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Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

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Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#31

Post by escape_goat »

ci5er wrote: post #6
wildmusings wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dennett’s arguments are very frustrating because he refuses to engage with the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience, and how it could arise from physical processes. In dismissing this problem, he doesn’t do much more than simply refuse to engage with it. “Consciousness Explained”? More like consciousness denied. For example, he insists that our consciousness isn’t quite as broad as…

We absolute can be aware of subjective experience/awareness. Hawkins posited in "On Intelligence" that consciousness is simply the feeling of having a neo-cortex. While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real", I really don't have any basis for believing/thinking that they could arise from anything else other than from physical quanta hitting my senso-sphere and being interpreted by a…

It's a bit tricker than it sounds, though. We cannot be aware of the absence of awareness. This could imply that we can only be aware of a sense of 'awareness' insofar as it was in fact differentiated from awareness itself, though a missing second step that is probably familiar to you (but it's a bit late at night for me to articulate it coherently).

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#32

Post by jldugger »

lawpoop wrote: post #12
abiox wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience (honest) why is this a problem? what's the difference between my "experience" and the experience of, say, a film camera?

If you don't think it's a problem, then it's not. There's no real way, presently, to prove there isn't a difference. Likewise, I could say there is no difference between my experience of satiation after eating, and the experience of a garbage can being filled full. If you don't think there's a problem with that, fine. No way to show there isn't. However, people inclined to agree with your film example might not be in…

> Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision?

One would argue that there's more chemistry going on in neurons feeding to the optic center, but I'm not well versed in neuroscience to tell you where the signal stops.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#34

Post by dvt »

pdonis wrote: post #17
dvt wrote: post #9

Dennet is a reductive materialist. He'd probably disagree with my hardline depiction of him, but, in my opinion, if it quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it's probably a duck. For what it's worth, he identifies as a 'teleofunctionalist' (???). The author of the piece doesn't seem to be a reductive materialist, so obviously Dennet won't jive with him. I'm also not a materialist, so I don't really find Dennet ve…

> he denies the existence of qualia No, he doesn't. He just says that qualia aren't what we intuitively think they are. Denying the existence of qualia would mean denying that we have subjective experiences. Dennett doesn't deny that. But he does deny that many of our usual intuitions about qualia are correct, by showing how they lead to inconsistent and incoherent thinking about our experiences. It's quite true that…

> Denying the existence of qualia would mean denying that we have subjective experiences. Dennett doesn't deny that. But he does deny that many of our usual intuitions about qualia are correct, by showing how they lead to inconsistent and incoherent thinking about our experiences.

I don't think you're right. See here[1]:

> There is a limited use for such interpretations of subjects' protocols, I have argued (Dennett 1978a; 1979, esp., pp.109-110; 1982), but they will not help the defenders of qualia here. Logical constructs out of judgments must be viewed as akin to theorists' fictions, and the friends of qualia want the existence of a particular quale in any particular case to be an empirical fact in good standing, not a theorist's useful interpretive fiction, else it will not loom as a challenge to functionalism or materialism or third-person, objective science.

According to the man himself, he thinks that they are "theorists' fictions" and "not empirical facts" -- that's about as "they aren't a thing" as you can possibly get.

[1] http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#35

Post by red75prime »

xyzzyz wrote: post #30
starchild_3001 wrote: post #22

What's the big deal with consciousness? Isn't it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I'd expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts & abilities are programmed.

The big deal is that there's no observable difference between the world where your robot is conscious of itself and has subjective experience of its surroundings, and between the world where your robot merely behaves as such, speaks to you trying to convince you that it indeed has subjective experience, but in fact it has none, its experiences are just a movie screened in an empty cinema where nobody is watching. Thi…

Why do you think those worlds are different in a meaningful sense? You can distinguish them in your imagination only. If you were the God, I would believe you.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#36

Post by OvidNaso »

starchild_3001 wrote: post #22

What's the big deal with consciousness? Isn't it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I'd expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts & abilities are programmed.

Well that is like saying gravity is an emergent property of space-time. Perhaps it is, but that doesn't finish explaining what it is or why it is an emergent property.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#37

Post by nzjrs »

starchild_3001 wrote: post #22

What's the big deal with consciousness? Isn't it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I'd expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts & abilities are programmed.

What's the big deal with programming? Isn't it an obvious trait sure to emerge after tapping those square boxes on the computer board enough times?

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#38

Post by pygy_ »

erasemus wrote: post #21
mrmyers wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Consciousness Explained, Dennet is deliberately not dealing with that problem because he had already written his thesis, a book, and several papers on the subject of content and qualia and that sort of argument. He was also a student of Quine, who had his own rather extensive criticisms of the notion of intentionality and subjective experience. As such, he decided to leave that particular sort of discussion out, a…

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm >What are qualia, exactly? Sets of associated ideas? For example, a door knob might be associated with (1) wood, (2) black, (3) grasping, (4) turning, (5) my right hand. All these ideas are activated to some degree when I contemplate the door knob, and to a greater degree when I contemplate myself contemplating the door knob.

I'd say: subsets of the perceptual/cognitive space.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#39

Post by xyzzyz »

red75prime wrote: post #35
xyzzyz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big deal is that there's no observable difference between the world where your robot is conscious of itself and has subjective experience of its surroundings, and between the world where your robot merely behaves as such, speaks to you trying to convince you that it indeed has subjective experience, but in fact it has none, its experiences are just a movie screened in an empty cinema where nobody is watching. Thi…

Why do you think those worlds are different in a meaningful sense? You can distinguish them in your imagination only. If you were the God, I would believe you.

The meaningful sense is that I have subjective experience, yet I can imagine a world where there's no subjective experience of being me -- it is exactly the world _you_ are living in.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#40

Post by sgt101 »

erasemus wrote: post #19
abiox wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience (honest) why is this a problem? what's the difference between my "experience" and the experience of, say, a film camera?

The camera doesn't have (1) an attentional system, (2) a model of the world in memory, (3) a model of itself within that model.

for humans with cultures (4) a way to create and impose narratives (5) narratives about the world
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