there are no writers any longer.
But, of course, there are writers today, typing away on their computers. And we write posts and emails all the time. Nobody bats an eyelash at the obvious misuse of the word. It's ludicrous to suggest we aren't wiring. Because writing is a pursuit. A goal. It's not the tools.
I'm wondering if the chemical reactions that we've called life are the quill and ink, pencils, and pens.
I see it more as a matter of facts which you don’t recognize.
Physics is violated only if you assume it is algorithmic. I disagree with this assumption. I believe that our own existence is 'proof' that physical laws allow non-algorithmic processes (as to why I believe that our cognition isn't algorithmic I refer to some of my previous posts).
BTW, I want to thank you for the discussion. It helped to clarify a lot of my own position. I didn't think that my denial of our cognition as being totally algorithmic is so important for me. What you also say in respose to @javra about the 'hedonic aspect' of consciousness would perhaps make sense if you assume that everything about us is algorithmic.
As I stated above, I do not think that sentient AI is logically impossible (or, at least, I have not enough information to make such a statement). But IMO we have not yet reached that level.
Quoting noAxioms
Again, I have to disagree here. We seem to be sufficiently 'differentiated' to be distinct entities. Again, clearly, if all our actions and cognitions were algorithmic what you are saying here would make perfect sense. After all, if all processes are algorithmic it seems to me that the only entity that there is in the universe is the whole universe itself. All other 'subsystems' have at best a pragmatic identity. Ultimately, however, they are only useful fictions.
Quoting noAxioms
I meant that 'interpretation-free QM' doesn't give a precise definiton of what a measurement is. It is a purely pragmatic theory.
I don't think that a 'process view' denies what I said. Note, however, that processes in order to be intelligible must have some properties, some structure. Otherwise knowledge is simply impossible.
In a 'process ontology', what I said perhaps would be modified as 'there is a potency for life-processes in non-living processes' or something like that.
Purely speculative maybe, but they're relevant in an important way sometimes. I do keep such ideas in mind. BiV is a form of solipsism.
Some external vitality (you've not been very detailed about it) seems to have no reason to interact only with living things like a bacterium, a human finger cell, or perhaps a virus. Apparently, it cannot interact with anything artificial. I can't think of any sort of reason why something separately fundamental would have that restriction.
You don't know that, but you say it like you do. I'm a programmer, and I know the ease with which intent can be implemented with simple deterministic primitives. Sure, for a designed thing, the intent is mostly that of the designer, but that doesn't invalidate it as being intent with physical implementation.
The effects produced in attempting to fulfill it are not the cause of the intent.
Like 3D print one or something. Made, not grown, but indistinguishable from a grown one.
That's for you, the created being, and for society to decide. A new convention is required because right now there's no pragmatic need for it.
Naw, my mother is one of those. She can't swim anymore since she's so dense with metal that she sinks straight to the bottom. They don't tell you that in the pre-op consultation.
Quoting JThompson seemed to make conclusions based on behavior. The cell shies away or otherwise reacts to badness, and differently to fertile pastures so to speak. By that standard, the car is conscious because it also reacts positively and negatively to its environment.
Probably because we're using different definitions. There are several terms bandied about that lack such concreteness, including 'living, intent, [it is like to be], and (not yet mentioned, but implies) free will'. People claiming each of these things rarely define them in certain terms.
I find being alive utterly irrelevant to any non-begging definition of consciousness. But that's me.
Good analogy, since there's definitely not any agreement about that. The word is used in so many different ways, even in the physics community.
Quoting PatternerA mother has reproduced. The definition does not require something to continue to do so. The mule cannot reproduce, but mule cells can, so the mule is not alive, but it is composed of living thing. Hmm...
Not shooting you down. Just throwing in my thoughts. New definition: A thing is alive if the 6 year old thinks it is. Bad choice, because they anthropomorphize a Teddy Ruxpin if it's animated enough.
Plenty of nonliving things evolve via natural selection. Religions come to mind. They reproduce, and are pruned via natural selection. Mutations are frequent, but most result in negative viability.
Easy enough to rework the wording to fix that problem. A living thing simply needs to be a member of an evolving population. What about computer viruses? Problem there is most mutations are not natural.
"An automobile, for example, can be said to eat, metabolize, excrete, breathe, move, and be responsive to external stimuli. And a visitor from another planet, judging from the enormous numbers of automobiles on the Earth and the way in which cities and landscapes have been designed for the special benefit of motorcars, might wellbelieve that automobiles are not only alive but are the dominant life form on the planet". — Carl Sagan
Similarly humans, which are arguably inert without that immaterial driver, but the alien might decide they're the dominant life for instead of simply the vehicles for said dominant forms.
Quoting javraThat's always a good test for any definition of life. How does fire rate? Are you sure it isn't alive? It certainly has agency and will, but it lacks deliberate intent just like termites.
Quoting javra
Quoting PatternerI was also going to point out that circularity.
Not all life metabolizes. Viruses for example, but some deny that a virus is alive.
Mind you, I personally don't place any importance on life, in the context of this topic. So while I find the question intriguing, I question its relevance. The discussion does belong here because there are those that very much do think it relevant.
Quoting PatternerI don't see how, but there can't even be rocks without chemical reactions, so that's hardly a test for life.
Quoting J:up:
Quoting PatternerThey have these. Some are viruses or simply mutations of user interfaces such as phishing scams. On the other hand, they've simulated little universes with non-biological 'creatures' that have genes which mutate. Put them into a hostile environment and see what evolves. Turns out that the creatures get pretty clever getting around the hostilities, one of which was a sort of a spiney shell (Mario Kart reference) that always killed the most fit species of each generation.
Quoting boundlessBarring a blatant example of a system that isn't, I stand by my assumption. Argument from incredulity (not understanding how something complex does what it does) is not an example.
I mean, some parts of physics is known to be phenomenally random (unpredictable). But that's still algorithmic if the probabilities are known, and I know of no natural system that leverages any kind of randomness.
Quoting J
Quoting boundless
Wow, two in one go. Thank you all. It may not seem like it, but these discussions do influence my thinking/position and cause me to question thin reasoning.
Quoting boundlessThat's something I look for in my thinking. X is important, so I will rationalize why X must be. I had to go through that one, finally realizing that the will being deterministically algorithmic (is that redundant?) is actually a very desirable thing, which is why all decision making artifacts use components with deterministic behavior that minimizes any randomness or chaos.
Other examples of X are two of the deepest questions I've come to terms with: Why is there something and not nothing? Why am I me?
Answers to both those questions are super important to me, and the answers rationalized until I realized that both make assumptions that are actually not important and warrant questioning. The first question was pretty easy to figure out, but the second one took years.
I can grant that. Sentience is not an on/off thing, but a scale. It certainly hasn't reached a very high level yet, but it seems very much to have surpassed that of bacteria.
You suggest that if I fix my door (reattach a spring that fell loose, or worse, replace the spring), then it's a different door. OK, but this goes on all the time with people. You get a mosquito bite, a hole which is shortly repaired and blood which is replenished in a minute. Are you not the person you were 10 minutes ago? I have some pretty good arguments to say you're not, but not because of the mosquito bite.
Being a distinct entity is different than the entity maintaining any kind of identity over time.
You seem to suggest that the identity somehow is a function of biological processes not being algorithmic. Not sure how that follows.
But I gave a definition that QM theory uses. Yes, it's pragmatic, which doesn't say what the measurement metaphysically IS. Perhaps that's what you're saying. No theory does that. It's not what theories are for.
Quoting Wayfarer
Perhaps because I don't see anything as a matter of fact. I call that closed mindedness. So I have instead mere opinions, and yes, ones that don't correspond with your 'facts'.
As it happens, I know it on par to knowing that 2 and 2 doesn’t equal 5 but does equal 4, and can likely justify the affirmation you’ve quoted from me much better than the latter. You could have engaged in rational debate in reply. Instead, you affirm knowledge of what I do and don’t know. And uphold this not via any sort of rational argument but via a pleading to authority, namely your own as “programmer”.
In truth, I find it hard to take the sum of your replies to me seriously, this as far as rational philosophical discourses go. So, I’ll just bail out of this thread and leave you to your philosophical musings.
:up: the same goes for me. These kinds of well made discussions, even if do not lead to a change of opinion, helps to clarify one's own.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, I hear you. I don't think that is a 'dogmatic' approach if it is done with an open mind. Yes, some rationalizations can be a sign of dogmatism but if the inquiry is done in a good way it is actually a sign of the opposite, in my opinion.
So, even if on this subject we probably end the discussion with opposite ideas, this discussion perhaps helps both to consider aspect of our own position that we neglected and so on.
In my case, ironically, it helped me to understand how my own conception of 'consciousness' seems to exclude the possibility that conscious beings are algorithmic and this perhaps means that physical laws do make room for that. To me the biggest evidence (but not the only one) that our cognition isn't (totally) algorithmic is the 'degree of freedom' that it seems to be present when I make a choice. As I told in another discussion we had, this is, in my opinion, also strictly linked to ethics. That is we have a somewhat free power of deliberation that makes us eligible to be morally responsible (in a way that this concept doesn't become purely utilitarian and/or totally equivalent to being healthy/ill - although I do believe that there is a strong analogy between good/evil will and being helathy/ill, however both the analogy and the difference are crucial).
Reegarding the two other questions you wrote, they are also important for me. In my opinion, they are ultimately mysterious but, at the same time, I believe that they are worth asking and at the same time we can find some partial answer also to those.
Quoting noAxioms
:up: Note that, however, I'm also a weirdo that thinks that the 'scale' is indeed like a scale with discrete steps. Nevertheless, I believe that the latency for the 'higher' level of sentience must be present in the lower. It seems to me that, to be honest, this inevitably leads to a less 'mechanicistic' view of the 'insentient'/'unliving' aspects of Nature.
Quoting noAxioms
Buddhists would tell you that saying that "you are the same person" (as you did change) and "you are a different person" (as the two states are closely connected) are both wrong. Generally, change is seen as evidence by most Buddhists that the 'self is an illusion (or 'illusion-like')'.
In my opinion, I would say that I am the same person. To this point, think about how the scholar D.W. Graham interpreters Heraclitus' fragment B12 "On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow." (and Aristotle's view):
Quoting DW Graham, SEP article on Heraclitus, section 3.1
Regardless the validity of Graham's interpretation of Heraclitus, I believe that it might be used to defend the idea that we can remain identical while changing. Life, after all, seems to be intrinsically characterized by some kind of 'movement'.
Quoting noAxioms
If all processes are algorithmic, I would believe that they can be seen as aspects of the entire evolution of the whole universe. Some kind of 'freedom' (or at least a potency for that) seems necessary for us to be considered as individual.
Quoting noAxioms
To make some examples, in Rovelli's RQM all physical interactions are measurements. In most forms of MWI that I know, IIRC only the processes that lead to decoherence can be considered measurements. In epistemic interpratiotions measurements are updates of an agent's knowledge/beliefs (and of course, what this means depends on the interpreter's conception of what an 'agent' is). In de Broglie-Bohm measurements are particular kinds of interaction where the 'appearance of collapse' happens.
And so on. There are, in my opinion, an extremely large number of ideas of what a 'measurement' actually means in QM among the experts. So, it's not clear at all.
I think that adopting 'QM without interpretation' would force one to 'suspend judgment' on what a 'measurement' ultimately is.
Perhaps we are saying the same thing differently. I suspect we do.
Well, that solves it. All living beings are made from marshmallows, and the moon really is cheese. Time we moved on.
Reference is to Schrödinger E. (1986), What is Life & Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press
I think this criticism applies to all the current proponents of panpsychism - Philip Goff, Anakka Harris, Galen Strawson, etc. They're all trying to preserve the veracity of the scientific model while injecting an element of subjectivity into it 'from the outside', so to speak.
@Patterner
Quoting Wayfarer
I think panpsychism is less likely to prove true than some version of consciousness as a property only of living things, but still, I don't agree with this characterization. The problem goes back to this part of what Bitbol says:
Quoting Michel Bitbol, Beyond Panpsychism
"Cannot" is the misleading term. Since we don't at this time have a scientific account of what consciousness is, or how it might arise (or be present everywhere, if you're a panpsychist), it's claiming far too much to say it "cannot" be tested. It cannot be tested now. But if it can be eventually couched in scientific terms, then it will be testable.
If panpsychism is at best an untested hypothesis, that should keep us modest about any claims that it's correct or true. But we also don't have license to say that it's flawed in some theoretical or philosophical way that can demonstrate, now, that it will never be science. Panpsychism as I understand it is not "mimicking a theory of the objective world." Rather, it's saying that if and when we understand what consciousness is, we will discover that our current division of "objective" and "subjective" into areas that can and cannot be studied scientifically, is just plain wrong. Philosophers do seem divided on whether this is even conceivable. I've never had any trouble with panpsychism in this way. If subjectivity is "really in there" in everything that exists, well, then that will be a feature of the objective world. What we lack is a vocabulary of concepts -- or, as it may be, mathematics -- to capture it.
Quoting JI'm not aware of any math for any other guess about the nature/origin/explanation for consciousness. Which is not a surprise, since, to my knowledge, consciousness doesn't have any physical properties/characteristics to examine/measure mathematically.
The metaphor Schrodinger gave was, 'once lived experience has been left aside in order to elaborate an objective picture of the world, “If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit." 'Putting colour back in' is a metaphor, but, leaving aside whether the metaphor itself is apt, Schrodinger's starting-point is accurate. Scientific method disregards or brackets out the subjective elements of phenomenal experience so as to derive a mathematically-precise theory of the movements and relations of objects. Consciousness is 'left out' of this, insofar as it is not to be found amongst those objects of scientific analysis. So panpsychism proposes that it must in some sense be a property of those objects, even if current science hasn't detected it. I think that's what Schrodinger's criticism means, and I think it is an accurate description of what panpsychism proposes to do.
As for whether its advocates are really trying to do that:
“Experience is the stuff of the world. Experience is what physical stuff is ultimately made of.”
— “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” Galen Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies 13(10–11), 2006.
“If physicalism is true, the experiential must be physical, because the experiential exists, and physicalism is the view that everything that exists is physical. The only way to avoid radical emergence is to suppose that experiential being is present throughout the physical world.”
— ibid.
It is exactly this kind of gambit that Schrodinger's critique anticipated.
Quoting J
But this division is intrinsic. Science depends on the bracketing out of the subjective. Its power lies in its ability to treat phenomena as objects of measurement and prediction, abstracting from the first-person standpoint. But that same abstraction ensures that consciousness — the condition of possibility for any object to appear — cannot itself appear as an object in that framework. In Husserl’s terms, consciousness is not one more thing among things; it is the ground within which “things” arise.
Bitbol’s point in Beyond Panpsychism is that phenomenology doesn’t try to patch consciousness back into the scientific picture (as panpsychism does) but to reverse the direction of explanation: instead of asking how consciousness arises within the world, it asks how the world appears within consciousness. That’s what makes phenomenology radical — it goes to the root (radix) of the knowing relation itself. The goal is not to extend the scientific image to include the subject, but to reveal that the scientific image itself is a derivative construction grounded upon experience. And you can see how this dovetails with Chalmers critique.
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There's Penrose's conjecture that consciousness depends on quantum phenomena, which are understood (if at all) primarily in mathematical terms. I lean toward the idea that math is the language of deep structure, so if consciousness can be captured scientifically, it may require a mathematical apparatus at least as elaborate as what's been generated by physics in the past decades. Speculation, of course.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes and no. Yes, methodologically. But no, not ontologically. There is nothing in the scientific viewpoint that has to deny subjectivity, or claim that it must be reducible to the currently understood categories of physical objectivity.
After all, isn't it objectively true that you are conscious? Objectively true that you possess, or are, subjectivity? Why would we bar science from acknowledging this? I doubt if most scientists would dispute it. Science is not a subjective procedure, but it can and does study subjective phenomena. It does so objectively, or at least as objectively as possible, given our primitive concepts.
This seems so apparent to me that it makes me think you must mean something else entirely when you say that "scientific method disregards or brackets out the subjective elements of phenomenal experience." Do you mean it disregards them as facts? I don't see why that must be so, except for a very hardcore physicalist.
A harder question, as Nagel points out, is whether "I am Wayfarer," spoken by you, is a fact about the world. If there are truly non-objective facts that cannot be made objective, this might be one of them.
I'm afraid that's not the point. Modern scientific method was founded on a deliberate division between what came to be called the primary and secondary qualities of bodies — a move that located objective reality in quantifiable properties (extension, motion, mass) and relegated qualitative appearances to the mind of the observer. Locke and the British empiricists codified this, and Descartes’ separation of res cogitans and res extensa reinforced it. And none of that is a matter of opinion.
From that point on, the objective sciences proceeded by isolating the measurable, repeatable, intersubjectively verifiable aspects of phenomena — the features that should appear identically to any observer. That methodological bracketing was enormously fruitful, but it gradually hardened into an ontological assumption: the belief that the model thus produced is the whole of what is real.
This is the confusion Nagel examines in The View from Nowhere: the tendency to mistake the “view from nowhere” for a perspective that could exist independently of the conscious beings who adopt it.
When you say “it’s objectively true that you are conscious,” you’re appealing to an abstract inference that science can register only at one remove. The felt reality of consciousness — what it’s like to be an observer — is not something that can be observed. It’s not one more item within the world; it is the condition for there being a world of items at all.
Quoting Patterner
The debate is about what you mean when you say 'there'.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is oft quoted, and nobody seem to know where it comes from or the context of it. But Schrödinger is definitely in your camp. Some other quotes:
I've said this much myself. The view requires 'other laws', and a demonstration of something specific occurring utilizing these other laws and not just the known ones.
Here he mentions explicitly that this is opinion.
The feeling is indeed unpleasant to some. Introspection is not evidence since it is the same, deterministic, free-willed, or not.
This quote seems to argue for physicalism. It puts up two premises (one from each side?) and finds them non-contradictory. This is interesting since it seems to conflict with the beliefs otherwise expressed here.
He goes on to rationalize a single universal consciousness. Not sure if this is panpsychism. I think this quote below tries to argue against each person being separately conscious.
There's lots more, but this introduces his general stance on things.
Quoting Wayfarer
Those are difficult interpretations to mesh with empirical evidence, but it can be done. But with like any interpretation of anything, it is fallacious to label one's opinion 'fact'.
Quoting javra
A bold move to put a choice of interpretation on par with 2+2=4. OK, so you don't consider it an interpretation then, but justification seems lacking so far. OK, you quoted studies showing bacteria to demonstrate a low level consciousness. I don't contest that. The interpretation in question is whether physical means is sufficient to let the bacteria behave as it does. I've seen no attempt at evidence of that one way or the other.
I'm in no position to prove my side. To do so, I'd need to understand bacteria right down to the molecular level, and even then one could assert that the difference is at a lower level than that.
Quoting boundlessI don't think it's done with open mind if the conclusion precedes the investigation. I need to be careful here since I definitely have my biases, many of which have changed due to interactions with others. Theism was the first to go, and that revelation started the inquiries into the others.
The supervention on the physical hasn't been moved. It's the simpler model, so it requires extraordinary evidence to concede a more complicated model, but as far as I can tell, the more complicated mode is used to hide the complexity behind a curtain, waved away as a forbidden black box.
On 'my other two questions':
I believed they're the two most important questions, but the answer to both turned out to be 'wrong question'. Both implied premises that upon analysis, didn't hold water. Hence the demise of my realism.
Quoting boundlessCool. Consciousness quanta.
The pragmatic side of my agrees with you. The rational side does not, but he's not in charge, so it works. It's a very good thing that he's not in charge, or at least the pragmatic side thinks it's a good thing.
A river is a process, yes. If it was not, it wouldn't be a river. Pragmatically, it is the same river each time, which is why one can name it, and everybody knows what you're talking about. It doesn't matter if it's right or not. Point is, it works. What if the river splits, going around an island? Which side is the river and which the side channel (the anabranch)? I revise my statement then. It works, except when it doesn't. What happens when the anabranch becomes the river?
Most of this is off point. I don't even think a rock (not particularly a process) has an identity over time. For that matter, I don't think it has an identity (is distinct) at a given moment, but some life forms do. Not so much humans (identity meaning which parts are you and which are not).
I mean, how much do you weigh? Sure, the scale says 90 kilos, but you are carrying a cat, so unless the cat is part of you, the scale lies.
Quoting boundless
Still not sure how that follows. Take something blatantly algorithmic, like a 4-banger calculator. It's operation can be seen as aspects of the entire evolution of the whole universe.and it seemingly lacks this freedom you speak of. The caluclator is (pragmatically) an individual: It is my calculator, quite distinct from the desk it's sitting on, and the calculator over there owned by Bob. So it's probably not following because you're using 'individual' in different way than <is distinct from not X>.
OK, agree that you've identified a different meaning of 'measurement' there, but that doesn't change the QM definition of the word, and your assertion was that QM doesn't give a definition of it, which is false, regardless of how different interpretations might redefine the word.
Yes, exactly. Theories are about science. Metaphysics (QM interpretations in this case) are about what stuff ultimately is.
We don't disagree so much as it appears on the surface.
Quoting J
If I were to place my bets, even if the scientists claim to have done this, the claim will be rejected by those that don't like the findings. I'm not sure what form the finding could possibly be. Can you tell what I'm thinking? Sure, but they have that now. Will we ever know what it's like to be a bat? No. Not maybe no. Just no.
So what's not being tested that in principle might be testable then?
Whether a given entity is conscious.
Quoting Wayfarer
An abstract inference . . . is that really what it is? Do you regard it as a fact that you are conscious? Do you think that science will forever be at one remove from that fact? I just can't see why. The felt reality has nothing to do with its factuality. Science doesn't have to observe, i.e., experience this felt reality in order to accept it as a fact, an item in the world. Science can't experience any of the macro- or micro-phenomena of the physical world either. That has never prevented scientists from bringing them under the umbrella of objective reality.
Again, I'm positive that we're somehow at cross-purposes, since what I'm saying seems to me uncontroversial. (And we both admire Nagel!) Don't we both agree that consciousness is a natural phenomenon, a part of the "given world" rather than some sort of intrusion into it? Do you think science is hobbled by its methods so that it can only inquire into certain parts of that world?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. And that will happen for consciousness as well, is my guess. I would further claim that consciousness is a necessary postulate for many scientific inquiries; if it were not, you'd have to maintain that psychology, sociology, economics, and game theory are not sciences.
I can only reply: not yet. But virtually none of the physical forces we now recognize as objects of scientific knowledge were weighable or measurable a few hundred years ago. I know I can be monotonous about this, but we simply can't say what will be possible once we actually start to understand what consciousness is. Way too early to say what we can or can't know.
I understand, and you're no more monotonous than I am. :grin: I just think that, since there's no hint of any physical properties of consciousness, despite many very smart people trying with our best technology, and leading experts in the physical sciences saying the physical properties of matter don't seem to be connected to it, we might want to explore other ideas.
For sure. I'd love to pursue the other ideas. I can imagine people saying, in 2125, "They used to think consciousness might be a physical property! How weird."
Quoting JI'm a hundred years ahead of my time. :rofl:
I'll refer to the potted quote I provided from Husserl again:
Also, as you mentioned Nagel, another passage I quote regularly:
Quoting J
Not as an object of science, but as its pre-condition. Note the juxtaposition of 'natural' with 'transcendental' that Husserl refers to, which he derives from Kant, although he differs with Kant in signficant ways. Transcendental is 'what is necessary for experience but not given in experience.' So consciousness is not an 'intrusion' into the world, but neither is it an object within it.
Another passage from the same book:
So, two questions: 1) Why is an objective description of subjective experience necessary to explain subjective experience? This goes back once again to the difference between accepting and inquiring into consciousness, versus also having to claim an impossible 3rd-person experience while doing so. 2) Do we want to conclude that Nagel thinks psychology isn't a science? I doubt it. I think he would say that it isn't a physical science.
To summarize: Are there not objective inquiries into subjective experiences? I guess you could say that any such inquiry is, by definition, not a scientific one, but that seems awfully inflexible.
Quoting Routledge Intro to Phenomenology
I want us to agree wholeheartedly with the first two sentences, but take issue with the third. Suppose we altered that final sentence to read: "Treating consciousness as part of the world is precisely the enormous challenge that philosophy is presented with -- how do we give full weight to consciousness' foundational, disclosive role while equally acknowledging that somehow there is a necessary act of self-reflection that also places it, and us, in the world? How can I, a subject, be both in, and constitutive of, the world?"
In other words, this application of phenomenology is trying to solve the difficult problem by flatly denying that consciousness is part of the world. That seems both too simple and too unlikely. The truth will turn out to be more bizarre, and more wonderful, than that.
Yes, here Nagel hits it on the head. It's both/and, not either/or.
But think that through. If it's not a physical science, then, according to physicalism, how could it be a science? It must by definition be metaphysics.
But think it through in relation to Chalmers' 'facing up to the problem of consciousness'. What you're saying is, you already agree that physicalism is untenable. But Chalmers, Nagel and Husserl are giving arguments as to why it is. And while their arguments are different, the distinction between the first- and third-person perspective is intrinsic to all of them. @noAxioms has already explained that he can't see any distinction. To be sure, many others say the same. But I think there's a real distinction that is not being acknowledged.
I do too, and it's captured in Nagel's question about whether "I am J," said by me, is a fact about the world (just to pick one example). We need to preserve the distinction between 1st and 3rd person perspectives, but . . . does that necessarily put science on one side of an impermeable line? I think that's what we're discussing here. If you interpret Chalmers et al. as explaining why physicalism doesn't work, we have no issue. But I took you to be offering a much broader characterization, going back centuries, about what the scientific project amounts to, and what is and isn't permissible within it. That's where I think we have to be careful. The fact that physicalism can't inquire into subjectivity doesn't mean that science can't -- because physicalism doesn't get to draw the line about what counts as science. (That's up to us philosophers! :wink: )
It certainly puts modern Western science, as understood since Galileo, on one side of it. Unambiguously. You know that German culture has a word, Geistewischenschaft, meaning 'sciences of the spirit', right? You could put Ricouer, Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl under that heading, but there's no way you could include them under the heading 'science' in a Western university.
I think there's a clear, bright line.
Quoting JYou saved me the trouble of saying that. "Treating consciousness as part of the world..."?? Consciousness [I]is[/I] part of the world. How is that in question?
Quoting WayfarerQuoting JRight. Physicalism only gets to say what is and is not [I]physical[/I] science.
Because it's not! You can observe other people. and animals, which you can safely assume to be conscious, and which you can safely assume feel just like you do. But you will not observe consciousness as such - only it's manifestations. The only instance of consciousness which you really know, is the instance which you are, because you are it. Not because it's something you see. You can't experience experience. The hand can only grasp something other to itself (from the Upani?ad).
I invite you to believe that you are also conscious, and also part of the world.
If by natural we mean “what belongs to the order of things that occur independently of human artifice,” then consciousness is indeed natural — but not physical in the sense of being an object or process describable in terms of physics. To call it “non-physical” doesn’t mean “supernatural” or “mystical”; it means that it doesn’t present as a measurable phenomenon, as an object.
Mind is that to which the physical appears. It is the horizon within which things become present as physical, as measurable, as anything at all. So the distinction isn’t between “natural” and “supernatural,” but between 'that which appears' and the subject to whom it appears. That is what I'm saying (and not just me!) has been bracketed out by science. It is also what Husserl, and before him Kant, were getting at: consciousness isn’t a part of the world in the same way the brain, trees, or galaxies are. It’s the faculty for which a world appears.
I hope you can see that distinction, because I think it's important.
Quoting Wayfarer
Let's say it's true that, at the moment, the natural sciences can only infer consciousness. (I think we can do a little better, but no matter.) This was also true of electromagnetic forces, before the 19th century. Everyone knew something was there, but not what or why. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that, in time, we'll have positive tests for the presence of consciousness, and be able to describe its degrees and characteristics? This isn't to say that consciousness is a force like electromagnetism -- I doubt it -- but only that science often starts with phenomena that are widely acknowledged but badly understood.
In a broad sense, but they are not counted amongst the ‘exact sciences’, are they? Their proponents might aspire to it, but there are many difficulties. Furthermore, as far as psychology is concerned, what are the broader questions that underlie it? What vision, or version, of humanity? That we’re species like other species, vying for survival and adaption? And that itself is not a question for psychology.
The genius of modern science was deciding what to exclude from its reckonings. For example, intentionality or telos. Such factors are invisible to precise definition and measurement. So, leave them out! Consider only what can be measured and predicted according to theory.
Quoting J
I’m sure that medicine does have such tests, they would be extremely important in the treatment of comatose patients. But the ‘how much’ and ‘what kind’ of consciousness questions are still within the ambit of what Chalmers designated solvable problems. (And for that matter, maybe the whole use of ‘problem’ in this regard is mistaken. Others have pointed out that it’s more of a mystery - the distinction being that problems are there to be solved, while mysteries are something we’re a part of, meaning we can’t step outside of them and ‘explain’ them.)
Quoting WayfarerOf course not. I have no idea why you're making this point. In this sense, consciousness is natural because it exists in this universe. Even things that[I]are[/I] of human artifice are not “supernatural” or “mystical”.
Quoting WayfarerOf course consciousness isn't the same kind of thing as those physical things.
Quoting WayfarerAs Albert Csmus said, [I]Everything begins with consciousness, and nothing is worth anything except through it.[/I]
Quoting Routledge Intro to Phenomenology
Hmmm… do I detect a similarity here? :chin:
We know to pay attention to details, and not just think an unexamined big picture must be accurate, as they did when they thought the earth was the center of the universe.
Perhaps most important, we learned a good lesson from those in the past who thought living things were animated by a special vital force. Now we know that the "animation" is various physical processes that can be observed, measured, and explained. (Exactly which processes depends on each person's definition of "life". But I haven't heard of a definition that doesn't have various processes, such as metabolism, sensory input, reproduction...)
Yet, despite being on guard for all the things, people thinking outside the box all the time, and having technology that can do things like slam electrons together and measure what happens, we don't have any clue how physical properties and processes can produce something so different from them, and no evidence that that's what going on.
Quoting WayfarerI suppose Husserl should get the credit.
Everything you say in your post is true, including the above. Once again, I'm speculating, but perhaps the conclusion we ought to draw is that physical processes don't produce consciousness; i.e., it is not a cause/effect relation, occurring in a temporal order. This is the essential premise of supervenience, as I understand it. Put crudely, consciousness is the same thing as its physical substrate, but experienced from the inside, the 1st person. This is not reductionism, because we could just as well say that the physical substrate is the same thing as consciousness, viewed from the outside. Neither reduces to the other. Of course, this stretches the use of "same thing," perhaps unacceptably. Phenomenologically, they are very far from the same thing. And yet, heat is the "same thing" as molecular motion, in one important sense of "same". They don't remotely resemble each other, experientially, but nevertheless . . .
But suppose this speculation is correct. We still don't know how to talk about this sameness or doubleness, because we don't (yet) have a scientific conception of what philosophers call the 1st and 3rd persons. So I agree with your cluelessness on the whole question; I'm just more optimistic that a path will open.
If they turned out to be 'wrong questions', then they aren't important. What is important is removing the illusion that they are. I disagree but I think I can understand why you think so.
Quoting noAxioms
Sort of. I see it more like that consciousness comes into discrete degrees and that there is some kind of potency of the higer degrees into the lower degrees. So, I'm a sort of emergentist myself I suppose but I would put 'emergence' as in 'actualizing a potential' (think of Aristotle). So, not in a way in which current 'physicalists' models frame it.
Quoting noAxioms
But note that you're using the notion of 'pragmatic' versus 'rational' in a way that the above statement is, ultimately, false.
I can agree with the 'rational' model that the we aren't the same person as we were in the past to exclude a static model of the 'self'. Conceptual models are, of course, static and, being static, might not be able to fully capture a 'dynamic entity'. I can even agree with the Buddhist notion that the 'self' is ultimately illusory if it is interpreted as implying that we can't be identified by anything static.
As an example, consider a song. The song 'exists' when it is played. Its script isn't its 'identity' but, rather, what we might call its form, its template. However, we can't even say that the song is something entirely different from its script as the script is something essential to the song. In a similar way, something like my DNA is essential to me but, at the same time, it can't 'capture' my whole being.
No description, no matter how articulate can ever capture the being of a person.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, I agree with that. But I disagree that it has the sufficient degree of autonomy to make its pragmatic distinction from its environment as a real distinction. It is certainly useful to us to distinguish it from its environment and label it with a name and think it as an 'entity'. But is it really one?
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, fine. I concede that. But I believe that in 'interpretation-free QM' measurement is a fuzzy notion. Once you define it clearly, the definition gives an interpretation of QM.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, up until the 20th century it was common to think that the purpose of science was at least to give a faithful description of 'how things are/behave'. I personally do not make a hard distinction between metaphysics and physics but I get what you mean here.
Excellent quote! Thanks!
Quoting J"Experientially"? Whose experience do you mean by that?
The temperature in a room [I]is[/i] the measure of the average kinetic energy of its air molecules. The mercury in a thermometer expands when the air molecules move faster, and kinetic energy transfers from the air into the mercury.
It's all fully described mathematically. What the average speed of the air molecules is at a given temperature on the thermometer. James Clerk Maxwell apparently came up with the equations for figuring out what percentage of molecules are moving at which speed relative to the average. How much energy is needed to raise the temperature of whatever volume of air.
Our nerves detect the kinetic energy of the air. We can detect electrical signals caused by the contact, follow them to the spinal cord, and to the brain, where x, y, and z happen. We can quantify all that, also. How fast do the signals move along the nerves? Which nerve pathways are used for which temperature ranges? What kind of ions are released at what points?
Nowhere in any of that is there a hint of our subjective experience of heat. Not any more than there is in the mercury expanding in the thermometer.
Quoting boundless:up: Yes, good stuff!
Quite right. And yet, if a child asks for an explanation of what heat is, you're going to tell the story about the molecular motion. We can finesse this by simply pointing out that "what heat is" is equivocal: it can mean "what does it feel like" or "what causes it". But I think the issue goes deeper than language. It's that "doubleness" that I referred to before. Heat really is two different things at the same time, from different perspectives -- maybe that's a better way to put it than calling it "the same thing."
Quoting Patterner
I'm contrasting the subjective experience of heat with the objective explanation of it. Perhaps "experiential" isn't the right term for how a scientist observes molecular motion. What I meant was, the feeling of heat doesn't at all resemble the picture described by the scientist. But again, as above: any description of what heat is would be incomplete without the 3rd person perspective as well.
The second thing is our subjective experience of all that as heat.
The Hard Problem is that nothing about the first suggests the second.
Yes, that's what I'm suggesting. But I would change the terminology in a small but crucial way: Both in ordinary language and from a phenomenological perspective, "heat" is the subjective experience. Everyone knew what "heat" meant long before chemistry. So I don't think we ought to talk about "our interaction with heat." The only "heat" out there with which we can interact is "heat" in the first sense, molecular motion, etc. The "two different things" are the results of the two perspectives -- and again, I'm not arguing that the same thing/different thing question has to be settled firmly. After all, what makes a "thing"? Rather, what we should be clear about is that the situation is a peculiar one: We have two uses of the term "heat," both widely accepted by their communities of users. They refer to different events, phenomenologically and perhaps extensionally. Yet they also refer to one single event, seen objectively. No one, I think, will deny that the 1st and the 2nd ways of understanding heat are intimately connected, such that you can't get 2 without 1. (Can you get 1 without 2? . . . interesting.)
Quoting Patterner
So, you're asking whether this is a good analogy for consciousness. But is there anything about the molecular-motion description of heat that would suggest the subjective experience of warmth? We started, pre-science, with our experience of heat, and went on to discover the physical conditions upon which it supervenes, which are utterly unlike feeling warmth. Why couldn't this happen for consciousness as well? It seems like a good analogy to me, but maybe I'm missing something you have in mind.
Another snippet from Michel Bitbol, this one from a paper Is Consciousness Primary? (I’m on a Bitbol bender at the moment.)
It is an example of how the ‘primary/secondary’ distinction emerged in a real-world context.
The danger you and I both recognize comes not from the story Bitbol tells here, but from the further story which physicalists try to tell, in which heat is "really" or "actually" or "reduced to" its objectively measurable components.
No, I don't think so. I agree that the feeling of warmth is an example of a conscious experience. We also agree, I suppose, that being conscious as such is a conscious experience -- sounds awkward, but how else could we put it? I certainly experience being conscious, and so do you. So I'm hypothesizing that, as with warmth, there's a compatible story to be told about the "outside" of our conscious experience.
Of course! Neither you or @Patterner are the kinds of reductive materialists that Bitbol (and Chalmers) have in their sights - but plenty are, and that is who he's addressing.
That is the polar opposite of Bitbol's phenomenology and Chalmers' naturalistic dualism. So they're not (and I'm not) 'attacking straw man arguments' - physicalists really do say that. It's important to get clear on the fault lines between the tectonic plates, so to speak. Which, from what you're saying, I'm not sure that you're seeing. (Incidentally I'm drafting a Medium essay "Intro to Bitbol" which I hope might be useful as he has an enormous amount of material online.)
They certainly do.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think I see some of them, but always happy to learn more. Appreciate all the thought you've given this.
Fair enough. We'd have to start by agreeing on what can be an object of experience. As you know, many philosophers believe that con* can never be an object for itself, that it is properly a transcendental ego of some sort. To "experience consciousness," for these philosophers, would be like saying that the eye can see itself.
I don't find that persuasive, but let's say we agreed that it was a good description. In that case, we need a different term -- not "experience" or "be conscious of" or "be aware of" -- for what happens when con reflects on itself. Whatever term we decide to use, that's what I'd be referring to when I spoke about experiencing being conscious.
Or, we can allow, as I do, that self-con or the awareness of one's con is an experience on par with any other mental event. In that case, when I talk about the experience of being conscious, I mean the experience I have when I merely look at my looking (doing meditation is an excellent way to get there). It's separate from any content, whether perceptual or internal.
But I don't think we even need anything this esoteric to answer the question, "Do you experience con?" We can just reply, "Is experiencing con the same or different from being conscious?" If it's the same, then we all agree that we have that experience. If it's different, then we return to the Sartrean exegesis I began with. But in neither case is the phenomenon -- call it what you will, "experience" or not -- in doubt.
*consciousness. I'm tired of typing that word incorrectly!
As far as I can tell, consciousness (=experiencing being conscious) entails the set of sensory sensations, thoughts and feelings one has in the present, where "the present" is a short period of time, not an instant of time.
These are all intertwined. Sensations and feelings can induce thoughts, and thoughts can induce feelings. It is the feelings aspect that the hard part, of the "hard problem". Most aspects of consciousness seem amenable to programming in software. Feelings are not amenable to this. IMO, feelings are the one aspect of consciousness that is inconsistent with what we know about the physical world. That doesn't mean it's necessarily inconsistent with naturalism - it could just mean that there are aspects of the natural world that are not understood and may be inscrutable.
Quoting JI [I]do[/I] agree with this, as it happens. I think everything is an object of experience. But I don't think the experience is an object that, itself, can be experienced. I don't think the problem is that an eye cannot see itself. I think the problem is that vision cannot see itself.
I think what is normally called [I]human consciousness[/I] is the consciousness - the subjective experience - of being a human. We have mechanisms for mental abilities, and we experience them as, among other things, self-awareness. We are aware of our thoughts and feelings.
A bacterium experiences greater or lesser warmth, just as we do. But it doesn't think about it, or comment on it.
I very much agree regarding what you say about feelings. I agree with most of what you say. But I don't agree that "Most aspects of consciousness seem amenable to programming in software." I think only mental abilities can be programmed, like sensory input, responses to sensory input, storage of sensory input and responses, referencing the stored data... I don't think subjective experience of all that is programmable. we can program feedback loops, but we can't program those feedback loops being aware of themselves.
This gets at the gnarly, self-reflexive quality of the con* problem. Can my experiencing of, say, warmth also itself be an object of experience? Rather than give my answer, I'd toss it back and ask, What do your observations of your own mentality in this regard tell you? How does it seem? -- let's start there.
As for the bacterium, yes, it has no self-con, no self-awareness. Once again, this raises the question of how "experiencing experience" may relate to human con. I'm not saying we're the only animals who can do this -- I'm sure many others are to some degree self-aware -- but it characterizes so much of our sense of what it means to be conscious, of "what it's like to be a human." And let's not forget that the practice of meditation can show us the opposite: what it means to experience non-experience, if I can put it that way. Or at least it may do; some doubt this.
*consciousness
Is this an infinite situation? I experience the knowledge that I'm experiencing warmth. And I experience the knowledge of the knowledge that I'm experiencing warmth. And…
The threat of the infinite regress is hollow, I'm pretty sure: How many iterations can a mind really retain?
No, I'd say that's just empty playing with words.
Quoting JI really don't see that problem, either. We are made up of many information processing systems. Some, are shared with many species, right down to single-celled bacteria and archaea. Even if our sensory input from light is much more precise and complex than theirs, they also subjectively experience it. (When it comes to light perception, plants leave us in the dust in some ways.) But we have mental abilities that nothing but us has. Our self-awareness is our subjective experience of some of those abilities.
My thinking is that, what we are conscious [I]of[/I] is not what consciousness [I]is[/I]. Consciousness is not self-awareness. So it's not a case of consciousness viewing itself. I think we have a subjective experience of the warmth. And we also have the subjective experience of feedback loops that are much more complex than single-celled (and many multi-celled) creatures.
Sorry for the disorganized structure of this post. I'm exhausted and this is the best I can get out right now before collapsing in bed.
Quoting Patterner
This is unproblematic until we consider what I've been calling the experience of being conscious. I agree that con is not self-awareness, but when we are self-aware, we are having a conscious experience of . . .. what, exactly? Is it multiplying terms too far to discriminate between "con" and "being conscious"? Sorry, I'm wide awake, and I already feel like I'm drifting into a Husserlian dreamworld, where terms and loops proliferate!
Maybe it helps to refer once again to meditative states, in which it's possible to experience a very simple, seemingly objectless state of awareness. Am I "viewing con itself" in such a state? What's especially interesting is that the literature of meditation claims that the ego, the (possible) source of conscious awareness, is largely absent in such states. Should we conclude that "I" am not doing anything at that moment, so the whole loop question can never get started?
I always go back to Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam in [I]Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged From Chaos[/I]:
It is difficult to think of the simplest [I]molecule minds[/I] ("All the thinking elements in molecule minds consist of individually identifiable molecules."), such as those of archaea or bacteria, as minds that are thinking. But it must surely be the first step on the evolutionary road. Thinking and mental processes are physical events. We are conscious of - we subjectively experience - these events. These events are not consciousness. That's what I mean by "what we are conscious [I]of[/I] is not what consciousness [I]is[/I]."
Quoting JFrom my standpoint, that's like discriminating between "mass" and "being massive".
Quoting JI can't speak from experience. But everything I've read makes it sound to me that the meditator is (how to say it?) not engaging in thinking/mental processes. Thinking might be an automatic response to sensory input and other thoughts. But if they are doing what is claimed, that automatic response can be prevented. Maybe "suppressed". Perhaps better to say "not engaged in", because that sounds more passive. In essence, as far as consciousness goes, the meditator subjectively experiences only the sensory input, much as other species that do not have or mental abilities.
That's an immediate red flag for me. According to their definition, a thermostat is a mind. From a review:
Despite the splashy blurb, Journey of the Mind is essentially a pancomputational, complexity-theoretic evolutionary narrative. It treats mind as something that emerges when matter organizes into systems capable of learning, in the broadest, most information-theoretic sense.
Think of it as:
Daniel Dennett + Integrated Information + Complexity Theory + Evolutionary Just-So Storytelling,
but written for a general audience with lots of nice pictures.
They argue that:
A mind is any system that takes in information, updates internal structure, and generates adaptive behaviour.
Minds scale: archaeal ? amoebic ? worm ? reptile ? bird ? mammal ? human ? societal “supermind.”
Consciousness = a sufficiently complex, recursively self-modelling prediction engine.
It’s an attempt to unify everything from basic chemotaxis to human language under one computational umbrella.
Me, I don't think it qualifies as philosophy. It's pop science.
Quoting J
Very insightful question! 'Non cogito ergo non sum'. I tried diligently to practice Buddhist meditation for years, but one of the early understandings I had was, so long as you're aware of yourself meditating, then you're obviously not in that kind of 'contentless consciousness' state, as you're still aware of 'I am doing this'. Getting to that kind of complete cessation of self-consciousness always eluded me. In yoga terminology, such states are called 'nirvikalpa', meaning 'nir' (no) 'vikalpa' (thought forms). But in my experience realising such states is very rare in practice. That's why genuine yogis and real spiritual adepts are often reclusive and keep away from society. It's the opposite of our over-stimulated high-tech culture.
If DNA was your identity, then identical twins would be the same person. That doesn't work. Consider a bacterium. When it splits, which is the original? That's where our notion of pragmatic identity fails and one must us a different one. It gets closer to the notion of rational identity.
Autonomy has little to do with it. It just plain doesn't care, and pragmatic identity only exists relative to an entity that finds pragmatic utility in assigning such an identity. Physics itself seem to have no notion of identity and is of no use is resolving such quandaries.
Quoting boundlessBut degrees implies a discreet jump in evolution. Thing X has one level of cosciousness, but it's offspring (one of them at least) has a whole new level of it, a significant jump so to speak. That seems not to be how evolution work, hence my skepticism on the discreetness of it all.
Well, you mix 'are' and 'behave' there like they mean the same thing. They don't. The former is metaphysics. The latter is not. Science tends to presume some metaphysics for clarity, but in the end it can quite get along without any of it.
Speaking of identity, it is kind of hard to follow @Wafarer's identity given the somewhat regular change of avatar. @Banno (and 180) also does this with similar rate of regularity. You guys don't realize how much stances and personalities I associate with the avatar more than the name. It's like my wife coming home, same person I always knew, but after having swapped to a totally new unrecognizable body. My avatar has been unaltered since the PF days.
Quoting J
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Patterner
All wrong! Much of the back and forth between all of you is dickering about what is included under the heading of science and what is not. All this is irrelevant. Physicalism does not asset which activities one might label as 'scientific inquiry' vs. not. It makes not claim about the what can be known or not. In the case of consciousness, it's on the way to being explained, but it doesn't need to be in order for it to be the case.
Yes, physicalism is a metaphysical stance precisely because, like anything inferred, it cannot be proven. But it's a stance that has proven wildly successful since science began to assume it as their primary methodology, contrasting with what has become known as the dark ages when science worked under a different methodology.
Quoting J
This was in reply to Wafarer's post just above. It seems an incredibly fallacious statement to suggest that either physicalism being untenable for making a requirement about what is designated as 'science' (it doesn't) or physicalism being untenable because it is metaphysics. Nonsense. It's alternative is also metaphysics.
Quoting JThere you go. An example of subjectivity being science before the thermometer came into play.
Quoting Patterner
Of course it's natural. The question is, it is something separate or does it supervene on what isn't consciousness? To assert otherwise, a demonstration would be nice.
Quoting J
Wrong question. I was thinking more along the lines of "Why is an objective description of subjective experience necessary for said subjective experience to supervene on the physical?".
I am up front that an objective description is never going to happen. It simply isn't a requirement. The strong claim is that it doesn't (cannot) so supervene, in which case the explanation needs to be 'why necessarily not?'. Plenty argue for 'why not', but the 'necessarily' part is always left out, which reduces simply to incredulity.
Quoting PatternerGood example, but the lesson is clearly not learned. Something being alive or not is still a matter of opinion and definition, with yes, no clear definition that beats asking a 6-year old. Nevertheless, Wayfarer aside, vitalism is pretty much discredited.
Quoting J
But that's not a test since it is a matter of opinion and definition, and the definition is especially a matter of opinion. Asking for a yes/no consciousness detector presumes 1) that consciousness is a binary thing (on or off, nothing being 'more conscious' than another), and 2) is kind of like asking for a meter for attractiveness. Thing X (a piece of artwork say) is attractive or isn't. Not a matter of opinion at all.
Oh right. A thing cannot be attractive unless it is alive. Don't forget that part.
Quoting PatternerThat's incredibly glossed over, but you give far better detail in another post.
Why is it suddenly just 'x,y,z'? Why not follow those x's and such, all the way to the decision to adjust the thermostat. OK, maybe you don't know what x, y, and z are, in which case you're hardly in a position to make assertions about what they can and cannot do.
Quoting PatternerYea, because you glossed over it with "x, y, and z happen" and then, far worse, make assumptions about them.
But it does if you start to work out the x,y,z. You just refuse to label it that, instead calling it correlation or some such.
Quoting JOpinion, so any attempt at agreement is likely to involve injecting one's conclusions into the definition. So no, you don't start there, you end there.
Quoting Patterner
Quoting Relativist
Is this an assertion or is there evidence of this? I mean, something totally alien to you is probably not going to feel human feelings. Despite the assertion above, I seriously doubt bacteria experience warmth the way we do. I'm not even sure if it's been show that they react to more/less favorable temperatures.
Quoting Patterner
That's a better question. If the reaction influences the entity's own 'welfare' (a loaded term since it isn't clear what is assessing this welfare), that's closer to being conscious than a simple cause-effect mechanism such as seems to occur with a thermostat.
Also, many (the majority?) of my reactions are not necessarily for my welfare. Take the decision to write this long post, or to pick up a piece of litter.
Btw, I didn't gloss over. I just didn't write out 50,000 physical events. But now you can say which of them convert physical events to subjective experience.
My point was: 1) that most aspects of consciousness can be described algorithmically- this is what materialist philosophers of mind do. There isn't evidence that this directly maps to neurological function, but it defeats the claims that materialism can't possibly be true. 2) on the other hand, feelings cannot be created via algorithm.
To your point: perhaps other life form have different feelings, or perhaps they have some of the same feelings, but the cognitive context is vastly differen
Quoting Patterner
We could program an "executive function" that integrates sensory input, memories that these trigger, and other memories, that induce thoughts and directs activity. Is there more to awareness?
I am suggesting that the "feeling of self awareness" is decomposible into feelings (qualia, including pain, pleasure, joy, sensory perceptions.) + thoughts, some of which are triggered by these qualia, and by neurological responses to other bodily activities (neurological, hormonal).
This is pure hypothesis on my part, but its epistemological virtue is that it minimizes the magic (i.e. the elements of consciousness that seem inconsistent with reductive physicalism).
I think it's the same situation. I am not aware of any physicalist hypothesis explaining qualia. You may be right that the "feeling of self awareness" is explained by qualia, but that doesn't explain it in terms of physicalism.
Regarding "magic", I don't think we have reason to believe we are sufficiently familiar with every aspect of our reality to know that there can be nothing that is not physical. (I, of course, see consciousness as proof that there is something non-physical.) Also, anything in our reality could not possibly violate it's rules/laws, and is, therefore, not magic.
I recently read Michael Tye's book, "Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness". Tye regards himself as a physicalist, but he rationalizes consciousness as due to some inherent property of matter that manifests only in brains of a sufficient level of complexity. I don't complete buy into his hypothesis, but it's virtue is that it's considerably less extreme than alternatives that dismiss physicalism altogether because of the explanatory gap.
I haven't read Tye's book. I'll look for it. His hypothesis is similar to mine in thinking consciousness is due to some inherent property of matter. But, although I'm not sure based on your words, it might be that I think it plays a role with much less complexity than he does.
Consciousness is not generally considered to be the same as mind, but then both terms 'mind' and 'consciousness' have many different uses. For example we refer to "unconscious mind" and yet it seems strange to say that an unconscious state is a mental state. It is easy to see why it is impossible for us to be aware of neural states, while it is generally uncontroversial that all mental states (meaning states that we can be conscious of even if we are not always) are correlated with neural states (which we cannot be aware of).
What is awareness or consciousness if not attention? We say we are conscious when awake and yet probably more than 99% of the time we are on autopilot. Is consciousness reflective self awareness, and is language necessary for that?
Quoting RelativistI once thought what you are describing. My thinking on the topic has undergo some changes in the last year or so, as I have taken part in conversations here. @bert1 made a very brief comment several months ago that altered this particular aspect of what I thought.
I'm going to try Tye's book. I'll let you know.
Quoting JanusI agree.
My way of thinking about mind, conscious, and aware only cause arguments, so I won't get into it. But I'll say this...Quoting JanusI don't language is necessary. But things would be unrecognizable if we didn't have it.
I'll order Hoffmeyer. Thanks! Unfortunately not available as e-book, but at least not $100+, like most Biosemiotic books I've looked at are.
Yes, there may be consciousness without linguistically enabled thought, but there would be no thinking about consciousness.
I hope you enjoy Hoffmeyer's writings. Signs of Meaning is the earlier, more accessible work.
That's like asking which transistor state change is Tomb Raider. Subjective experience is not one neuron event (and 50k is way short).
Quoting RelativistIt's a parallel process, but any parallel process can be accomplished via a Turing machine (presuming no weird reverse causality like you get with realist interpretations), so I disagree, the operation of any physical system at all (if it's just a physical system) can be driven algorithmically.
So your point 2 is one of opinion, something to which you are entitled until one starts asserting that the statement is necessarily true.
Quoting PatternerI am also not aware of any non-physicalist hypothesis explaining qualia. Don't forget that.
Quoting PatternerThe point of the 6-year old is that they have an intuitive feel about it, which is how the philosophers go about attempting a definition. You know what you want to designate as 'alive', and so you attempt to craft a definition that always meets that intuition. That's a nice example of a rationalized definition rather than a rational one.
I am a physicalist, but I see no reason to believe feelings could be programmed into a turing machine, unless we treat feelings as illusions: a belief that the sensation is real, along with the behavioral reactions it induces. An alternative is that there is some aspect of the world that manifests exclusively as the feelings we experience. I'm open to other possibilities. Do you have something in mind?
Sorry for the late reply. Indeed, my point was that a person seems more than anything that can be described.
But in a sense, everything is more than what can be described by concept, isn't it?
Stephen Hawking once asked What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?. Regardless the question about the supposed 'agent' that 'breathed fire' into the equations, clearly all that exists can't be 'reduced' to concepts. I believe that concepts can 'map' (or perhaps even are) the structure of what exists. However, in the case of personal identity there is even more than just 'existence' IMO.
Pragmatic identity is simply a convenient way to describe things, a coarse-grained description that has a pragmatic value. However, in the case of persons, I believe that a person is real in a fundamental sense. It can be 'dissolved into' a more detailed description or anything else.
Of course, this is all speculative but things like 'qualias', subjective experiences, the experience of being an agent ('free will') and so on do suggest so.
Quoting noAxioms
I'd agree with that. You and I seem to disagree on how 'complete' the description that current physical theories is. It might well be the case that in the future our 'current picture' of reality will be regarded as how we now see classical physics.
Quoting noAxioms
And you should be skeptic! I know I am proposing something sketchy here. But I do believe that the 'hard problem' etc point to something like that.
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah, I used the words in a somewhat flippant way. In any case, my point was that proponents of epistemic interpretations of QM think that QM doesn't give a description. To people like Newton, Galileo and so on that would be somewhat absurd (and even Galileo suggested that science can 'disclose' less about the 'nature of reality' than his contemporaries thought).
Quoting noAxioms
LOL, agreed.
Good. Just checking. Earlier in this topic, somebody (not you) suggested almost exactly that, as if a computer could feel pain if it executed a 'feel pain' machine instruction. This was meant sarcastically, but meant to imply that physicalism would require that there is similarly one 'feel pain' synapse in a brain.
Well, you can't find subjective experience of heat in physical events possibly because you don't understand what the physical events are doing. I don't claim to have this knowledge either. It's besides the point of illustrating that it cannot be done, which probably isn't going to be accomplished by not understanding what does go on.
Again, no. Not the point.
Quoting RelativistOK. Similarly, I do see reason to believe that. Our opinions differ. I'm OK with that. Can you demonstrate that feelings cannot be programmed into a Turing machine? I outlined a simple way to do it in my OP. Simple, but compute intensive, beyond our current capability, which is too bad. Doing so would likely not change anybody's stance. Such is the nature of subjective proofs. They only prove things to the subject.
That aspect is a testable prediction. So test for it. Find out where some simple effect that cannot be physically caused. If there's no suggested test for that, then there's no real theory that supports your alternative.
Quoting boundless
My arm is more than what can be described, sure. I tried to say as much in my OP (not specifically mentioning arms).
That's a question for the universe being mathematics, and not just being described by it. MWI suggests simply: "In a closed system, its wave function evolves according to the schrodinger equation". So if the universe IS actually a wave function, the breathing of fire refers to what's driving the evolution of that wave function, which is much like asking what created the universe.
Personally I don't see a need for a fire. That's realism's problem, and yes, MWI is a realist interpretation.
Depends on your definition of exists, but saying otherwise is essentially idealism. And most definitions of existence are pretty dang idealist. I really tried to hammer that home in some of my recent topics.
I may not be an idealist, but I've come to terms with 'existence' being an ideal, which is awfully dang close to being an idealist I guess. Personal identity is certainly an ideal, with no physical correspondence. It's a very useful ideal, but that's a relation, not any kind of objective thing.
Quoting boundlessOK. We differ on this point.
I'm pretty sure that the subjective experience of a free agent vs the experience of a non-free agent (however you want to define that) is pretty much identical, and thus having free will is not something one can determine by introspection.
Quoting boundlessI know that quantum mechanics does not tell you how to make a cherry pie. Does that make QM incomplete or does it just mean that you're leveraging the wrong tools to explain how to achieve the pie?
There are those that deny that pies are physical because they cannot describe them in terms of field equations. I consider that fallacious reasoning. Maybe the pies are not just particles, but any claim to that effect needs more justification that just personal incredulity.
Really? It does describe, but it describes what we know more than attempt to describe what is. In that sense, any such interpretation is far closer to the science of the situation than is a metaphysical interpretation.
Not exactly sure what you're saying they find absurd. Yes, it has always been the nature of science that the more we understand, the less we realize we know about the actual nature of things. This is sort of a progression from the naive realism (of say classical physics) to the statement that reality is stranger than we can know.
There's much I agree with in your op, but I don't see anything in it that suggests the qualia "redness" or "pain" could be created through computation.
A Turing machine can't create the experience of "redness". It could compute the conditions that give rise to it, and the aspects of the world that it represents. But if you have a solution, I'd be interested in hearing it.
Keep coming! You're getting close!
I believe that the 'fire' is an image of change. If the universe was merely a mathematical structure - as Tegmark's MUH (mathematical universe hypothesis) says - it would seem that the universe would be changeless. So either change is a 'persistent illusion' (as Einstein wrote about 'time' in a letter to the family of his deceased friend Michele Besso) or change is real. If change is real, something more than 'just math' is needed.
Ironically, if MUH was right, it is difficult for me to consider its ontology as 'physicalist'. After all, mathematical structures seem very remote to something I would call 'physical' (in a former post you disagreed...).
If, instead, there is something more than 'just math' we might ask ourselves what is it. Again, we agreed that common form of 'materialism' seem inadequate. So, again, if change is real, what is it?
Quoting noAxioms
Agreed something like MUH is essentially a sort of 'idealism', however more a variety in which concepts are what is fundamental. To me this kind of 'idealism' is defective because it can't, in my opinion, adequately explain change, consciousness and so on.
But I respect Tegmark for his clarity and honestly I think your position is similar. In his system there is no 'prime matter' that is left unexplained and 'somehow' follows mathematical laws. Simply reality is mathematical structures all the way down.
Quoting noAxioms
I think you're pretty close to what I am saying. You can't 'pin down' the identity of a person but denying the reality of a person is also wrong. Of course, if one starts from the assumption that anything that is 'real' can be 'pinned down' personal identity becomes an useful fiction.
Nevertheless, I also believe that the 'person' of a human being is not independent from the 'physical'. Perhaps the closest we can say is that the 'person' is a mode of existence, which, I believe, is curiously similar to how the 'Aristotelian' metaphysical tradition understood the 'soul' to be (note that for them the 'soul' wasn't a 'substance' opposed to matter).
Quoting noAxioms
I can grant that 'pies' are indeed useful fiction we impose on experience to make sense of it. Valid fictions that help us to 'navigate' in our experience that remain valid until one 'looks deeper'. This doesn't mean that 'everything is an illusion' but I'm open to the idea that the way we 'carve' the world into separate objects is, in fact, is more rooted in utility rather than 'truthfulness'. However, pies and human beings are vastly different kinds of 'entities'. I can accept the idea that pies might be one day completely described in terms of fundamental particles/fields but I'm not sure the same is true for human beings.
Quoting noAxioms
QBism for instance is pretty clear that wavefunctions are more like representations of the degree of beliefs an 'agent' (and QBists differ on what an 'agent' is) has about a given phenomenon. There is no need for them that there is an isomorphic relation between the mathematical structure of the theory and some properties of nature. Simply, QM is seen as an useful tool for calculating, predicting and so on.
QBists are quite explicit of this and, however, I believe that the same goes for all other epistemic views (even if admittedly the latter aren't as clear).
Newton and Galileo certainly believed that we could 'disclose' something real about the 'nature of things'. A famous passage of Galileo:
Quoting Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore (1623), in Opere, vol. VI, p. 232.
IIRC, even Fenyman (who AFAIK endorsed a form of the Copenaghen interpretation) in a lecture (there is an online video I believe somewhere) stated that physics is not only predictive. He made the example of the impressive ability of the Mayans to predict the motion of celestial objects. However, he was clear that science doesn't give us only predictions but it really helps to understand more of nature and we do understand more about celestial objects than the ancients.
Epistemic interpreters are often skeptics who also point out that what is common to all physical theories is their predictive powers. They would say that Newtonian mechanics remains valid for its predictive powers and not for being a 'faithful description' of the world.
I somewhat agree with them about this but, at the same time, I also believe that science is a gradual process of understanding better nature. Knoledge gradually becomes less and less 'confused' so to speak and 'physical reality' becomes less and less 'veiled'. I don't believe we will be ever be able to 'completely unveil' reality (so on this I agree with the skeptics) but at the same time I do believe that intelligibility of nature is real.
I don't know, but it seems to be the dualists that are claiming this knowledge in the absence of understanding. I never made such a claim. Perhaps you took my double-negative as a single negative.
Quoting Relativist
The relevant bit from the OP, which is a proposed empirical test for physicalism:
Quoting noAxioms
No, the quote does not mention any specific qualia, but the simulated person would notice the sudden disappearance of them if they were not there.
Note my distinction between a demonstration that physicalism is the case, and actual understanding of how consciousness works.
Quoting RelativistIf physicalism is true, then the machine very much can. So your assertion amounts to a claim that physicalism is wrong, but apparently expressed as opinion, not as something falsified.
Quoting boundlessYes, it would be. That means that the universe is not containted by time, which is generally concluded by relativity regardless of MUH or some other sort of solution. That the state of the universe is different at different times does not contradict the universe being changeless. States of things change. The universe is not a state.
Well, under alternate interpretations, yea, it is a state, but those are in denial of concepts like spacetime. Such a universe would need to be externally driven by such a fire.
Depends on how you define change. The state of a person changes over time. That's change, and not something that Einstein would considered to be an illusion.
Quoting boundlessRight. Math doesn't supervene on material or energy, and 'physical' has implications of material. Physicalism (but not materialism) still works in such a case, since it only suggests that nothing additional is needed.
MUH seems to have some big problems that need solving. Maybe they have been solved and I didn't read up on it. In particular, why does our particular mathematical structure appear so interesting? Most mathematical structures are not, and if they all exist equally, they you're probably part of one of the uninteresting ones, not the tiny fraction that is interesting. That's a tough problem, and one that Carroll has attempted to point out.
Change is a difference in state over time. How is that a problem with any interpretations of things? Change can also be over something other than time. e.g. The air pressure changes with altitude.
Then mathematics would not be fundamental, but would supervene on some entity thinking the mathematical thoughts.
Quoting boundlessMy quote there was not about if pies were fictions or had identity, but rather suggesting that pies cannot be explained in terms of say quantum fields. So by the same reasoning that some claim that humans cannot be purely physical, neither can pies or say Mars. I mean, where does the cherryness emerge if none of the particles are cherry?
No, it will never be done. It would be as pointless as trying to run a strip mine with tweezers. Wrong tool for the job.
Put more simply, it isn't hard to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, but science goes further and blames it on Earth spinning and not the sun moving around.
Sure, which is why they still teach in in school despite it being wrong for more boundary cases.
Right!
Quoting Wayfarer
Except idealists put mind at the root of the supervention tower, and I put it near the other end. How can I be an idealist if I do that?
Good point, but it means your Turing machine question doesn't further the analysis.
A Turing machine could produce feelings if (and only if) the machine's initial state includes the capacity to exhibit feelings. Feelings can't be programmed into existence. So the issue remains: how can feelings be accounted for? I offered 2 possibilities: illusionism and some otherwise undetected aspect of reality.
You reference simulation in your op. This amounts to a zombie: one could simulate a human that appeared to behave like a human in all ways, but it would not experience feelings because the machine lacks the capacity for them. For example, the machine could detect the wavelengths of reflected light, and identify "red", and react just as we would. But that't not experiencing the quale as we do.
As for my dualism, I'm just trying to come up with a system that is internally consistent. There may be many other guesses that are internally consistent, and there may be no way to falsify or verify any, as is the case with physicalism. But I have a couple starting points.
1) If what we can detect cannot explain something, then we should consider the possibility that there is something we can't detect.
2) If consciousness coming into existence only when physical structures have some level of complexity, without it having been the goal, does not make sense, then maybe we should consider that it was there all along.
Do you mean 'idea' when you write "ideal"? Do you mean that 'existence' is an idea or concept, but existence is not? If so, there is nothing idealist about that position.
It isn't the Turing machine that's going to have feelings, it will be the simulated person. I said as much in the OP. So its that simulated guy that has the capacity, not the Turing machine. Neither the Turning machine nor the people running it will know what it's like to be the thing simulated.
Physics of course, which is how they're accounted for if physicalism is true.
Right. That only works if there's a distinction between a zombie and a regular human, and it only works if qualia are non-causal, which is a self-defeating suggestion. The whole zombie argument seems to argue only for epiphenomenalism, which is trivially falsified.
Remember, the simulated person is not programmed by anybody to do or say anything. The point is, he can't tell when the simulation took over from the real physical state that was used for the initial condition. I think you'd notice if your qualia suddenly vanished.
Quoting PatternerNo, I concluded from your glossing over that you don't fully understand how it all works, which is fine because I don't know either. From this non-knowledge, I suggested that one is in a poor position to say how it cannot work.
If you fully understand how the brain physically works, and physicalism is true, or even if it isn't, then yes, you will find either subjective feeling of heat or the absence of it. If absence, they you'd find the parts that are supposed to be affected by these feelings but in the absence of the magic, are missing their cause. That's a prediction made by any dualist stance, and yet no scientist believes the suggestion enough to go look for it.
DesCartes put it in the pineal gland, which I thought was due to its inaccessibility, safe from falsification. Turns out he chose it (a gland of all things) because it's the only construct in the vicinity that there's but one of, and he felt there shouldn't be multiple receptor locations for this interaction.
But we can detect it, else you wouldn't know about it. Something physical must detect it, else there could be no physical effect.
Better. It kind of has been the goal, since it makes one more fit, so I'd leave that part out. It doesn't eliminate my answer to your first point. Something needs to detect it, simple or not. Such detection I suspect would not be all that complicated, but that's me considering an idea with no theory behind it.
Quoting JanusI mean a mental construct, with no corresponding physical thing. I've done a whole topic for instance on identity (of beings, rocks, whatever) being such an ideal.
No, I'd have put it in quotes like that if I was talking about the word. I've done other topics on that as well, where i query what somebody means when they suggest mind independent existence of something, and it typically turns out to be quite mind dependent upon analysis.
Quoting noAxiomsPhysical processes with no element of consciousness evolve with the goal of achieving arrangements that produce consciousness?
I don't understand what you mean. Isn't the identity of a rock simply whatever name or description I give it in order to identify it? Or else it is just the rock itself?
Quoting noAxioms
It seems obvious that any name or description of anything, the identification of it, is mind-dependent, but does it follow that the thing itself is mind dependent? Perhaps 'identity' does not have to possess a single meaning but could be counted as applying to both name (or identifying description) and object, no?
Are you referring to physics, as a scientific discipline?
It's possible that feelings depend on some aspect of physical reality that only manifests in sentient beings. Physicists would never be able to detect its existence.
How could this be compatible with physicalism? There is nothing physical about the simulated person outside of the Turing machine.
Simulations reproduce the informational, but not the physical, aspects of a system. If you are right, this implies that the 'what it's like' is informational, not physical (which I happen to believe).
But even if that were true, this still doesn't mean the simulation has qualia. It might be that only a certain type of informational processing manifest qualia. Ours have it, but the simulation lacks it. Would that imply qualia are epiphenomenal? Not necessarily. With the way our brains process information, qualia do work. The simulation might process in a completely different way that doesn't require qualia. The only requirement in a simulation is the informational behavior is reproduced. How it is reproduced is up to the simulation's designer.
Quoting noAxioms
The zombie isn't aware, in the subjective sense, so it wouldn't notice anything.
Well if the 'state of the universe' changes, then the universe changes. However, I think you made a good point here.
Anyway, relativity strongly suggests that 'change' is an illusion due to our limited perspective. However, as I noted in another discussion I had with you I am not sure if I am prepared to accept that. If our experience is illusory even on this seemingly basic fact, then perhaps this basic deception would undermine any empirical investigation.
Quoting noAxioms
'Idealism' is a broad category. On some interpretations, Plato held the Idea of the Good as the fundamental entity but it wasn't seen as a 'Mind'. Others would argue that the 'Good' was indeed a Mind.
Yet, Plato, under both interpretations is often regarded as an 'idealist'.
If we restrict the term 'Idealism' to describe the views of those who posit a Mind or a plurality of Minds as fundamental, then yes your view isn't idealistic. However, if you think that mathematical truths are fundamental you are quite close to that, in the sense that you would posit concepts ('intelligible forms') as fundamental realities.
Quoting noAxioms
Again, this is only valid if you think that 'mathematical truths' are physical. I guess that we have freedom to call views with the names we want to call them, provided that we do this in a consistent way.
To me mathematical truths are not 'physical' because, as I wrote earlier, I believe that they are not localized into space and time and are not identical to space-time.
Quoting noAxioms
I'm not sure how this is a problem for MUH. I mean, if all mathematical structures exist, then both interesting and non-interesting one do.
Quoting noAxioms
I can envision that all properties of 'cherryness' can be explained via the (known) properties of the constituents of cherries. I'm not sure that there is a 'discrete jump' in complexity between particles/fields and cherry.
However, in the case of a human being, I'm not so sure that there isn't a 'discrete jump'. It doesn't seem possible for consciousness to emerge as 'cherryness' does. So, if there is indeed emergence, it is of a different kind of emergence than in the case of cherryness.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, but a skeptic would concede to you that your model 'works better' than the ancient's. However, the skeptic would then point out that this doesn't necessarily mean that you have more knowledge of 'how things really are'.
The skeptic would use the example of the 'progress' from Newtonian mechanics (NM) and, say, Special Relativity (SR). Taken as two descriptions of physical reality, NM and SR are incompatible. We know that NM has been falsified. However, they are both valid in many contexts and NM can be impressively precise in its prediction. So, even if NM is an incorrect description of physical reality is good at making predictions. So, perhaps, the skeptic would argue, the same goes for all physical theories. Predictive power, alone, doesn't guarantee that a theory gives a good description of physical reality. You need something else than empirical confirmation. Given that science begins and ends in empirical observations, this means that, in order to justify that we do know more of 'physical reality as it is' you need extra-scientific reasons.
From a 'purely scientific' viewpoint, scientific theories are predictive models. Nothing more or less. And if we wanted to base our knowledge only on science we should 'suspend judgment' on everything that is different from predictions, measurements and so on. Scientific progress would only give us better predictions, applications etc, i.e. it would have only a pragmatic value rather than a noetic one.
I agree with that to a point. However, I do believe that, say, we can discuss about the intelligibility of nature and find out a reasonable position about it, i.e. 'metaphysics' has a place. If it didn't, then knowledge of 'physical reality' would be impossible.
P.S. I believe I'll be unable to respond further until at least next weekend.
Of course it has physical properties. It is the cause of physical effects. If it couldn't do that, you would not be going on about it. It therefore very much can be detected by our science. How do you not see that?
Why would a natural process refuse to work if there was an external goal involved? That seems pretty unlikely for a natural process that shouldn't 'care' about such things. It's like saying gravity only works when you don't want it to.
Quoting JanusNot talking about a token meant to represent the object. Yes, the object itself. OK, the topic I linked is more about there being no physical boundary for an object itself. I gave several examples of physical devices presuming to measure this, and every one of them was fictional.
The identity is more a question of: Is this rock the same one it was yesterday? What if I chip a bit off? Is it the same rock but smaller now, or is it two entirely new rocks? That's the kind of identity that is only a mental construct. We decide what convention works best and go with it. It being a convention makes it an ideal.
So people pragmatically consider themself to be the same person they were yesterday, but older, changed somewhat. That works great, but rationally it can be taken apart, suggesting once again the lack of physical basis. Derek Parfit did some nice work analyzing such things, and concluded that the physical lack of it doesn't matter.
I actually did a topic explicitly on that, but I think it went away with the old PF site.
Quoting JanusI don't think it follows, but the convention typically chosen by anybody is a mind dependent one. There are very few definitions that are not. "Is part of the universe" is heavily mind dependent, especially because of 'the' in there, implying that our universe is special because it's the one we see. "Is part of a universe" is better, but leaves open what constitutes a universe and what doesn't. It's also very much a relational definition, not a particularly objective one. Anyway, the linked topic very much goes into that issue specifically.
Quoting RelativistNo. Referring to the actual natural laws and constants of this universe, and not to the study and/or knowledge of same.
Well, see my reply to Patterner just above.
Quoting hypericin'What it's like' is subjective, which arguably is and isn't informational since you cannot know what it's like to be a bat for example.
I think the simulated guy would notice qualia abruptly shutting off. But yes, the machine running the simulation would not have qualia.
Then it is simulating something else, not the physical workings of the system.
I think you're thinking of an imitation, not a simulation. An entity that attempts to pass the Turing test is an imitation person, not a simulated one. It knows dang well that it's the machine, but being an imitation, it's goal is not to tell you that. The simulated person, like the chip, cannot tell if its real or not.
Quoting boundlessSure, but referencing 'the state of the universe' implies that it has a state, and thus more or less is a state. My assertion of the universe not being a state is consistent with relativity theory, black holes, and all that goes with it. I'm inclined not to be one of those that rejects Einstein, but that isn't to say that other interpretations (that are inconsistent with all of the above) are wrong.
Perhaps yes on the mathematical truths (arguably not since so many of them depend on unprovable axioms), but definitely not to any sort of concepts, all of which seem to supervene on something more basic.
I just said that such truths are not physical, the opposite of your assertion here.
Agree. Perhaps you read my comment wrong above to think I suggested otherwise.
Quoting boundlessBut there's so many more of the latter, to the point that you are more likely than not to be part of one of them.
As Carroll put it:
"The issue is not that the existence of such observers is ruled out by data, but that the theories that predict them are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed."
-- https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850
MUH (raw at least) seems to be such a theory.
How would you respond to somebody who cannot envision such an explanation being possible, especially given the current lack of such an explanation?
I would have said that the new model is closer, but sure, you'll never get all the way to ding an sich.
So, even if NM is an incorrect description of physical reality is good at making predictions.Same can be said of SR. It demonstrably does not correspond to reality. But it was never an attempt to do so. GR is closer, but just like NM, breaks down at the boundary cases. Doesn't imply that we should teach neither NM nor GR in schools.
Quoting noAxiomsCan you tell me what the physical properties of consciousness are? Are they like the physical properties of particles; things like mass, charge, or spin? Are they like the physical properties of objects; things like length, weight, or hardness? Are they like the physical properties of processes; things like speed, duration, or distance? Can we measure how much energy is required to taste sweetness or see red?
You seem to be assuming consciousness is a thing. Physicalism does not require that; it may be that consciousness is produced by the physical in a manner analogous to a movie is produced by the rapid projection of a series of still images. We can refer to the movie as if it is an object, but it actually is not. My hypothesis is that consciousness entails the rapid change from one static brain state to the next. This would be no more detectable than a movie: brain states can be detected, but not the subjective experience they create.
You are missing the distinction. The sim simulates a physical chip, simulating it's physical properties. But, it exhibits none of the physical properties of the chip: not the mass, not the current at any point, nothing. At best it can report values representing these physical quantities. Of course, any simulation simulates only a narrow subset of the physical properties deemed relevant.
If the simulation was aware, it suggests the awareness is a property of information/competition, not physics.
Quoting PatternerThis cannot be, since you posting on a forum about it is a physical effect. You (probably) don't post via telepathy, so the effect is not direct, but something needs to cause your fingers to type those specific words. Follow the chain back to where your mental processes necessarily cause a physical effect somewhere. Maybe it isn't in the brain. There's plenty of brainless things out there that those on this forum consider to be conscious, you included if I'm remembering correctly.
I know for a fact that some important decisions in my life have been 'ruled by one's d*ck' so to speak, decisions I would never have made had said non-brain organ not thrown its influence into the process.
Quoting PatternerA physicalist would say that all mental properties are physical properties. A dualist needs to answer that question himself. If he asserts none, then one is left with a self-contradiction since any writing about it (a physical effect) can only have physical causes. The mental, being totally undetectable, becomes an orbiting teapot: Posited, but totally lacking evidence.
Probably not, but they can influence things with those properties,. Being able to influence a physical entity is a physical property. It's something that can be scientifically measured.
Quoting RelativistPersonally I suspect consciousness is a physical process. If a process (like a movie) is a thing, then yes, else no. It isn't an object. Not sure how you're making this conclusion of 'thing' based on what I post.
Yes. It's treated as a thing in terms of syntax, but it's not an object like a rock, but it can be a grammatical object.
That does not sound much like a dualist hypothesis, with the mental not supervening on physical states of an object like a brain.
Quoting hypericinIt very much does simulate the current, at all points. Mass, no. Mass is pretty irrelevant to the operation of chip, so it's not simulated. We're not simulating how much effort it takes to mail them.
That's a loaded term. It would seem to not need what is probably your notion of 'awareness' in order to perform its function successfully. I see no relevance to this comment, so maybe I'm missing something.
In terms of ontology, things have properties, processes do not have properties. You may have meant it in a de dicto sense. Regardless, we agree consciousness is a process.
DNA replication is a process. How many base pairs were copied? How many ATP molecules were needed for energy? How long did it take?
If consciousness is a physical process, what are the answers to these kinds of questions?
You are missing the point. It simulates the current. But there is no current, just numerical values representing current. That is what separates the simulation of a circuit from the circuit. The simulation reproduces computational features of the circuit, without reproducing the circuit.
Simulation: reproduces computational features
Model: reproduces (some) physical features
Imitation: reproduces behavioral features
Reproduction: reproduces all features
And so, Does the simulated guy have qualia? It would seem this can only be true if qualia were computational. And if so, you can't build a qualia detector, as you can't build a computation detector. A computation can be performed in a vast variety of physical media, in a vast variety of ways. No physical detector can operate at that level, and detect the computation no matter how it is instantiated. It would have to be a physical property for it to be detectable.
Neuron firings, changes to action potentials, release of chemicals, other bodily activities. Of course, none of these measures apply to what we consider thought processes. But that would require knowing exactly how thoughts are produced in a brain.
Alright, since you've been using 'consciousness', are you saying that you cannot detect your own consciousness? That it has no physical effect?
Funny that you're straight up refused to answer a question asked so many times now.
Quoting Relativist
Oh really. Vapor pressure is not a property of boiling? Light absorption spectrum is not a property of photosynthesis? Sorting efficiency is not a property of a sort process? Bias not a property of decision making?
I suppose one can argue that these are all properties of whatever is running the process (can't think of what in the case of boiling, since vapor pressure is neither property of water nor of heat.
Unclear what you might hope to accomplish by taking this stance.
Quoting hypericinThat's right. It simulates current for the purpose of learning what real current will do to the real circuit. I never said the simulation was the same thing as the actual chip. Just that it has all the same relevant properties, so one can learn all you need to know about the real chip behavior without actually making one.
Disagree with this one. Computation is used, sure, but most often the purpose is not to reproduce computational features. They simulate the weather a lot, but not the computational features of the weather at all.
OK
You're thinking like a model ship or something, not a model of physics, the latter of which does not reproduce physical features. The ?CDM model is an example of the latter.
Yea, which makes it a nice test, no?
Well, you ask the guy if his qualia is still there. If you go with the zombie argument, then qualia is epiphenomenal and the zombie is lying when he makes up stories about it. I don't seem to understand how that argument helped Chalmers' case since the zombie behaving identically without the qualia is either inconceivable or an assertion of epiphenomenal, which is identical to fiction.
Quoting Gillian Russell
Each god is omniscient about non-indexical facts. They each know the truth values of sentences like:
The Question: Can either god deduce the truth values of indexical sentences?
For example:
The idea: Indexical sentences can't follow from non-indexical premises. The gods know all non-indexical contents — i.e. all propositions that are true at the world. But indexical sentences don’t have fixed contents unless we first supply a context (agent, time, place, etc.). The angry god can know “There is one angry god” but not "I am the angry god".
There is a piece of information each god lacks, of a different kind from ordinary propositional/worldly information. It is contextual or self-locating information.
A puzzling argument.
I mean 'computational' in the broad scene, where one state of a weather system physically "computes" the next. The state and only the state is what is transformed, not the substance. And if you think about it, there must be a homology between this physical "computation" and the sort of computation a computer does, otherwise the computer wouldn't have the causal power to simulate it.
Quoting noAxioms
Right. Just trying to make my little taxonomy more complete.
Quoting noAxioms
But remember, this is a simulated human. Part of a human's behavior is to respond to questions about their qualia as if they had them. Answers to the negative would break the simulation.
Just as in your circuit example. The sim circuit faithfully reports so many amps at each point. Yet, there is no actual current flowing, so in a certain sense the sim circuit is lying, as is the sim human.
Quoting noAxioms
Why? Can you quote or restate your argument?
Quoting noAxiomsWell, twice, anyway. and I haven't answered it because I've been trying to make you understand what I actually said. But first I'll answer, and then I'll try to make you understand.
Yes, I detect my own consciousness. Although 'detect' is too weak a word for this. I [I]am [/I] my consciousness. I would give up quite a few body parts before I would give up consciousness. I am still me without an arm, or a leg, or both, or even all of my arms and legs. But, at some point, I'm sure I would wish I no longer had subjective experience. Wayfarer and I recently posted these two quotes:
What I said is:
[I]If what we can detect cannot explain something, then we should consider the possibility that there is something we can't detect.[/I]
To try to clarify, let me try it this way:
[I]If what we can detect (the physical) cannot explain something (consciousness), then we should consider the possibility that there is something we can't detect (the fundamental nature of consciousness).[/I]
No. It's a property of the material. I'm referring to the intrinsic properties of existents. Everything that exists has intrinsic properties.
Quoting noAxioms
Clarity on ontology.
One could say that "red has the property of being in a wavelength range of X-Y" but it's just way of talking. Red isn't a thing. Rather, the word "red" corresponds to wavelength range of X-Y.
One could refer to speed as a property of running. But speed is actually a property of the runner (or more precisely: a relation between the runner and the earth).
OK, It seems pretty obvious that indexical truth does not follow from non-indexical truth. Not sure how to apply that here. For one, most indexical statements come with an implied context, allowing a reasonable assessment of truth. Secondly, I'm not sure if the first/third person dichotomy is an index/non-index kind of division, mostly because yes, context is almost always implied, and almost any statement is indexical, such as 'noAxioms lives to his 55th birthday'. The context there is subtle and often missed, but it's there.
Thanks for joining in. Don't think it was due to my jibe about your avatar-du-jour.
Quoting hypericinOK. Don't think I've ever see the word used that way. States correspond to data, and data does not compute, the engine does. It is unclear if in reality there is an engine involved in the evolution from one state to the next. This would be the 'breathing of fire into the equations' that Hawlking spoke of. A simulation is typically a presentist model, whereas reality probably isn't. It's the presence/absence of that fire that is the difference.
I.E. If the universe is a mathematical structure, it is not necessary that there is a more fundamental engine doing computations somewhere. That would make mathematics not fundamental at all.
And yes, this is only my 11th topic here, but I've done one on that subject as well, 3 years ago.
A simulation is typically classical, and the universe is not, so a computer cannot simulate reality. I see no evidence for instance that 1) there is state at all (counterfactuals), and 2) that any of the values (the velocity of the moon relative to Earth say) is discreet, meaning it is impossible to express a typical real number. The set of numbers available to a (infinite capacity) computer is countably infinite, but the reals are not, and I suspect the universe uses reals.
I don't think something as crude as a human crosses the barrier into requiring more than such a classical simulation, but the expression of the initial state of such a system possibly does cross some sort of measurable-in-principle barrier.
I reject this fantasy. If my qualia valished abruptly, I would 1) notice, 2) not feel obligated to pretend otherwise as you imply, and 3) probably not even be able to express my distress since qualia is required for a human to do almost any voluntary thing like communicate coherently.
Why? The simulation just makes the chemicals and momentums do their things. It has no high level information that it's a human being simulated. It's just a bounded box with state, suitable for simulating a heap of decaying leaves as much as anything else without any change of code.
I did, just then..
Quoting Patterner
First of all, that wording half implies that we can only detect the physical. I do admit that you don't explicitly deny the ability to detect anything non-physical.
Your argument instead hinges on the lack of explanation. Physicalism might indeed not have an full explanation, but neither does your alternative, which lacks even the beginnings of one. So positing something undetectable isn't an improvement.
Secondly, the point I keep making: This fundamental nature of consciousness cannot be undetectable. It may itself be non-physical, but it has to cause physical effects, because you are physically responding to it. That's the part that's self-inconsistent with your suggestion.
Quoting Relativist
I consider processes to exist as much as the material involved in the process. This all seems a quibble about choice of language application and not about how anything actually works.
Why does this point matter?
Quoting Relativist
Beyond that, I was just explaining what I meant.
"I" is an indexical.
What is shown is that there is a barrier to entailment between sentences int he third person and sentences in the first person. Given access to all true third-person sentences, even the gods cannot deduce the simple "I am on the coldest mountain".
The context is an addition, not found in any third person sentence.
It would seem that first person accounts are indeed not reducible to third person accounts.
Not a mystery, perhaps; but a puzzle.
Damn Lewis. The more I read of his, the better he gets.
@Wayfarer, more grist to your mill.
A formal account:
Let:
Then for any extensional predicate F:
Yet he does not know whether:
And therefore he does not know whether:
Even when F is extensional.
This shows that extensional truths about the world still do not fix the reference of “I”.
It seems that Lewis has demonstrated the irreducibility of first person accounts. What is at issue now is whether this amounts to more than grammar. Now I would, perhaps along with Anscombe and Wittgenstein, both admit that this is no more than a piece of grammar, and yet maintain that while "I am not the god on the cold mountain" does not tell us anything more than "Banno is not the god on the cold mountain", it nevertheless positions me in the language game.
I'm reversing the order of your next two paragraphs. I don't think it changes your meaning in any way, and I'm not intending to do anything like that. It's just that putting them in this order seems a more natural progression for my point.Quoting noAxiomsI don't know how I am being inconsistent when I agree with everything you just said. And I have never said otherwise.
I would like to draw attention to what you just said about consciousness not being physical, which I have been saying for several weeks in conversations with you and others.
Quoting noAxiomsIt isn't merely the lack of a physicalist explanation. It's the lack of any hint of what a physicalist explanation might look like. The reason for that is because it is trying to build something non-physical out of physical components. That's worse than trying to build a wooden house out of water, because at least wood and water are physical things made out of the same primary particles. if I told you I saw somebody pour a bunch of water on the ground, and suddenly there was a house, you would be skeptical. If you saw it happen yourself, you would still think somebody was pulling a fast one. But building something non-physical out of physical components is unquestionably the answer, despite the fact that many brilliant people have been failing to even get a vague idea of how it might work?
No, there is no evidence for what I'm suggesting. But at least I'm positing something from which this non-physical phenomenon can be built. A fundamental property. We don't know whatmass is. We don't know what charge is. We only know what those things do, and the proof is all around us. We don't know what dark matter is, and cannot detect it in any way. But we assume it exists because we can see what it does. The evidence is all around us. I'm suggesting another fundamental property. We don't know what consciousness is, but we know it exists because we feel what it does. The proof is ourselves.
Relevance noted. Trying to see if it solves anything, especially since the universe is seemingly not composed of true statements.
The context is typically there for most indexicals, including any first person account. Our gods seem to have no point of view, or they'd know their context.
How about a statement of the form "The cold mountain is to the left". Is that a third person sentence? It arguably references an unspecified context, but not necessarily a subjective one.
Quoting Relativist
OK. The whole thing came up because you suggested that I consider a process to be a 'thing', and apparently because I consider processes to be eligible for having properties. We have differing opinions on this, and 'thing' isn't precisely defined, so that kind of explains the disconnect.
Quoting PatternerThat's kind of funny because I read what I said myself and I decided it doesn't follow. The noun there is 'nature', and the nature of this consciousness may be undetectable even if the consciousness itself is. That just means you cannot know how it works, which is true of plenty of physical things, anything with multiple interpretations.
It still stands that whatever it's nature, this posited immaterial <whatever> must have physical properties in order to work, and that means it should be (and is) physically measurable. You just need to figure out where and how, and only once you know that can you lay judgement on what can and cannot utilize it.
I disagree since it's pretty trival to put environmental awareness, appropriate reaction, and intent into some fairly simple devices. That's at least a hint, better than not only a lack of dualist explanation, but an actual assertion that there isn't ever going to be one. The whole point of the black box is its blackness, the inner working being deliberately hidden, the opposite of investigation of how anything works.
Not much. Works for sea monkeys.
Are you dissing dualism here? The brilliant people seem to have a vested interest in not investigating how it works. There very much is data to investigate like how this supposed non-physical stuff is so susceptible to physical damage.
Nonsense. If it's undetectable, then it should have no reason to be posited (*1). It very much is detected because it's effects are physical and measurable. Thing is, it's slippery stuff and defies being captured in a container.
But that's how you detect anything. We don't detect the moon directly, but we see what it does. Dark matter is like that, just way less obvious. What they didn't do is suggest the galactic rotation curves are caused by magic. They could have. Perhaps MOND is an attempt at doing so, except it has never worked.
*1 There often very much IS a reason, but the reason is not to explain nonexistent evidence. Not all explanations have knowledge as their goal.
You say you will notice, but this already presumes that you have the capacity to notice. If the simulation is just state and processing, there will be no distress. A faithful simulation of the human brain will, somewhere in its workings, faithfully process all the state associated with a full qualitative experience. The agent will "experience" it's qualia, and report nothing unusual. There just may not be any actual qualia.
In the same way, your chip sim faithfully processes all the state associated with electrical flow. There just isn't any actual electricity.
Quoting noAxioms
If you show a human an apple and ask them what color they are experiencing, they will say 'red'. This is a behavioral fact. And so, a simulated human agent should respond in the same way. If they do not, something is wrong with the simulation. But this says nothing about whether the agent is actually experiencing any qualia at all.
Quoting noAxioms
Computers can't process infinite precision reals, but they can process numbers precise to an arbitrary degree. At some point the result will converge so that it is not measurably different.
But hopefully, what one says about the university is.
Quoting noAxioms
Nice. Your sentence is indexical without being in the first-person. There is some tension between the Lewis account and the Anscombe/Wittgenstein account, but also some agreement in that both admit to a context, the one saying it is additional information, the other that it is a role int a language game.
An aside - the dependence here is on context, not on subjectivity. It's not that first-person statements are subjective - whatever that might mean - that is at issue, but how we account for the place of the context in first person statements and indexicals.
That's why the guff here about qualia is irrelevant.
Quoting Banno
To me the natural conclusion is that the guff here about indexicals is irrelevant.
So Chalmers separates first-person access, the subjective, phenomenal, what-it-is-like aspects from the first-person perspective or standpoint, indexical, self-locating, contextual information (“I am here now”). Most philosophers conflate these.
It's been done here. Folk are using “What-it-is-like” accounts, which misunderstand the source of first-person irreducibility. They treat it as arising from private inner objects along the lines of qualia, but the actual source is grammatical: the first-person pronoun designates a role within communal language-games, not a metaphysical subject of experience.
Theories about qualia, and much phenomenology, disembodies the person from the practices that make the first-person possible, and thereby veer into a form of conceptual solipsism.
The formal logic being used here mitigates against the tendencies of natural language to take it's own grammar too seriously, to mistake it for ontology.
This feels silly. How on earth do you get first person perspective from mere grammar? That is quite the trick. You point out that people conflate subject-as-language-role and subject-as-experiencer, only to then somehow reduce one to the other?
Anything with the right cognitive skillset can play communal language games. ChatGpt, for instance. But this does not track at all with whether ChatGpt is an irreducible subject. It can be the (unlikely) case that it is, and the (likely) case that it isn't. Similarly, a dog, while communicative, lacks language entirely. Certainly they have no notion of indexicals. Yet, there is something it is like to be a dog, just as much as there is for me and you.
If the matrix product of these two concepts results in a 2x2 grid, where each cell is perfectly possible, how can one have their origin in the other?
Subject, Language User: Human
Subject, Non-Language User: Dog
Non-Subject, Language User: LLM
Non-Subject, Non-Language User: Tree
I honestly don't see how anyone can conflate these. I remembered and found this quote of yours (I remembered the thread title somehow).
Quoting Banno
Has your understanding improved in the intervening decade plus? Is it possible that you, and maybe some others here, have a cognitive architecture that makes it difficult to fix on qualia as a distinct concept? Or, is this just another philosophical difference?
No. I continue to think the qualia are incoherent. In so far as they are private sensations, they are irrelevant, and in so far as they are public, we already have 'red" and "sour" to cover that use.
Quoting hypericin
I don't. The logical or public irreducibility of first-person ascriptions is linguistic. Stop trying to explain them by positing private inner objects such as qualia. First-person grammar explains why self-ascriptions behave differently from third-person reports; it does not explain the existence of conscious subjects.
Rocks have physical boundaries?namely where the surface meets the air or water and the ground. The boundaries may not be precise on the atomic level, but a boundary does not have to be absolutely precise for us to be able to identify an object.
Quoting noAxioms
"This rock"! If it is this rock yesterday and today it is the same rock. Which rock did you chip a bit off? This rock or that rock? If you break a rock in half then it is the same rock now in two pieces
from one perspective, or from another it is two smaller rocks. It all depends on how you frame it?there is no context-independent fact of the matter.
Quoting noAxioms
Conventions? You are talking about descriptions or specifications, not about the objects described or specified. The objects are not conventions either.
Quoting hypericinYou're right. For instance, I presumed memory is physical. If that's taken away, I will have no memory of that which was taken away, but I also will be completely unable to function since I could not utter a sentence, lacking memory required to remember what I wanted to say and where I was in the utterance, and lacking language knowledge at all.
So perhaps I (the simulated copy of me) would just be a vegetable, in no distress at all.
If there was memory of the qualia, then its abrupt absence would be noticed. Whether that causes distress or not depends on if that distress is part of what was taken away. It probably was. Either way, if the simulated entity notices the lights going out and he retains the ability to report things, he'd report it.
Not if dualism is true. It would be like perfectly simulating a physical radio and expecting it to play music. It just wouldn't because you're missing something that is more than the physical radio, and the simulated radio would have zero access to real radio waves.
Point is, the simulation makes for a wonderful falsification test for both sides of the issue, leaving me to wonder how each side would reject the results if their own opinion was falsified.
How can qualia be experienced if there isn't any? This all seems contradictory. I've essentially created a p-zombie here, which is identical under physicalism and not identical under dualism (both substance and property). The dualist will thus reject the test on grounds of p-zombies behaving identically, but I've argued how that cannot be. They cannot make up a story about something they cannot know. They're not conceivable without some serious denial of logic.
OK. I never said there was. That's what it means to be a simulation. The simulated chip cannot detect if it's real or if it's a simulation. If the simulation is incomplete, then it could detect the difference. For instance, the simulation does not simulate mass, but the chip has no way of testing its own mass. If it did, then it needs to be part of the simulation.
OK, but under dualism, the zombie simulated would be a human body, not a human.
Exactly The simulation is missing a critical component, and would thus not be simulating a human. That's why it makes such a nice falsification test, since it works only if a human body and a human are the same thing.
Never worked with an analog computer then? I have. Interesting stuff, but hard to simulate anything complicated since they're so limited. No memory, no instructions.
Quoting Banno"The universe is not composed of true statements" is also an indexical and thus lacks an objective truth value. The language usage there is so common that most forget that it's an indexical.
Not being well versed in any of the known philosophers, I don't know how (Wittgenstein presumably) argues for the language game thing, and I see arguments made by language games all the time.
Quoting JanusWhere it meets the ground is pretty ambiguous. I've a small protrusion of rock in my yard. Does the rock end near the vaguely defined mean ground level? Does it mass a kg or is it a continental plate, even if most of the plate is not the slate that protrudes from my yard? Read the topic if you're interested. One test is: "How big is this?" where 'this' is something pointed to or touched. No actual language is allowed, since the contention is that 'this' is an ideal, defined only by language. Just saying 'rock' gives a huge clue about an ideal instead of the thing in itself.
Even with biological beings it's quite ambiguous. How much do I weigh? Well, 9 stones, but that includes the roll of coins in my pocket. Is that part of me? Fiction says it is. Logic has no clear answer. Convention says it's not part of me, but convention is an ideal.
Of course. Such is the nature of a pragmatic ideal.
Just so. Hence identity also being merely an ideal, lacking in objective truth.
Your statement immediately above seems to suggest otherwise.
You may think the core feature of conscious experience is irrelevant. Others disagree.
Quoting Banno
These don't generally refer to qualia. Rather, to public features. We just happen to identify these features by a internal coding system, qualia. How each of our coding systems presents to us is not communicable by language or any other means, as there is no stable referent language can latch onto.
Quoting Banno
I'm not. I think one has nothing to do with the other. You are the one trying to shoehorn your language games into a topic far afield from them.
I don't think so.
If qualia are private, then how is it that you and these others agree about them? How do you know that, when you use the term "qualia", you are all talking about the same thing? Especially if:
Quoting hypericin
If you’re right that qualia are private, then you can’t claim consensus with others who also believe in them, because there’s no way to determine whether your “qualia” and their “qualia” refer to the same thing.
So qualia can't be usefully used in our discussions of consciousness. Or they are not private.
We don't know, and can never know, that the content of our qualia agree. What most of us do agree is that there is something that it is like to see an apple and smell ammonia. This shared fact structures our collective experience, and the concept can be communicated with language. While qualitative content can never be.
The concept is public, in that it refers abstractly to universal human features most of us understand. But a part of the concept is that its concrete instantiations as qualia we individually undergo are private.
Chalmers move is to suppose a structural similarity between the players, that there is a "shared internal geometry" to which terms such as "qualia" make reference. He suposes that indexicals like “here,” “now,” along with “this feeling,” “my visual field” succeed in reference despite lacking Wittgensteinian criteria. Qualia are understood by acquaintance, not by public criteria.
Dennett would reply that phenomenal concepts don't pick out anything. What is spoken of as "the sensation of red" is not a thing at all, so much as the illusion of a thing. Consider how the red in the sunset changes over time as well as over the span of the sky; what here is the sensation of red?
Dennett repeats Wittgenstein's point, that if two people cannot compare referents, and cannot check criteria, and cannot correct or be corrected, then they are cannot genuinely be said to be “talking about the same thing.”
He points out that relying on phenomenal introspection cannot be shown to be reliable. Reports of “similarity” among experiences are public behaviour, not windows into private geometry - if this "geometry" is to amount to anything, it is imposed by us, not grounded in introspection. What Chalmers is relying on is not private sensations but public behaviour.
I think Dennett has the better case here.
While I was writing this, you replied:
Quoting hypericin
I think it clear that you are relying on a structure that is imposed by our shared language, a structure that is public. We can see the shared language, and that gives us the illusion of a shared private world.
FWIW, my take:
We, as conscious beings, live in the perspective of the brain's executive decision maker. All qualia are informational, they tell us about the world and about ourselves. Qualia are the way that the brain presents information to itself, in a form it can efficiently process and act upon. Sensory data, bodily sensations, feelings, all just information that guide us in making decisions and ultimately acting.
Qualia exist only in the context of the brain that produces them. We are, each of us, a machine within a machine. The brain creates for us a virtual world, and then lets us executive decision makers use and act on this information.
Qualia are as real as a computer animation. They exist, but only in terms of the larger framework which supports them. There is no exotic physics, nothing mystical. Just a system organizing information in a way it is able to effectively process and act on.
Form our perspective, qualia are elemental, mysterious, and apart from the material world. But that shouldn't be surprising for virtual machines who experience everything only through qualia.
I'm not sure I understand. It seems like you're saying the brain understands the information well enough to convert it to a different format? If it understands the information in the first place, why does it need to convert it? I can understand a computer AI understanding the code, but presenting it in a form [I]we[/I] can efficiently process and act upon. But why does the brain present what it already understands to itself in a different form?
Or am I misunderstanding?
Think division of responsibility. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions. When receiving information from the world, one part of the brain translates that information into a form that can be easily processed and acted upon. Then the executive, the conscious part, uses that translated information to learn and to act.
I agree with you that relativity - both special and general - taken literally imply 'eternalism'. And, indeed, the existence of time dilation, the limit of the speed of light, black holes, gravitational waves etc corroborate the validity of general relativity.
However, there is other empirical evidence (mostly experiential evidence) that I can't deny that seem to suggest that 'eternalism' is wrong.
Quoting noAxioms
I would also add something like 'Goodness', 'Beauty' etc as fundamental, but I would digress.
Regarding unprovable axioms, I'm not sure that this is a problem. I mean, can you give an example of a 'mathematical truth' that is not based on axioms?
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, fine. In which case, however, you're saying that something that isn't physical exists, so you can't be a physicalist (unless you are using the term 'physicalist' to describe a 'broader' position in which the mental supervenes/reduces/emerges/is dependent on the physical but doesn't exclude the existence of non-physical entities).
Quoting noAxioms
I do not get the point you and Carroll make. I'll read Carroll's paper. At best it seems to me that it is an objection to the 'plausibility' of MUH rather than a critique of its consistency and/or it being a correct description of reality.
Quoting noAxioms
To them, I would reply that in the case of 'consciousness' I see properties like qualia, the experience of 'free will' etc that seem obviously harder to be understood in terms of what we know of the 'physical' than in the case of 'cherryness'. This difference leads me to think that a complete physicalist explanation of 'consciousness' is less likely than a physicalist explanation of cherryness.
Quoting noAxioms
Agreed. I would also add that this implies that the 'ding an sich' has some kind of intelligibility. Otherwise, we would able to distinguish which model is 'better'.
Quoting noAxioms
Of course, yes. Even from a purely pragmatical point of view that the skeptic shares this is true. However, the skeptic wouldn't agree that we can say that NM or GR (or QM for that matter) can give us true knowledge. They work but their usefulness is no guarantee to their correspondence to reality.
I can grant that to the skeptic. But past at a certain point, the skeptic position seems to me to lose its plausibility. GR seems indeed to be closer to 'reality' than NM was. However, 'reality' is 'veiled' to borrow from an expression of Bernard d'Espagnat, so the quest of the knowledge of it doesn't stop (precisely becuase it is 'veiled' and not 'totally clear' or 'totally hidden').
I think what you have in mind is an incomplete absence of qualia. For instance, the idea of someone losing all five senses at once. Yet, they are blindsighted in all five senses, so they can still navigate the world as before, just without conscious awareness.
But keep two things in mind:
1. Memory is also qualitative. When we remember, we remember images, sounds, feelings. These are just as much qualia as external sensations. It is just that the brain is able to bookkeep these, marking them as internal (schizophrenia might be the failure of this bookkeeping mechanism).
Someone who lost all qualitative awareness would lose the qualitative aspect of memory as well. So, there would be no mismatch, memory (no qualia) would match current situation (no qualia).
2. Feelings are also qualitative. It is not just distress that would be lost, all feelingds would be lost.
No sensations, no feelings, no memory of either of these. If the sim lost qualia, it wouldn't notice a thing.
Quoting noAxioms
No worries, happy holidays!
I've kind of stayed out of this exchange, but I have to agree here with you. I do not follow any argument that leads to how Banno sees things, and thus I decline to leverage such thinking to support my opinion.
I am currently inclined to agree with Chalmers in that under 'meaning is use', reference to 'my feeling' is relatable to feeling by a similar context, anchoring the meaning.
Quoting Banno
But word usage is not about assertions of the referent being the same thing. Most language is pragmatic, and if a Doctor asks me if I'm in pain, nobody suggests he's asking if I'm experiencing his pain, or pain the way he would. I don't buy Dennett's reasoning.
Quoting Banno
Introspection is valid evidence. Discussion of introspection is presented evidence, which is indeed public.
Quoting hypericin
We probably agree that there is something it is like for another human to experience these things, and that the experience is vaguely similar from one human to the next. This might be totally wrong. I know my father's experience of the apple image is somewhat different than my own, that he could not experience red the way I do. As for non-human experience of X, you can assert that there is something it is like for A to experience it, and assert that there isn't something it is like for B to experience it, all at one's own whim. B cannot experience it because B experiencing it in its own way does not lend support to my unbacked belief system.
Quoting BannoIn a universe that IS composed of true statements, the statement above would be false (and perhaps nonexistent). That makes it context dependent, and thus an indexical.
It also makes the mistake of implying the existence only one universe, a very idealistic definition being used for ontology. I did say above that almost anybody's definition of 'exists' is an idealistic one. Not being an idealist, I needed to find a definition that was an exception, resulting in my more or less relational view of such things.
- - - - -
Quoting boundless
Just for reference, light speed is locally c under both relativity and not. Time dilation is a coordinate effect (not real) under relativity (R), but is real under absolutist (A) interpretations.
Light speed has no limit non-locally. I don't know how (A) frames gravitational waves. They nave to exist since they're empirically detectable. Black Holes? Yea, those can only exist under R, so they make a funny sort of private falsification test, sort of like how a test for an afterlife is private.
All this is a nit. Just me spouting my science-forum background.
Really. They're empirically the same, except for the BH test I mention above.
Maybe not. Not enough of a mathematician to think of one without help.
Not being a realist, that depends heavily on one's definition of 'exists', but I often go with 'relates to', which is a relation with something else, and sure, I think there are relations between entities that are not necessarily physical.
If you say so, then no word describes a stance that doesn't assert that final qualification. Maybe there is one, but I'm unaware of it.
A physicalist cannot suggest that the physical supervenes on something more fundamental? I've always used 'materialist' to express that stance.
It kills so many more theories that just MUH. There are many standard cosmological interpretations that fail this test. This doesn't mean they're wrong, it just means that they cannot be simultaneously justified and true.
Quoting boundlessBut we're not talking about consciousness or the experience of this pie. The person is asserting that the pie itself, never experienced, is more than a physical state of matter. How would you respond to this person? What evidence would you supply to counter this person's incredulity of the alternative?
Better can be assessed in multiple ways: Simpler, or making better predictions. The predictions are pretty similar between the sun rising each day, and the alternative of the Earth spinning. So in this case, 'better' probably comes from simplicity, from the lack of additional inventions to get it to work. Maybe it's not simpler. If Earth spins, then why don't we fall off? Gravity is arguably more complicated than just blaming everything on God, who happens to have an awful lot of stuff to move around each day, all seemingly constrained to predictable paths, without any will being exercised to break the monotony now and then. That's an awful brutally boring job to have your deity have to do forever, like the lowest factory worker.
Does anybody? I mean, what, true, complete knowledge? There's always more to learn, and always parts what are interpretation dependent. So truth is forever unreachable. Your bit from Bernard seems to convey your agreement with this.
Concerning p-zombie plausibility:
Quoting hypericinAs the story is typically told, the sensory hardware is still there, as is all the brain hardware. But the experience of those senses is gone, leaving only the automoton physical response to the data, not a response to the experience. Except I find this utterly implausible since my reactions (talking about it say) are directly due to the experience, not to the data. The data does have effect. I jump due to sudden noises, and shiver/sweat in response to temperature. I have no conscious control over that, so it's evidence that there is at least some processing of the incoming data that is more direct, before it gets to the experience part.
So yea, I assert that since so much of it is in response to experience (perhaps all of language), a zombie could not function identically without it. I labeled it a fantasy to suggest otherwise.
Some of it is. Memorizing the digits of Pi seems pretty thin on those qualities, but the memory of qualia once had? Yea, that's very qualitative. But where is that memory stored?
This seems to suggest that the brain stores them, meaning our simulated guy remembers the qualia, but isn't getting it anymore. And the implausible suggestion is that he'll not behave any differently with that turned off.
This comment on the other hand suggests that qualitative memory is stored offsite (not in the brain, or at least not via the physical properties of it. So the loss is not noticed, but any reactions to qualitative experience is still lost. How does one interpret speech (recognize a voice say) with the qualitative experience of that voice gone?
Agree. Don't agree that the lack of feelings will result in identical behavior compared to somebody with them. The key difference is the implausibility of somebody totally lacking qualia somehow describing feelings never felt, and insisting that the experience it doesn't have cannot be explained physically.
I have on occasion claimed to be a p-zombie (in all seriousness) simply because it's so obvious to somebody who's conscious, and I only used the words (conscious, qualia, feelings) due to imitation of others, not due to actually having the inexplicable thing that I cannot know. The obvious solution to this disconnect is that some of us are zombies and some not. We don't behave the same. What is so clear to you is baffling to me, and we only use the words because everybody else does.
Thanks, and same to you if it's holidays. One can never tell.
Yes, indeed, there need be nothing "the same" between your pain and the doctor's pain, apart from the game of assessing pain level and location and prescribing solutions. We need not have a shared referent. You reaffirming the idea that meaning and successful communication do not require private referential identity.
So if we agree to talk of a qual of coffee - even if here, now - what is it that is being agreed on? The term "the aroma of coffee" perhaps picks out a pattern of behaviour and report, coordinates shared expectations, and is indexical but public. But it does not pick out a thing. We may avoid the hypostatisation.
What we have is not a qual, but the aroma of coffee.
It's not just being context-dependent that makes an indexical. The truth value of an indexical changes with who is doing the uttering.
"I am Australian" is true in my mouth, perhaps not in yours. But the truth value of "The universe is not composed of true statements" does not depend directly on who says it in this way.
I assume that by 'absolutist' you mean theories like the modern versions of Lorentz Ether Theory (LET). There have been attempts to build versions of LET compatible with GR, but my point wasn't about that. To be honest, I'm not really interested in those attempts, which seem to be somewhat 'forced'. Perhaps, 'eternalism' will be shown to be incompatible with quantum gravity, but I am not enough informed on that topic.
I meant that 'eternalism' seems to be in contrast to our experience of change, 'free will' etc. Perhaps those things are illusory, but personally I need more evidence that they are illusory to accept the idea.
Quoting noAxioms
Same here. But, anyway, didn't Godel prove that even simple mathematical structures are based on unprovable axioms? In fact, the very impossibility to prove 'everything' (as 'formalists' like Hilbert believed) was seen by Godel himself IIRC as a proof of 'platonism'. After all, if everything was provable by humans, it would make more sense to think that mathematics is purely an invention (not a decisive point, but nevertheless an evidence against 'realist' views).
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, perhaps I see more the point now. However, it is isn't a 'fatal' point against MUH.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, I understood in this way your point. I would answer as I answered in my previous post.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, I would add that if 'physical reality' wasn't (at least partially) intelligible, predictions would be impossible. Indeed, IMO if physical reality didn't have an order, it would be quite difficult to explain how could predictions be possible in the first place.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, I would perhaps say that IMO physical reality is less 'veiled' than D'Espagnat thought. At the same time, however, I also see the 'total undrestanding' of physical reality as unreachable. Still, I do not see this unreachability as evidence against its intelligibility.
IMO the skeptics just go too far. We might see as 'through a glass, darkly' to borrow an expression from St. Paul the Apostle but we are not 'blind'.
There is no hypostasisation. A quale is not a material thing, it is more an event. But it is concrete, not abstract. The "aroma of coffee" picks out the subjective character of the internal event that occurs when coffee is smelled. (While patterns of behavior, expectations, etc are all real, this is just not what "the aroma of coffee" refers to).
The privacy of qualia is philosophical, it doesn't necessarily have significance in linguistic practice. In practice, there is a cousin to naive realism, call it "naive intersubjectivism": the presumption that we all internally experience basically the same things. Even though philosophically, the subjective aroma of coffee is private, by presumption we can talk about it as if everyone is talking about the same thing, everyone experiences what I experience. Moreover, that which prompts the experience is public. And so the discourse can function, even if its philosophical presuppositions are suspect.
Even if naive intersubjectivism is abandoned, we can still discuss qualia. We just abandon the idea that we can understand concretely what others experience. "The aroma of coffee" becomes relative, that which the sniffer experiences when smelling coffee. There is no singular, concrete content, but rather a conceptual structure: that particular experience which each individual undergoes.
The aroma of coffee is hardly private. The discourse functions without qualia, on the basis that what we smell is the smell of coffee, regardless of whether it is the very same for each of us or not.
So yes, the discourse can function without the metaphysical introduction of qual. That only confirms the Dennettian/Wittgensteinian insight.
:worry:
"can I please have some coffee? I prefer Turkish. The coffee needs to be pulverised. That one has a nutty aroma. $5 for a flat white is outrageous!"
None of these directly involve qual. The presence of qual is quite specifically something inferred by a subgroup of philosophers. And I'm saying that there is no evidence here of qual. None of this requires positing private mental items.
I don't think preference or aroma are about anything [I]but[/I] qualia. And why does the coffee need to be pulverized?
Well hang on - the aroma of coffee is not private - anything but! And a preference is not a sensation, is it? that seems odd. If anything, a preference is a pattern of behaviours.
And if it's not pulverised it will not make a good Turkish coffee. And it will stick between your teeth.
If you claim you smell coffee, I cannot look inside your head to verify. But I can attend to my sense of smell: do I experience the internal sensation I have leaned to associate with coffee, or don't I? I do. i can confuse that you are experiencing the same smell that I am. Or more sophisticated, that both of us are experiencing the internal event we associate with coffee (even if these are different).
That these sensations off coffee may be entirely different between us is ultimately only of philosophical significance, the discourse functions the same either way. But without these sensations, the discourse wouldn't happen at all.
That everyday discourse functions without the philosophical notion of qualia is not under dispute. But what relevance is that to us purported philosophers?
Molecules of the liquid floating through the air is not a private thing.
My subjective experience of it is, and it might be very different from yours. We might have preferences that are different to the point that one of us hates it and the other loves it. That's not accounted for by the physical events of the molecules landing on the mucus of the olfactory epithelium inside the nose, traveling through the mucus until they reach the olfactory receptor cells, binding to the olfactory receptor cells, which send electrical signals to the region of the brain known as the [I]glomerulus[/I], which sends the signals to yet other parts of the brain for identification.
Have we? Or have we co-ordinated our behaviour? What more, exactly, is there to "identifying my internal, private sensation as coffee" than is found in "I smell coffee"?
Quoting hypericin
Well, yes. But play close attention to your conclusion: "without these sensations, the discourse wouldn't happen at all". How could you possible know that? Discourse functions even if our sensations differ... so what is the place of the sensation?
Quoting hypericin
It raises the question just asked: What more, exactly, is there to "identifying my internal, private sensation as coffee" than is found in "I smell coffee"? What is it that qual do? Your “identifying an internal, private sensation as coffee” is doing no explanatory work. It’s simply re-describing the public behaviour from the inside, then insisting that this interior décor must be metaphysically indispensable.
The discourse functions regardless of any supposed private qualitative sameness.
Is your point that there is a difference between the physics and the smell? But the aroma is not the qualia.
So this doesn't help you.
Both. We coordinated on the basis of internal sensations. That is part of the mechanism. Lacking this, you might say "I smell coffee", I might say "I smell bacon", one would be as groundless as the next.
Quoting Banno
Nothing. One just makes explicit what is already contained in the other.
Quoting Banno
Since sensations are private, there is no need for them to be consistent between people. They only have to be consistent within an individual. Smell sensations are like a private, internal symbol table. We learn by consistently matching a public event, coffee brewing, with a private symbol, the smell of coffee. Then, when we later encounter the private symbol, the smell of coffee, we can infer the public event, coffee is brewing, is nearby.
How can this system function without the private symbol? And so how would smell discourse function without the system?
But here, the only basis you have for positing an internal sensation is the public response; and that has been learned and fostered over time, so that "I smell bacon" is an inappropriate response to the smell of coffee. Again, what is being posited as private is quite clearly pubic - the smell of coffee, not bacon.
Quoting hypericin
Then we have no need for qualia, since we already have "smell of coffee".
Quoting hypericin
Wrong question. The right question is to explain why the functioning system requires a private symbol.
Notice how the sensation has now become a symbol.
So let's play that game, after Wittgenstein. Suppose that your qual of coffee changes over time, but you do not notice; so that the way coffee smells for you now is utterly different to how it smelt to you as a child.
Now, what is it that is the same now as it was when you were a child? Well, it's not the qual, since that has changed. It's the language and behaviour around the smell of coffee that has stayed the same
The system functions entirely without the consistent private symbol. It is not required.
Then it's not novel, and not private. It's just smell. taste, colour...
Seems your argument is that physics explains behaviour, but that given such an explanation, there seems to be something left over: the private “what it’s like.” Therefore, there must be irreducible qualia.
Note the gap. It's not unlike the "and this we all call god" at the end of Anselm's arguments.
Perhaps that “something left over” is an illusion of language and introspection, and since all evidence comes from publicly observable criteria, no extra metaphysical object is needed.
Or, my preference, the smell of coffee just is those chemicals, under a different description.
But either way, you are now a long way from that private, ineffable sensation.
You say what now?
We got us a homunculus? Somewhere inside the feedback loops of neurons there's a tiny “observer” that experiences redness and smells coffee?
Quoting BannoI don't suspect that. I suspect the entire system (each of us) experiences its own existence in a way that cannot be studied, or even detected, from the outside, and cannot be explained by physics.
"The aroma of coffee" does not reference a particular public reaction to it. It is bending the meaning considerably to suggest so. It is not a reference to the detected particles in the air. It is a reference to an indexical private thing, and no particular private thing since the subject is missing, but the language usage works due to a presumption that the private thing referenced is similar from one human context to the next.
Note that I say human. Humans cannot see yellow, but squirrels can, meaning that if a squirrel sees a printed picture of a banana, it doesn't look yellow at all because it isn't. And it's not the same from one human to the next. Again, my father, when asked to pass the yellow token, doesn't know which I am requesting.
It does not pick out a particular, but not all referents designated as 'things' are particulars. I speak of a banana, and that's a thing, but not a particular. "This banana" is, or it would be if I was indicating a specific one.
An example from lyrics of non-object that are nevertheless designated 'thing' in language use:
"Silver-white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things"
Thus selected because every other 'thing' in that song was an object. No, the example is not one of a qual like 'the aroma of coffee'. Not even an abstraction. More of a process being treated linguistically as an object.
Why, when language is so full of it?
Why is the language usage relevant in any way to the topic of first person being mysterious or not?
Quoting BannoThe definition of 'indexical' mentions only context dependency, with no requirement at all that the statement is something necessarily uttered, although many of the examples are of typical utterances. "The cold mountain is to the left" you labeled an indexical despite it not being dependent on who says it. It was listed as an objective statement lacking context, but even if we give it context (e.g. I am the one uttering it), it doesn't give information needed.
Sure, but that's a self reference to the speaker. The statement is arguably meaningless if printed. My statement is not.
It doesn't depend on it being said at all. But it does depend on context, meeting the definition of 'indexical'. Perhaps you're using a more anthropocentric definition of the word than the one I see if I just google it.
Quoting boundlessYes. Pretty much anything that denies both premises of SR. Hard to deny just one since one postulate is a particular instance of the more general one.
The wording on wiki is very empirical, whereas the wording in Einstein's paper is more metaphysical. Light is measured to locally move at c, vs. light moves locally at c. The difference between LET and SR is metaphysical only. They make the same empirical predictions, so absolutist interpretations are actually the same theory as relativity, with a few exceptions, opening a door for an almost-falsification test.
But both interpretations of time involve that same experience, else there would be a falsification test.
Probably, yes. Any axiom is by definition unprovable. If it could be proved, it would be a theorem (based on deeper axioms), not an axiom.
I don't see how mathematics being an abstraction follows from axiom-free mathematics. I don't think raw MUH is a form of Platonism, but the kind of MUH that Tegmark suggests is such a form. He's a realist. MUH can also be a non-realist view.
It renders MUH empty (completely lacking in evidence) unless the problem is fixed, making it a modified MUH. I do believe that there have been attempts to do so, so maybe my protest has been addressed. But in a satisfactory way?
Your answer in the previous post was that you share similar incredulity, just about a different topic. This in no way lends evidence one way or another about the true nature of a pie.
Exactly
Also, how are we imagining an experience that we're not actually having? How is it that we can consistently identify things? How would I be able to identify spheres off different colors, you rearrange them while my eyes are closed, and I correctly identify them by color when I open my eyes again? And you and I agree on which color they all are?
Can we start referring to things by a characteristic that nobody has ever mentioned, and bring that new characteristic into illusory existence, which people will soon be claiming they are experiencing?
The problem with eternalism is: are those experiences (i.e. that 'time flows', the appearance of 'free will' etc) compatible with eternalism? Again, eternalists seem content to say they are 'illusory' and leave at that. But to me it isn't a real answer. In fact, as I said before, if we deny those 'raw' experiences, can we trust empirical knowledge?
Quoting noAxioms
Yeah, that wasn't Goedel point, sorry.
IIRC, Goedel's theorems showed that even in relatively simple mathematical structures you get true yet unprovable (within the structure) propositions. So, you can't derive all mathematical truths by a set of arbitrary axioms.
This clearly suggests that mathematics isn't 'invented' IMO (although, to be honest, my own 'realist' view about mathematics doesn't depend on a controversial interpretation of Goedel's theorems).
Quoting noAxioms
Interesting, however I'm not sure how to conceive it.
Quoting noAxioms
Ok, I see. If you take MUH as a scientific theory, then yes the criticism is important, I agree. But as a metaphysical view, I don't think it is shown as inconsistent.
I do believe that MUH is defective, however. Other than the problem of change, I also believe that things like consciousness, ethics, aesthetics and so on require more than just 'math'.
Quoting noAxioms
But I explained why I think the two cases are different. Yes, I don't think that there is a model that can 'fully explain' the emergence of a cherry or a pie from fundamental physical objects. At the same time, however, I believe that consciousness has properties that can't be explained via emergence from what we know about physical reality. So, I think that in the case of consciousness the skepticism is more reasonable than in the case of pies and cherries.
Notice that we manage to name the smell of coffee and the shade of red in the paint shop, despite supposedly not being confident that your smell of coffee and your sensation of red has anything in common with mine?
How's that work, then. The qualia are again irrelevant here.
What fixes the meaning of “coffee smell” or “red” are the public practices, not any supposed private qualitative object.
So the fact that we can name and coordinate these things is not evidence for qualia — it’s evidence we don’t need them.
As for the mysticism, not my cup of tea.
To be clear, that was not what was claimed.
Quoting noAxioms
If you and I both smell coffee, it cannot be a reference to an indexical private thing, since we both smell it. Your qualia is not my qualia, by definition. The presumption is not of a reference to a private thing, but to the very public smell of coffee. We hypostatise that, if you like.
Qualia here are again irrelevant.
Quoting noAxioms
Well, yes it is. If we face each other, then if it is to my left, it is not to your left. It matter who says it. That's why it is called indexical.
But people do experience colours. The problem is that some folk want now to talk about ineffable private experiences of colour, instead of yellow.
It's this new, philosophical sophistry of "qualia" that is being questioned.
Not a new position. The smells are symbols. Smells exhibit the characteristic one way relation of symbols. The smell points to the event, brewing coffee, but you can analyze the coffee for a thousand years and you will never derive the smell.
Note that any suitable medium can function as symbols: roads use signage, books use glyphs, brains use qualia.
Quoting Banno
This does not follow.
It is theoretically possible that all of our private symbols vary over our lifetimes without our noticing. But for this to work, our memories have to vary in lockstep. If they do not, then not only would we notice, but the symbols would become useless. If what we remember as coffee yesterday smells like bacon today, then the symbol does not communicate anything.
It is as if you are arguing words are not required for language to function, because theoretically words might be varying without our noticing (along with our memories and all printed text).
Quoting Banno
This is very wrong. The smell is certainly not the chemical. This feels like naive realism.
If the smell were the chemical, an alien could analyze the chemical and derive the correct subjective smell. This is clearly impossible. The smell is not a chemical property. Smells are the end product of the conjunction of the chemical and the human sensory system.
Yep. So much the worse for that semiotics.
Any semiotic theory that starts from inner signs is already lost. If its coherence requires the “lockstep variation” story, then the right conclusion is not that the lockstep story is possible, but that the basic picture is wrong. If the private-symbol model requires “lockstep drifting qualia” just to keep meaning afloat, then abandon the model. Meaning doesn’t live there anyway.
Quoting hypericin
On the presumption that there is such a thing as "the correct subjective smell", which is the very point at issue.
As the brain receives a sensory signal, it is just a signal, presumably without any qualitative content. The brain has to do the work so that the signal can be interpreted by (the conscious subset of) itself as qualitative.
The key insight is that the sensory manifold we experience is not accidental or epiphenomenal. It is a highly efficient way of organizing information that would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system.
Wait what? Drifting qualia is your idea, not mine. I'm pointing out how implausible it would be for memories and qualia to drift in lockstep without our notice.
Quoting Banno
You identify the smell as just another version of the chemical. This seems to imply that there is a correct subjective smell, which is absurd.
It is an objective fact that we see colors. It is a subjective experience in that we cannot quantify the experience, or transfer the knowledge of it to someone else. We can't tell a blind person what sight it, much less color. We can't tell someone with complete color blindness what color is. We can't tell someone with deuteranopia or protanopia what red or green are, even though they see other colors just fine. Color is not objective.
Which is why we say we cannot know that what you experience as red is the same as what I experience as red. We both experience whatever it is we each experience consistently, so we agree on what things are red. (For the most part, anyway.) But we have no way of objectively demonstrating that we experience it the same way. I would bet we do, but we'll never know.
Yep. Well, Wittgenstein's. I'm just parroting him.
Your qual change over time but you do not notice, yet the language game continues unchanged. Therefore the qual are irrelevant to the language game.
Quoting hypericin
No, I suggested that the smell might be another description of the chemical. Not unlike the way you suggest the smell is a different symbol for the chemical.
But we have colour tables that allow us to do just that at the paint shop.
Quoting Patterner...and this makes no difference. The qual - the private experiences - do not have a place at the paint shop.
The quale can change, but memories must as well. This does not imply that qualia are irrelevant. What is required is the qualia are stable with respect to memories of them.
It is true that given a radically different cognitive architecture that does not make use of qualia, they would be irrelevant. But the fact is, we do make use of them. Given our cognitive makeup, without stable qualia (at minimum, stable relative to memory), we could never coordinate our experiences. It is on you to describe how we can agree that the aroma of coffee is in the air without them.
It's translated in exactly the same way in the G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schultep edition. p218, §214
Where do we make use of qualia - outside of philosophy fora?
Your argument seems to be: Our "cognitive makeup" is coherent; the only way it could be coherent is if there are qualia; therefore there are qualia. A transcendental argument, with all the problems thereof. The core complaint is that it is on obvious that the only way to make sense here is by using qualia.
Again, it is not at all apparent how qualia keep the game stable. As Wittgenstein showed, even if the qualia change, the game can still be played.
For instance, I make use of qualia when I identify the smell of coffee. If I didn't recognize that particular subjective olfactory experience as coffee, I couldn't make the identification. That there is coffee in the air is revealed to me by the quale of coffee aroma.
I believe most humans, including neuroscientists, agree with me here. Does your brain somehow work otherwise?
So you "have" a qual, and you run down a table of qualia and match it to the qual you previously identified as "coffee".
I just smell coffee.
Suppose that your qual for coffee changes over time, and your table of qualia also changes to match. You still run down the table to identify the qual, yet it is a completely different qual.
What role did your qual play here?
But further, a qual is supposedly a here, now sensation. However the existence of the table implies the qual for coffee stays the same over time, that the qual you have now is the same as the one you had previously. Qualia are supposed to explain how we recognize things, but the recognition depends on stability, which qualia, as momentary sensations, cannot guarantee.
Perhaps this suffices to describe what my brain does. I'm not generally aware, unless I'm struggling to identify an odor.
Quoting Banno
That is a statement of what you do. It explains nothing.
Quoting Banno
The qualia I experience still matches my "table", even in the implausible scenario both are drifting.
Quoting Banno
While qualia themselves are momentary, the cognitive machinery which produces them must be stable enough to allow for recognition through time.
Again, please explain how you identify the aroma of coffee without qualia.
it is unlikely that there is a table of any sort in your brain. More likely that there are neural paths that activate when there is coffee in the air.
Quoting hypericin
Yep. But the qual plays no role. You want an explanation that goes odour?qual?table ?coffee when one that goes odour?coffee will suffice.
Quoting hypericin
Yep. Same for smell, which unlike a qual has temporal continuity. That is, your qualia become smells in order to be of any use.
Certainly. "Table look up" is at best a logical description of the operation, but not faithful to the actual mechanics.
Quoting Banno
"Odor" is supposed to be the molecules here? Sorry, but the gap is far too great. How do you get from odor to coffee?
Quoting Banno
What is a smell if not a quale?
I still don't know how the"game" functions without the "beetle". Specifically, how you are able to accurately utter "l smell coffee" without the involvement of qualia.
What gap? It's the smell of coffee.
If you want phenomenology, there is no gap between my smelling that and my smelling coffee. That's the point. What there might be is a gap between my smelling coffee and my choosing the word "coffee" for what I smell.
Quoting hypericin
...and that's the very question I asked, way, way back. If qual are just smells and colours, why bother? Why not just talk about smells and colours?
Quoting hypericin
The Beetle Game
Materials / Setup:
Each player has a small sealed box (their “beetle box”).
Inside the box is an object known only to that player. It could be anything: a pebble, a coin, a crumpled note — the point is that no one else can see it.
There is a shared score sheet or public ledger.
Rules:
Naming:
Each player must choose a word for their private object. Let’s use “beetle.”
Whenever a player’s beetle is referenced publicly, they use the word “beetle,” but no one can look inside the box.
Public Tasks:
Players take turns making statements about their beetle: “My beetle is shiny,” “My beetle is round,” “I will pass my beetle to the next player.”
Others respond according to the rules of the game, not by inspecting the box, but based on the pattern of use of the word “beetle” in prior turns.
Scoring / Action:
If a player uses the word “beetle” consistently with prior uses (for example, always passing it when they say “pass my beetle”), they earn points.
The content of the actual object is irrelevant; the game rewards coordination in public usage, not private inspection.
The game works without anyone knowing or needing to know what a beetle actually is; all that matters is that the word is used consistently in public practices.The “private beetle” may exist or not, it may change from day to day, but the language-game continues unaffected.
Quoting hypericin
By uttering it when there is a smell of coffee.
I want to understand consciousness. Science has allowed us to come to know our reality to a degree that allows us to measure both the fantastically huge and fantastically small to degrees that are as fantastic, to understand the things and forces at work father away than we can comprehend outside of mathematics, and create wonders. We can communicate all of this information to others in various ways, giving them the ability to measure, understand, and creater the same things. And all this knowledge grows every day.
And yet, keeping with the paint store for an example, we have no idea how we experience redness. We know about photons of certain wavelengths, the retina, cones, optic nerve, neurons in the brain, and more other things than I can guess. But we have no idea why all of that physical activity is accompanied by our experience of redness. No idea how to even beginning looking for the answer.
We can give someone who can see all colors but red all the information that can ever be given, and they will not know what red looks like. No description or data will help.
To me, consciousness is the most fascination topic of all, and qualia is a big part of it.
Sure, all that. But how do qualia help here? I think that they are a red herring...
And I think I've made a good fist of showing that they are not well understood.
If not, which came first? If the ability to do the work came first, then why was it doing that? If the conscious subset came first, then what did it do before there was an interpretable signal for it?
Qualia are absolutely not well understood. I do not think trying to understand them is a red herring. But, to each their own. if the fact that you and I can look at objects of various colors and agree on which is red, which is blue, and which is green is all that is important to you, that's perfectly fine.
Oddly irrelevant.
It remains for advocates of qualia to explain what qualia add to the conversation that is not already found in our talk of sensations, colours, odours and sounds.
This is demonstrably untrue. It doesn't allow for the common case where you smell something but cannot recall what it is. Despite not recalling, there is still something it is like to smell it. For this to be possible, there must be a difference between smelling something and identifying it, even if the identification is not always conscious.
Quoting Banno
So are qualia redundant? Incoherent? Or non-existent? Which is it, you have claimed each of these at various times.
Qualia is a generic term for the individual, subjective experience of smells and colors, and anything else we experience. Invented, I suppose, because "experiences" and "sensations" are already too overloaded. Whereas, "smells" and "colors" can equally refer to the properties engendering these experiences.
Quoting Banno
This does not respect the structure of qualia. The owner of the box may look inside, but no one else. Moreover, the box is not disconnected from the world. There is perhaps a global beetle, and everyone's personal beetle is, though a network of cameras, an image which is a perspective on that global beetle.
Look again, with care. That is precisely what it does allow for - the smell is recognised, but the matching word is not:
Quoting Banno
Quoting hypericin
All three, depending on which account of qualia is under consideration.
Quoting hypericin
Then is it anything other than what is commonly called a "sensation"? If not, let us use that term rather than invent a new one. It will suffice.
Quoting hypericin
It is clear in the text that the owner can look inside the box. It might help if you studied what you a e attempting to critique.
No, forgetting the word is a different case. I'm talking about the case where the smell is not recognized.
Quoting Banno
"Sensation " is not good enough. It is almost completely specialized to bodily feelings. "Red sensation", "oboe sensation", "angry sensation", "imagining a green sensation". are awkwardly disconnected from established usage.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
A trivial distinction. To not recognise the smell is to not be able to place it, especially in terms of language.
(Added: but moreover, this shows the poverty of reliance on phenomenal investigations; there is no independent way to choose between your view and mine; no public criteria to which we might appeal. )
Quoting hypericin
It's unclear to me what this is claiming. Are you now saying that anger and imaginings are also qualia? Odd. Perhaps the next question is, what for you isn't a quale?
Quoting Banno
Read Philosophical Investigations again.
Not recognizing something and forgetting the word for something are entirely different. You can know what a smell is, what produces it, while the name of what produces it might be elusive. Or you may know the smell is familiar, but have no clue what it is. Or, you may have never encountered the smell before at all.
Are we really arguing this?
Quoting Banno
Yes. This is really standard, and it is odd to me that you have read papers on qualia, hosted topics on qualia, opine frequently on qualia, without even knowing that. Qualia applies to anything that has a felt, subjective character. "Qualia" specifically picks out only that felt, subjective character, discarding everything else. There is no suitable word that can be used in it's place.
You seem very confident about that. Fine. To me they are instances of the same sort of thing, and distinct from the sensation of that aroma. On the one hand is the sensation, on the other it's recognition. Go back to where this line of thought originated:
Quoting Banno
When someone smells coffee, it's coffee that I smell, recognised or not.
Notice again that there is no public criteria here to help us decide who is correct.
But you want to add, in addition to the smell of coffee, something more: the quale of coffee, here, now, perhaps. Something of that sort. And the simple request is, why?. To what end?
Quoting hypericin
What a grand vision! Compounding error with illusion. Rhetoric dressed as precision. The raw sensation by itself doesn’t explain why you identify it as "coffee." Therefore, "qualia" does no explanatory work in the theory of perception or cognition. It’s a label, not a mechanism.
Let's take it away, and hook up an electronic eye that can differentiate wavelengths, and tap your skin in certain patterns to indicate to you what color you used to see. Go to the paint store, and you'll be able to have the same conversations. *tap tap tap* "Three taps. That's sky blue. But I'm looking for royal blue." Scan another can. *tap tap taaaaaaap* "There it is! I love royal blue."
Your conversations with the store clerk and your spouse will be exactly the same as they would have been when you could see color. It's all irrelevant.
Quoting BannoThose things [I]are[/I] qualia. The physical is the body's interactions with the environment, which causes various electrical signals to go from various parts of our exterior to our brain, where they are compared with stored information from previous exposures, etc. Talk about that all you want, and it will never hint at sensations, colours, odours and sounds.
That presumed equivalence between qualia and colour is... unjustified.
Quoting Patterner
Then qualia do not act as advertised; they are not private and ineffable. You have defended qualia to such an extent that they are no longer qualia. They are just colours and smells.
But your parable is cute. What it shows is that what matters for colour-talk is functional discrimination, not a private qualitative feel. You preserve the entire public language-game of colour, nothing is lost except the internal “what it’s like.” And crucially: nothing about the language-game depends on the missing qualia. You've shown that qualia do not do explanatory work. Cheers. "Colour experience” is a role in a language game, not some private essence. What we call “seeing blue” is just discriminating this from that, and responding appropriately in action and speech.
Notice that in loosing all my qualia, I did not loose consciousness. You should find that odd, if being conscious is having qualia.
You want the message to be “Ah! so there is something missing, something ineffable and private…”. But what is missing is the illusion that there needs must be a private feel doing causal or explanatory work - you've inadvertently shown that the private feel does no work at all.
If I can lose all the qualia and still use colour words perfectly, then what’s ‘missing’ never did any work and isn't needed. The something something over and above behaviour drops away. Presumably the "feel" bit is important here; that all Chalmers would now be saying is that the emotional reactions of the organism are the marker for consciousness. but importantly, when you actually examine what that “something” amounts to, it collapses into an impression, a way of talking, or an attitude toward the experience—not a metaphysical ingredient. The “feel” isn’t an extra entity; it’s just how we react, respond, or are disposed to speak in certain situations.
Being conscious is not possessing a certain metaphysical item, a quale. Being consciousness is being a creature that lives, reacts, expresses, interacts, and speaks in certain ways.
And that embeddedness is what is in danger of being lost by the simplistic expedient of treating consciousness as a thing.
But it's a good parable.
Quoting BannoMy thought experiment is about you/someone who has
known color your whole life. If you lost your ability to see colors, and that little doohickey became your only way of identifying things by color, you would know something was missing. And you would not think it was unimportant, even though you would still be able to have the conversations. Think of the times you would use it if you were alone. If you point it at a sunset, you would learn which areas of the sky are red, orange, yellow, and still blue. Point it at a painting or photograph of a field of flowers, and learn which are which colors. Would you bother?
And would you wish you could see colors again?
If people never had color vision, there woods be no concept of, or word for, color. And if we were all given this device, we would never use it. It would be meaningless. We would have no idea what its taps were for. Even if it was given to us by aliens who tried to explain it, it would be meaningless. We never would have been, and would not now start choosing paint by color. We wouldn't even have vans of specific colors. As we would have been up until then, we would be concerned with how it held up to the weather, to having our children's crayons washed off of it, and whatever other kinds of wear and tear. But there would be no aesthetics involved.
Quoting BannoPeople who go blind or deaf are still conscious.
I'll adopt everyone else's views on consciousness for the moment, and say that an entity that had no capacity for qualia would not be conscious. Do you think a machine that can differentiate frequencies in the range of the spectrum that we call visible light knows what red is? Do you think it knows what vision is? Do you think it's conscious? Do you think if we gave ChatGPT a device that can differentiate these frequencies it would experience read the way you do?
Quoting BannoThis is correct.
Quoting BannoMuch of that can be explained by the physical things and events that make us up. But some aspects of some of those things would be different without consciousness. For example, there would be no conversations about color if we did not subjectively experience the physical events of photons hitting retina, voltage gates opening, ions flooding neurons, electrical signal moving through optic nerve, etc. That is, if we did not see colors.
Quoting BannoConsciousness it's not a thing. It is subjective experience.
Then it seems we are in agreement, at least on this. Except that I would drop talk of qualia as unneeded and potentially misleading.
Let's go over the other argument again. It's that qualia - such things as seeing colours - are essential to consciousness. But the very example you give shows that someone who cannot see colours - someone without qualia - would nevertheless be conscious.
What follows is that seeing colours - having qualia - is not constitutive of consciousness.
Quoting Patterner
Those two words: Experience and subjective.
What we might say is that "I experience being conscious!". But how is that saying anything more than "I am conscious!" What work is done by "experience"?
And what does that weasel word, "subjective", add here?
So we agree consciousness is not a thing. But I don't see how calling it a "subjective experience" is at all helpful in explaining what it is.
But are qualia real without consciousness? Qualia are first person as a matter of definition.
Quoting Banno
Perhaps it is not something that can be, or must be, explained. That's what makes it a hard problem!
Can you set out how this might work? What are you suggesting?
Quoting Wayfarer
If it can't be explained, it's not a problem but a brute fact. I could go along with that.
I'm confident. There is more than a trivial distinction between meeting an old friend whose name you cannot place, and meeting a stranger.
There are three very distinct things: smell, recognition, naming.
Quoting Banno
No, I never said anything like this, and I keep feeling you are somehow missing the concept. The quale is not something in addition to the smell. The smell is an instance of a broader category, qualia, that includes everything with a subjective feel.
Quoting Banno
In your mind, linguistic context somehow explains it? I don't think so.
It is really a very simple story. In your life you encounter aromatic things. In their presence, you experience a kind of qualia: a smell. In your mind, you form an association: smell <--> aromatic thing. In this case, coffee smell <--> coffee. Then later on, when you encounter coffee smell, your training tells you it's significance: coffee.
You cannot omit qualia from this story. Qualia, that which is a subjective feel, is how information such as aromas enter into our conscious awareness. Without qualia, it isn't clear how the information would enter into awareness at all. Maybe if we were some kind of hyper linguistic species, a voice would whisper in our ear: "coffee is near". But we are humans, and so our brains use qualia for this job.
How does linguistic context do a better job of explaining this?
Quoting Banno
Lol, and here I thought it was just a definition.
I'm suggesting that in the context of philosophy, 'qualia' are defined as subjective and first-person in nature. Look it up.
I think an issue with Chalmer's 'Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness' is just that problems are there to be solved, whereas the nature of consciousness (or mind) is a mystery. 'A mystery is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question' as Gabriel Marcel put it. It's also not a 'brute fact' - being consciously aware is prior to the knowledge of any facts. Infants are consciously aware, with almost no grasp of facts.
You have omitted qualia already. The word does no work in your explanation. The explanation is as effective without mention of qualia.
Would that the advocates of qualia would reach some sort of agreement.
SO you are at odds with those who have said elsewhere that qualia are just colours and so on. Because colours are not restricted to the first person...
But this is one of the issues; there is no clearly and generally agreed notions of what qualia are. See the SEP article for an exposition of this problem. And it seems to me that one simple explanation of this is that the notion is incoherent.
A smell is a quale. You are free to be allergic to the word and never use it. And you are free to invent a world where qualia are just decor that don't do anything, or are incoherent, or don't exist. You are free to be wrong.
Yes, that is exactly why we need the term, to specify we are talking about the first person aspect specifically.
Quoting Banno
A very easy, simple recourse to incomprehension.
Quoting Wayfarer
You two need to talk.
It's incoherent for the exact reason that this thread was created months ago! Even designating 'the quality of lived experience' as 'quale' or 'qualia', automatically transposed the entire discussion to the wrong register. It suggest that there is some such thing or state - which there is not. The quality of experience, 'what it is like to be', is always first-person, prior to any discussion. You will invariably try and drag the discussion in the direction of what can be expressed in terms of symbolic logic, but 'what it is like to be' can't be accomodated within that framework, for the simple reason that it is not objectively real. That is what this whole thread is about. That said, there is no 'hard problem of consciousness' at all. The whole reason for Chalmer's polemic is to show up an inevitable shortcoming of third-person science. Once that is grasped, the 'problem' dissappears. But it seems extraordinarily difficult to do!
I have a somewhat different take. Consciousness is real, and in principle it admits to explanation. The problem is our unique epistemic relationship with our own consciousness. Our whole access to the world, and to ourselves, is via consciousness. And so we have the problem of explaining consciousness from the inside.
It is like someone who lives alone wearing rose colored glasses, who can never remove them or even look at them, tasked with explaining the glasses that filter their vision.
Consciousness, which can experience so much, and explain these experiences so well, has a unique difficulty explaining itself.
Probably not all that different. I think there really is a hard problem, and it is hard because of the relation between us and our own consciousness, vs. us and anything else we experience. All of our collective evolutionary and cultural problem solving machinery was developed to manage the latter. Whereas with the former we really only have our own example, and none of that machinery applies. Worse, All of that machinery is reflexively part of what needs to be explained, insofar as it structures our conscious experience. That is what makes it so hard.
Cool.
Now, what does it have to do with first and third person? And can we do it without qualia?
I would add, to @Banno's question, that there is no first person without qualia. To be aware of anything at all, there must be something it is like to have that awareness. In other words, consciousness without qualia is contradictory. To do without qualia is to do without consciousness.
Why? And what, exactly, is the claim here?
As if there were one thing that "it is like" to be aware that your toe hurts, to be aware that the sun is out, and to be aware that Paris is in France.
No, these have nothing in common. There need be no "something it is like" that makes them all cases of "awareness".
One of the ground-breaking books (which Thompson cites) is Hans Jonas The phenomenon of life: toward a philosophical biology. Dense book, too hard to summarise, but well worth knowing about. One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. Like, nothing matters to a crystal or a rock formation, but things definitely matter to a bacterium, because it has skin (or a membrane) in the game, so to speak. It has the drive to continue to exist, which is something only living things exhibit. And that it plainly tied to the question of the nature of consciousness (if not rational sentient consciousness of the type humans exhibit.)
The applicability of the word "sentience" is something for us to decide.
What counts as being sentient?
Have to log out for a while, duty calls.
Give her my regards... :wink:
But whether or not you, or anyone, think it would result in a total loss of consciousness, it is still in need of explanation. I think everyone in the world should watch all the Ninja Nerd videos that can. Here's one on [Url=https://youtu.be/GKaFjw8N8zQ]The Phototransduction Cascade.[/url]. Just to give an ideas of the very beginning of the process, I wore a little from Michael Behe's in/famous [I]Darwin's Black Box[/i] at the end. Agree or disagree with his conclusions or religious beliefs (I happen to disagree with both), he knows the science.
Nothing anywhere in these things suggests or hints at our experience of redness, or anything regarding consciousness. Colors aren't in these physical events. Yet we see colors. They are what is more important to us, and you would not willingly give them up.
The second two examples use "aware" in its other sense, which is simply to know a certain fact.
To be aware of a mosquito bite, aware of a sunset, aware of a feeling of jealousy, are all qualitative states. There is something it is like to experience each of these. What each is like is quite different. What unifies them is that they are all varieties of qualitative conscious states, they each have a felt quality. "Qualia" bundles this property of having a felt quality into a conceptual bucket.
Quoting Banno
The claim is that in order for you to be conscious of anything at all, that consciousness must have a felt quality. Absent that, you aren't actually aware. If something has no felt quality, no associated qualia, then it is not conscious.
"Doesn't the answer simply depend on what we count as being sentient? That is, it's something to be decided , not discovered?"
I would argue that qualia is the bedrock of sentience. To be sentient is to have qualitative states. But given that, it is still something to be discovered, if this is even possible. Unless consciousness is a physical property (which I doubt), we can never build a consciousness detector. The best we can likely do is identify the features of neuroanatomy, across very different species and neural architectures, which bring about consciousness.
All life has "drives". Viruses have "drives", to infect and reproduce. Roombas have "drives", to clean. This is not enough. What is relevant is whether these drives are experienced as such. We don't just have drives, our drives are sometimes (but crucially, not always) experienced as drives. We have this capacity, this does not remotely mean that to have a drive is intrinsically to experience that drive.
Quoting Wayfarer
I thought that 'all sentient beings' was making a distinction between these and insentient beings?
I don't see why it is problematic for us to conceptually mark out what counts as sentience. For me, to be sentient is to have qualitative states. It is quite another thing (maybe impossible) to empirically know whether other species have qualitative states.
Again, what is "having a felt quality", if not "being conscious of a feeling"?
Have you said anything more than that being conscious is being conscious?
Seems to me that such an approach seems profound, seems to be providing an explanation, until one looks closely.
Quoting hypericin
Here's the same thing again; to be sentient is to perceive or feel; and saying "qualia is the bedrock of sentience" sounds cool, as if "Ah! Now we know! it's qualia that explain consciousness!"
But look again. Qualia are perceptions and feelings. so "qualia is the bedrock of sentience" just says "perceptions and feelings are the bedrock of sentience"...
The feeling of having an explanation dissolves... We've just said the same thing with different words.
But they don't heal, grow, reproduce, or mutate. Agree that it's very hard to determine what is or isn't sentient at borderline cases such as viruses (presumably not) or jellyfish and so on.
Somewere I once read the aphorism that 'a soul is any being capable of saying "I am"'. i rather liked that expression.
Quoting hypericinCan you give me an example of an insentient being?
IMO I don't even think that we can say that one can 'know' something without a qualitative experience.
For instance, I don't think that my computer 'knows' the information it processes and stores. Rather, it seems to me that qualitative experience is a precondition of 'having knowledge'. So, while I think the distinction you make is relevant, I believe that we should say that 'knowledge' is a specific kind of 'awareness' (in the general sense of the presence of a qualitative experience).
:lol: I didn't necessarily think I was blowing anyone's doors down! But I don't think I said nothing either.
Just look at all the ways consciousness has been defined in the past. You just said the term was up to us to define. Wayfarer just quoted:
Quoting Wayfarer
Consciousness has never been a clear, fixed concept. Whereas qualia, your feelings about the term aside, is much more precisely defined. If the unclear term can be defined in terms of the clear term, even seeming tautologously, then that is progress. At least we would know what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness. Does that explain consciousness? Of course not.
Viruses are a hard no. They don't even have volition, they make no decisions, they are essentially giant, extraordinarily complex, free floating molecules. Jellyfish seem to be the upper limit of what can be achieved with no central nervous system. Probably not, but as you say it is extremely hard to rule out entirely.
My hunch is that consciousness is the ultimate fulfillment of the engineering principles of modularization and abstraction. It is an extremely efficient strategy for abstracting and organizing information that would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system. We have to integrate all the physical senses, bodily senses, emotions, memories, thoughts. Based on this enormous mass of information, we are supposed to act, moment by moment. If there were no abstraction, if these were all just raw electrical inputs, the brain would be totally overwhelmed. So the brain's strategy is to transform these raw inputs into abstractions, and act based on them. Our lived experience is that of the brain's decision maker. Our world consists in these abstractions, qualia, and from them, we attend to the relevant subset, we predict, and we act.
This strategy has probably coevolved multiple times in different evolutionary branches. To detect consciousness, we would have to understand the principle whereby the brain achieves this kind abstraction, and examine the extraordinarily complex nervous systems of the animals that might be using it.
In first aid we are taught to test to see if someone is unconscious by asking for a response - "can you hear me? Open your eyes! What's your name? Squeeze my hand!". Some folk tend to forget this sort of thing doesn't apply to jellyfish and rocks.
In extremis, people may be conscious but unresponsive, which has led to a body of work looking for "no-report" tests for consciousness. One suggestion is that medical folk look for the "neural correlate of consciousness", which face the problem of how to establish conscious experience without first-person evidence. No-report paradigms rely on eye-movement, neuro-imaging, or physiological measures as indicators of consciousness. The trouble with no-report approaches is that they tend to diagnose cases of consciousness as cases of unconsciousness, the “bored monkey” problem, in which a monkey appears unconscious because it fails to follow the red dot, when it's just bored. Perhaps the panpsychists are right, and we are attributing unconsciousness ot rocks that are simply bored.
At the other extreme, would it make sense to insist that someone was unconscious, despite their protests to the contrary?
Is it that we have not yet found a clean and clear definition of consciousness, or is it that consciousness is not one thing, with a clean and clear definition?
Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity?
What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. We pick and choose our concepts, and I think mine cleanly maps to that which we are talking about when we talk of consciousness. It is an entirely different matter to reliably apply this concept to other beings. Qualia, and therefore consciousness, is private, as third person observers we only have indirect access, through behavior and self report.
I don't think so. Rather what you see as epistemic - an inability to know if someone is conscious - is the result of thinking about a family of related notions as if they were a single notion.
It's a mistake to think of consciousness only in terms of having a particular object, some private quale. The very idea of a private definition of consciousness is a philosophical artefact born of misusing words like “experience” and “inner” together with a misguided notion of essential characteristics. A picture that holds us enthralled.
Now I think I've demonstrated that, over the last page or so. I don't see that there is an account of qualia that can hold it's own.
None of what I've said here is to claim that we are not conscious. That's a common error hereabouts. What is shown is the poverty of adopting only one account, the possession of quale, as the arbiter of consciousness.
Analytic philosophy is a broad church.
But that last paragaph is somewhat ambiguous. You see qualia as a way of undermining Chalmers? But for him the “hard problem” relies on the reality/cogency of qualia.
Only if modern analytic discourse on consciousness is a narrow band in its entirety.
Quoting Wayfarer
Only grammatically. I don't see the nounification of "objects of consciousness" as carrying any particular ontological commitments.
Like @Banno I don't see how this is deployed against Chalmers, as I recall he makes use of the idea, which predates him by quite a bit.
I think it is, rather. The 'consciousness studies' discipline that developed in the early 1990's around Chalmers and a few others was much broader ranging than analytic phiiosophy. It included perspectives from cognitive science, phenomenology, psychology and many other disciplines. I didn't have Chalmers in mind when I made that remark, so much as his legendary opponent, Daniel Dennett. Chalmers does reference it in his original Facing Up paper, though:
Why 'more natural?' Because 'qualia' is academic jargon for something we are all intimately familiar with, namely, our experience of existence.
Been traveling, and the topic has once again run away from me.
Quoting Banno
You do think so.
Quoting Banno
By this very idealistic definition, this particular universe is the actual one due to your presence in it, and possibly due to your perception of it. It depending on the context of your perceptions, this universe's actuality is an indexical.
Quoting Banno
It works in that the referent (especially with the coffee, not so much the paint) is the private sensation that evokes the public concept of coffee. It is not a referent to coffee. It being a reference to a private thing, it bears no implication that your personal experience of the scent is similar, but it can still be a reference to the personal experience of another.
I do agree that qualia has no place in a paint shop since orders for a very specific color ("match this swatch") can be (and very much is) done entirely by machine.
Quoting BannoThat usage has both of us detecting the same public actual coffee. That usage is not a reference to the experience of the scent, only to the action of detection of the public substance.
Quoting Patterner
I said as much in the OP. It's why we cannot know what it's like to be a bat, but given that, we also cannot go around asserting that there is or is not something it is like to be X. If you're not X, then this cannot be known.
Quoting Patterner
Hence 1) my falsification test mentioned in the OP, 2) the inconceivability of a p-zombie acting undetectably the same, and 3) I suspect that the ability to object at all would be stripped away with the qualia gone. Such actions rely on continuous feedback, feedback which is now gone.
Quoting Wayfarer
Definitions don't tell you how things work. They're not metaphysics at all. They just indicate how language is to be used. I can't prove my solipsism by defining existence to be confined only to that which I directly perceive.
Quoting WayfarerGreat, so since the roomba knows where it has been and where it still needs to go (knowledge of a fact), then it is only via its consciousness that it can come by this knowledge.
Quoting WayfarerNobody claimed they were life forms. But I know. You're leaning on your proof-by-definition again, which as I just said above, just shows how language is typically used, and doesn't prove anything about the roomba not doing as much and more than many 'sentient' life forms.
The same tactic is employed by racists to 'prove' that moral obligations don't apply to the race of choice.
Quoting boundlessWell, 'qualitative' apparently is a word reserved for life forms, and since non-living things can know stuff (see roomba example just above), I must either disagree with the statement or disagree with all the definitions that are confined to life forms.
Quoting Banno
It's actually a matter of coordinate system choice, and not on who says it. Any person can choose whatever coordinates he likes. For a given person, the coordinate system would be loosely suggested more by which way he faces than who he's with.
Quoting boundlessAgain, the experience of both interpretations is identical, so if it isn't compatible with eternalism, then it isn't compatible with presentism either. Both have you experiencing flow of time. I have a hard time with free will since there's no way to detect it one way or another. It also seems to make no predictions.
Since the two interpretations are empirically identical, you cannot have knowledge of which is correct. So there's no empirical knowledge to trust when it comes to anything interpretational.
Yes. It's really easy to show this. But our universe isn't composed of statements or determinations of halting or whatnot. It's simply run by rules, none of which seem to contradict its operation. A counterexample would help a lot.
Agree. How is this relevant since I'm not suggesting that all truths must be derived?
If it was invented, it wouldn't be fundamental, but rather supervening on this inventor. So no argument here either.
Quoting boundless2+3 sums up to 5. That works whether those values are real or not. Some disagree.
You mean you think those things require more than just 'particles'. You are incredulous about physicalism. I suppose MUH is typically spun as a foundation for physicalism.
begs the question i.e. assumes what needs to be proven.
Quoting noAxiomsI agree. I think experience is feeling. I think "What is it like?" Means "What does it [I]feel[/I] like?". Not necessarily physical feeling. I think the experience of redness is a feeling. Although anyone would object if they were told all of that was about to be stripped from them, once it was stripped, once they had no feelings, there's nothing to complain about.
"The universe is not composed of true statements" contains no indexical expressions. It contains no indexical terms (no “I”, “here”, “now”, “actual”, “this world”, etc.).
"The actual world is the one we are in" is indexical. It contains "we".
Quoting noAxioms
On this account, any possible world in which you exist would be an actual world.
This all seems a rather odd thing on which to focus.
Quoting noAxioms
Pretty much.
What is being demonstrated ('proven' as you put it) is an implication of the assertion that "being consciously aware is prior to the knowledge of any facts". I don't buy that assertion, but I am not begging what follows from it.
The roomba empirically demonstrates the knowing of where it has been and where it yet needs to go. This constitutes empirically obtained facts. Therefore, by your assertion, the roomba is conscious. I would suggest that the example falsifies the assertion rather than the example demonstrating that the roomba is conscious.
Quoting BannoGiven your "By definition, the actual world is the one we are in", how is "The universe" in any way distinct from the form: "this world'? You label the latter indexical, but apparently deny that of the former.
So does 'the universe', since it means "the actual universe" which has, by your definition, a 'we' in it.
You never said 'an actual world'. You said 'the actual world'. That's your wording, one that implies that your being in it makes it the one and only world that is actual.
You brought up indexicals. I brought up the fact that almost everybody's definition of 'exists' is essentially an idealistic one, which your definition illustrates quite nicely.
As for the 'smell of coffee', my usage of that language is a reference to the mutual private experience of the scent, carrying no implication that the experience is entirely similar between two people. It is neither a reference to the coffee nor a reference to my public reaction to the scent, which may well be no reaction at all, despite very much noticing it.
Quoting PatternerHe should also discuss 'what it is like to be a roomba' (my choice of X). Answer:We cannot know. That not knowing includes us not asserting that there's nothing it is like to be a roomba.
I know Nagel is famous for the bats, but I've actually never read any of the famous works by anybody. Most of them were published before modern physics and its implications were known, and so they all lean on classical assumptions, assumptions we know today to be false. Not saying Nagel is wrong. Just that I'm uninformed. I appreciate the quotes.
Some don't even believe that of their mothers, so Nagel is perhaps assuming a less solipsistic audience here.
But that shedding of faith is important, since it implies that somewhere on our walk up that tree, experience (if a binary thing) suddenly turned on, something its immediate ancestor lacked. If this 'experience' is more of an analog thing (X is more conscious than Y), then we entertain that notion that we may very well still be incredibly low on that scale.
I find bats (being a fellow mammal) to be unreasonably close to humans, a safe call that suggests an unwillingness to explore something far more alien like the roomba.
And bats are awfully similar to humans. We can get around by echolocation except we lack the hardware to emit the sharp sound pulses required. They've fitted babies with these and they learn to run through a forest at full speed in complete darkness.
Dolphins are closer to us in intelligence, and they also use echolocation.
Anyway, your quote kind of dies there. Nagel indicates why 'bat' was chosen, but says little more.
I did pull out of the woods in a canoe, at twilight. A cloud of mosquitoes came out with us and tracked the canoe (laden with firewood) across the lake. Two bats emerged, flew around us for about 5 seconds, and then the cloud was gone. I was impressed.
But Chalmers apparently thinks otherwise, that the thing stripped of feeling would behave undetectably the same. A lot of his argument hinges that unreasonable assumption.
Well, I hope you and it can form a meaningful relationship.
'Knowing' something seems to imply having an awareness of such a knowledge. My calculator can perform the operation "5+3=8" by processing the data I'm giving to it but it seems to me too far fetched to claim that it 'knows' the information it is processing. Of course, if 'knowledge' can mean merely 'storing data', then yeah, the calculator might be said to 'know'. But at a certain point, one should wonder if one isn't equivocating language.
Quoting noAxioms
Yes, the experience is identical. But the interpretation is different. In one interpretation, the experience is taken as veridical. In the other it is taken as illusory. In both cases, however, one should be able to explain how the experience occurs.
Regarding 'free will', the evidence comes from my own immediate experience and, of course, the view that moral responsibility seems to require it.
Of course, both free will and the experience of 'flow of time' might be illusory. But I do not deem the grounds of taking them as such to be compelling. YMMV.
Quoting noAxioms
One however might ask the ontological status of these 'rules'. If they are 'real' (and not just an useful 'construct' that *somehow* help us), what is their status? Can they be explained in purely physicalist terms? And so on.
Indeed, it seems that they are real (in some way). Otherwise, we would be unimaginably lucky in (falsely) believing that they are real.
Quoting noAxioms
:up:
Quoting noAxioms
Not sure of your point. MUH asserts that all mathematical structures are 'real'. If the mathematical structure of 'natural numbers' is real, how is it possible that the numbers aren't real?
Quoting noAxioms
Again, I believe that in this discussion we agreed that mathematical truths do not seem to be 'physical' as they seem to be independent from the existence of the universe (or the 'multiverse'). MUH asserts that reality is made of 'all mathematical structures'. So, I wouldn't call it a form of physicalism.
And yes, I believe that MUH errs precisely because it can't account for 'those things' in a satisfactory way.
Quoting noAxiomsI have never read any of the old classics, either. But I've read, or am reading, a few newer things. Anyway, the implications of physics don't include anything about consciousness. The physical is what is experiencing, to be sure. We are physical, after all. But how that can be is not implied by physics.
Quoting noAxiomsCertainly. He is trying to examine consciousness. His audience isn't anyone who doesn't believe anything other than themself is conscious.
Quoting noAxiomsHe isn't saying that. He's just trying to find something close enough to us that those who believe things other than us are conscious will agree is conscious, but different enough that we can't really imagine what it's experience is like. For all the similarities you mention, we can't know what it is like to exist with as creatures who have echolocation as our primary sense every waking moment, and to fly and capture our food and eat it while doing so. As he says, our imagination can only get us so far:
It's like empathy. The goal isn't to think of how I would feel in that situation. The goal is to try to understand how the person in that situation is feeling.
I think consciousness is fundamental because the "experience (if a binary thing) suddenly turned on, something its immediate ancestor lacked" idea seems too fantastic. If there is no consciousness present, and nothing is guiding physical evolution toward configurations that produce it, how is there suddenly a physical configuration that has this new thing which is so very different in nature, that was never the point or purpose, yet which it (the physical configuration) apparently is perfectly suited for?
Quoting noAxiomsPerhaps Chalmers is not always right.
Mixed domains. "Universe" is a metaphysical notion, while "world" is a logical notion. They do not have the same use. "Universe" is a term used by physicists for a particular physical structure. "World" is used by logicians, more or less for a group of consistent, true sentences - a use that probably comes from the Tractatus.
The calculator indeed does not know it's doing math, just like the roomba. At best it knows what is stored in its limited registers in such a way that it can act upon those contents when requested, and even then, it just knows digital bits, not that those registers represent numbers.
But language should be used in situations where it is appropriate and not just places where it used to be used.
I'm claiming the roomba knows where it's been. I'm not claiming it has qualitative experience (but I also not claiming it doesn't).
On presentism:
Quoting boundlessYes, the intuition is false in the latter case, but if the experience is identical, one has to wonder why the intuition for something undetactable is there at all, regardless of which is the case. The answer of course is that the intuition makes one (any being that predicts) more fit. Being fit scores points. Knowing the truth about something that cannot matter does not.
Why? This has come up countless times in the topic. Why do the dualists hold physical monism responsible for an explanation of something complicated when 1) it is clear that no explanation will ever be accepted, and 2) their view is even less explained?
So I reject this requirement. Sufficiently complicated things (like the sun rising each day) have been physically processes despite lack of physical explanations for them over the centuries. To falsify one, one must show that it cannot be the case, not to show that there isn't currently a full physical explanation.
There are many definitions of 'free will', so not sure which one you are using, or how you would distinguish the experience of not having it. I mean, my definition is pretty loose: Physics does not prevent one from doing what one wants, and I don't have that kind of free will since I desire to levitate, and gravity prevents that.
The suggestion that moral responsibility requires free will seems to stem from a lack of distinction between choice and free choice. You have the former (and thus bear responsibility), else you'd not have evolved this nice brain to make better (more fit) choices. The latter requires a definition that yields a distinction from mere choice, and most distinctions actually seem to hinder making a better choice, but it's quite definition dependent.
Also note that eternalism is quite compatible with non-deterministic quantum interpretations like Copenhagen. Not sure if you're aware of that.
A good starting point is also pinning down 'moral responsibility'. Responsible to what? Responsibility is a relation. One can be help responsible to physics, or to the law, or to society, or to a god. Only responsibility to something outside our universe seems to require some sort of external volition. The rest doesn't. I've given several examples earlier in this topic of responsibility to the former things, and how classical deterministic process are best at implementing choices in those contexts.
Opinions are fine, but you cite 'evidence' a lot, and there cannot be any if there's no empirical difference. I hold intuitions very low on the likely-to-be-true list. so my opinion tends to go with the simpler model, not with the suggestion of a known liar (intuitions, not you).
On the 'physical laws of our universe':
Quoting boundless
To me it's a relation. These laws describe the outcome of the particular nature of the mathematics that describes (or is) our universe. It's a relation between emergent effects (matter say) and the mathematical structure in question.
Whether any of that 'exists' or not seems to be irrelevant to it being a relation. The realists need something to have 'exists' stamped on it, but those same realists often define existence (or 'actual') in idealistic terms.
The universe supervening on mathematics is different than the mathematics being objectively real or not. Of course you might not be talking about objectively real here, but more the relaties-to-me kind of 'real' that most self-described realists use.
No. The physical comes from the laws, not the other way around. Physicalism does not explain the laws of physics. That's backwards.
Quoting boundlessYea, I have a real problem with that. How would the structures differ in any way if they were not real? That's why I think declaring them 'real' is pointless. By my main issue is with giving all structures the same status, which means all the uninteresting structures exist as much as the interesting ones, and there's so many more of the former, to the point where you are probably part of one of those instead of the improbable interesting structure you think you're part of.
Does anybody suggest that? One of the rules seems to be "real stuff comes from other real stuff", so if I'm real, so is my child or anything else I cause. If I'm not real, I cannot create or interact with something real. Likewise, it seems that natural numbers share the same ontology (whatever that may be) as the set of natural numbers.
Yes, we agree on that. I cannot find a physical natural number anywhere in the universe. Collect them all!
I also don't think the mathematics that is the universe is a set of 'truths'. It's a structure, not a truth. A typical example is the Mandelbrot set, which is simply a set of numbers in the complex plain with a certain property. There's nothing true or false about it. It's just what it is. It doesn't need to exist to have certain properties (like being fully connected). It's ontology seems utterly irrelevant to what it is. That's how I see our universe. It being objectively real or not seems totally irrelevant, which is why most people's notion of being 'real' isn't an objective one.
No, but the universe thus described by some mathematical structure typically is suggested to obey physical law. It isn't necessary. Perhaps the mathematics can be more complicated and include mental properties as well. It's just that nobody has ever observed such properties, let alone modeled them.
Quoting PatternerOK. I don't think anybody would suggest that a roomba has the complexity needed for human awareness/experience, but neither does a bat. The bat gets closer.
I beg to differ. So much of the old works rest on classicality (one world, one identity, presentism, and yes, all effects have a cause), and all that has been tossed out the window by 20th century physics (starting pretty much at 1900). It's why I got into these forums in the first place, since so much of the philosophical literature (even 20th century stuff) was written by people who don't know their physics.
So here I am, an armchair physics guy (moderator of a science forum), working out my own philosophy with little help from the pros.
As an illustration, try finding somethings that explores which quantum interpretations are compatible with the Bible or one's theology of choice.
For some reason, the free-will discussion seems to care about this, reasoning (incorrectly) that apparently randomness is required for moral responsibility, thus favoring only interpretations with, as Einstein put it, 'God rolling dice'.
It seems pointless to belabor the point when you don't worry about a cutoff like I described. If you think rocks are conscious (just not very), then it isn't something that just 'turned on' with one thing. There are those that believe otherwise (the jellyfish, lacking a brain, isn't conscious), and the comment was only applicable to that suggestion.
No argument there. But at some point, he goes so far as to conclude the necessity (does he? or just he possibility?) of these mental properties that don't supervene on physical properties, and being admittedly ignorant of his work, I cannot assert if he finds a valid reasoning for this, or just the usual incredulity that so many lean on.
Sorry Thomas, but not going to happen. It not happening is not proof of anything. As was said, imagination only gets you so far. It certainly fails to get to the roomba.
I also find that too fantastic, but I never considered it a binary thing that you have or don't. Like I said, it a point only relevant to those with such a view: probably substance dualism, where something has an immaterial 'mind' object when it's parent did not.
I had the Adam/Eve thing explained that way. Two people cannot breed all of humanity, and the story as taken literally contradicts evidence. So the idea is that the area was full of these near-human apes, and Adam was somehow a mutation that utilized this immaterial object to call his shots rather than using his own brain. It worked better, and the mutation propagated as he (and his offspring) bred with the almost-humans, and most of the descendants of Adam were conscious after that, when the ones without this mutation (ancestors, early spouses) were not. Of course bats wouldn't be either. It's this mind/soul thing that God judges, not the physical body. All this requires that classicality.
All kinds of holes in that. The mind taking over like that is akin to possession. Why do we have these huge expensive organs (a whopping 20 watts, a power drain that has killed plenty of people), when the other animals do it for far less. If this immaterial object is doing all the hard work, a walnut size brain should suffice for the rest just like it did for dinosaurs.
And then there's the whole bit about how the not-conscious ones (zombies, just like the bats) managed to do what they do without any 'experience', which I find preposterous.
And then the Bible kills off everyone a 2nd time (so much for the last of the zombies) and has Noah & co (4 couples) repopulate the planet so fast it would require something like 50 kids per breeder. I digress...
Quoting BannoPerhaps this is our disconnect, given my physics background. "World' means that which relates to us, or that which has been measured by a given entity. Think the W in MWI. Hence our world is essentially confined to the visible universe, the rest being totally unmeasured by humans.
OK, so you're using a modal logic meaning of the word when you say "The actual world is the one we are in", I think you saying that this particular world is the only one that corresponds to the facts of reality as we experience them, which is not a strong statement since I don't see how it could be otherwise. It's just a stipulation: actual to me. The designation seems to correspond to idealistic or relational thinking: actual to me, not objectively actual (as I had mistakenly interpreted your comment). Empirical truth vs objective truth.
Tell me where I'm getting this wrong, since I'm sure I mucked up the meaning from a modal logic domain.
Quoting WayfarerAn evasion. Have I pointed out an inconsistency then? Knowing your methods, you'd likely deny that a non-living thing cannot know something since the dictionary doesn't have any examples of that usage, a denial despite the roomba clearly not being able to do what it does without such knowledge, and knowledge that it obtain on its own, not something fed to it. You can teach it stuff, like define a no-go zone to protect a place it cannot handle.
Not really.
The usage comes from "The world is all that is the case", the first lines of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It's still a pretty good definition. While it says nothing about experience, it remains that it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise.
But not at all idealistic. The world is the facts, experienced or not, known or not.
Quoting noAxiomsSorry, I don't know what you're asking.
Quoting noAxiomsThat'd my point. There isn't anything about mechanics, or classical physics, that's suggests such things.
Quoting noAxiomsI don't.
Quoting noAxiomsNeither do I.
There is no mystery. First and Third person views are the way of human perception. For example, I am playing guitar and singing a song. I am perceiving my own guitar playing and singing as I am playing along and singing. I see and feel the guitar strings making sound as I intend to play, and I hear my own voice singing with my own ears. This is the first person view.
But I can record my own guitar playing and singing on my phone, and replay it after the session on my phone or upload to youtube, and watch me playing the guitar and singing. I am seeing my own performance from the third person point of view.
I was feeling that my performance was faultless and was happy with it, when I was perceiving and listening to it from the first person point of view. But when I watch the replay on the video, I might find some mistakes in the play, and feel not quite sure if I like it or not. I feel I do need more practice. This is the third person point of view.
It is the mode of perception, nothing to do with contradiction. truth or falsity.
I would here also add that in the case of algorihm-based machines, consciousness seems to be unnecessary. In our case, it seems that being self-aware allows us to evaluate, ponder, argue and so on in the case of algorithmic machines, an eventual consciousness doesn't seem to me to add any kind of 'functionality' that an 'unconscious' doesn't have.
I cringe at calling those abilities 'mental' since there's such a strong connotation of both life-form and dualism with that word. Let's just say I am considering the cognitive abilities of that roomba.
I wasn't a question. I was noting that Nagel concludes dualism from his musings, and I don't follow the logic by which he gets there. Maybe if I read his work, I'd know better, but maybe not even then since the only argument I ever see is incredulity.
I'm sure I'm getting your stance wrong, but i had gathered that you believe that matter (all matter) has mental properties, and since the rock is made of matter, it must have mental properties. OK, having mental properties is different than being conscious, but then at which point does the latter kick in? You either draw a line somewhere, or deny the line. Denying the line makes for conscious rocks. So where do you draw it?
Quoting boundlessDidn't know there was more than the two, even if presentism comes in half a dozen different flavors, but all sharing the premise of a preferred moment in time.
OK. You accept intuition as evidence and I don't. That's fair. I agree, I think more along the 'falsification' line of thinking.
Eternalism does not deny change, so awareness of that is to be expected.
Good example. I was trapped in a hung jury once. Being hung like that is bad, but the reasons why they voted their way were often the wrong reasons. I was probably the most waffley guy there, most likely to be swayed to the other side. The facts were clear. It was the interpretation of them that split the decisions.
Agree. Relativity and absolutist theories make (almost) the same predictions, so the appeal to a model doesn't work.
Not sure how this got worked into a topic about first person being magical or not.
Quoting boundlessI'm fine with that. I didn't claim it was the way we do it. And no, you're not aware of all the things you've learned. But my point was, however the roomba does it, it acquires the information of where it can be, where it has been and where it has yet to be. It couldn't do what it does without that information. If you don't want to label that 'knowing', then you're just saying that the language usage of that word is restricted to a privileged subset, but it doesn't change what the roomba is actually doing. It only alters the words available to something else trying to describe it. The roomba functions just fine regardless of which words you find eligible for describing it.
You put it in scare quotes, suggesting that the word is reserved for things that do it the human way. I didn't claim the roomba has any need to do that.
You willingness to stamp 'qualitative experience' on what the roomba is doing is similarly irrelevant. Point is, it is gathering information on its own by whatever means and reacting appropriately to that information. The way it gathers that information can be expressed as 'qualitative experience' or not. The roomba operation doesn't depend on anybody's designation of where that term applies or doesn't. You apparently decline to apply the term. That's fine. Nobody claimed it is experiencing the way you do.
I don't see how these two are related at all, and while I don't know how you distinguish autonomy from the lack of it (to the point that you can demonstrate that you have it, rather than just feel like you have it), the roomba is admittedly a slave, doing what it's told, but leaving how to do it open.
Or alternatively, demonstrate that you're not algorithmic, since that term is also put out there. I attempted to describe a test for that in the OP.
Quoting boundlessPerhaps we define consciousness differently. The roomba needs to measure its environment and react appropriately to that. Refusal to apply that word to the situation just seems to be a word-definition choice, not a denial that the roomba is doing the same thing, just in it's own way, just like frogs do it their own way.
Quoting BannoAmbiguous. Do they mean 'all that is empirically the case' or 'all that is objectively the case'? The former seems idealistic/relational, and seems to be how you're using the term. The latter wording is realism.
I say that, but most people's idea of 'realism' is 'it's real because I see it;, which is the relational usage again. If I say I'm not a realist, I mean I'm not an objective realist because I cannot identity a meaningful distinction between something real and something not. I only see relations.
That is very different than how you've been using the word, which seems very much based on experience and induction.
Quoting CorvusThere are those that assert that a human being supervening only on physical particles and laws cannot have a first person view. That's part of what the topic is about. The other part is drawing the line between what can have it and what cannot. If it's confined only to humans (or a subset of them, as has been argued), one must justify what makes us the preferred entity, and when that preference was acquired.
Quoting noAxioms
:lol:
No, he meant "all that is the case". Empirical, non-empirical, objective, subjective...
It's almost a tautology... but not quite, which is why it is so important.
Quoting noAxiomsI assume you mean incredulity regarding consciousness emerging from physicalism. If that's the case, I would say that no similarity between physical properties/characteristics and consciousness; no logic to physical matter arranging itself according to the laws of physics, then, for no reason, become conscious; and no theory of how this happens from anyone, is less incredulity, and more looking for answers to legitimate questions.
Your reply is very sketchy. Could you elaborate more?