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We Are Beast Machines

nautil.us

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Re: We Are Beast Machines

#11

Post by nickelpro »

joeberon wrote: post #7
nickelpro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

Well we do know emergent phenomena that occur as abstractions. Probably the most obvious example is a computer program. At a basic level, the computer really doesn't look like it's doing useful work, it just processes lists of rules and stuff, but actually the emergent behaviour is that I am browsing Hacker News. What is the difference between a computer and a rock? Well there isn't actually a fundamental difference,…

Exactly, you have a handwave. A vague idea that when a system becomes "complex" enough it suddenly becomes conscious. There's no mechanism, no rigor, no cause and effect. With the browser you can chase down every bit through the hardware, down to the quantum tunneling effect dictating what's happening in the silicon and come up with a concrete explanation based in physical laws.

With the browser example, at no level of abstraction does there exist any ambiguity. "Emergent" in that framing simply means we can explain abstracted behaviors in terms of other abstractions. But if you wanted you could drill down to the particle physics and have a complete, rational explanation of the system.

Not so with consciousness, and thus the "hard problem"

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#12

Post by joeberon »

ivanbakel wrote: post #9
nickelpro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

The trouble with the "hard problem" of consciousness is that it's predicated on the possibility of the existence of p-zombies. Even if you don't know how a complex physical system gives rise to consciousness, you understand that a block of steel is not a complex physical system - so the fact that it isn't conscious isn't that contentious. If p-zombies could exist as complex systems without consciousness, then there w…

Yeah I think a more interesting problem is asking what the difference between an electronic robot that behaves in every way like a human, and a human, is. Or further, an electronic robot where every single neuron in the human was completely simulated. I thought about this a lot when I was a teenager lol, surely in this case such a robot must have a subjective experience just as we do, but why?

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#13

Post by nickelpro »

ivanbakel wrote: post #9
nickelpro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

The trouble with the "hard problem" of consciousness is that it's predicated on the possibility of the existence of p-zombies. Even if you don't know how a complex physical system gives rise to consciousness, you understand that a block of steel is not a complex physical system - so the fact that it isn't conscious isn't that contentious. If p-zombies could exist as complex systems without consciousness, then there w…

Really? A sufficiently advanced computer is a perfect P-zombie to me. This is the Chinese Room problem restated. A computer is capable of behaving as a conscious actor without any concept of knowledge or qualia as we would recognize it. But again this gets into a faith-based discussion. To me a sufficiently complex computer doesn't suddenly cross a "consciousness threshold" of complexity, but if to you it does there's no problem, which we could call "camp 3" in this discussion.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#14

Post by eli_gottlieb »

nickelpro wrote: post #6
joeberon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far the only answer I've seen people give to the question is "what problem? There's no problem". Basically, there are many people who don't (or also have convinced themselves that they don't) perceive an incongruity between their personal subjective experience and the idea that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena of a physical system. I haven't found a good way to explain it, I just know that there's somet…

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

Blocks of steel don't have nervous systems of any kind, let alone complex brains. Hell, they aren't even alive at all: they lack the underlying physiology for a nervous system to sense and control in the first place.

Seems like a bit of a hint for why we're conscious and they're not.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#15

Post by tim333 »

nickelpro wrote: post #6
joeberon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far the only answer I've seen people give to the question is "what problem? There's no problem". Basically, there are many people who don't (or also have convinced themselves that they don't) perceive an incongruity between their personal subjective experience and the idea that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena of a physical system. I haven't found a good way to explain it, I just know that there's somet…

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

I'd go with a variation on 2:

2a) I am not like a block of steel, but I know why ("evolution")

In the same way that a camera takes pictures while a block of steel doesn't because someone designed it that way, we are conscious because evolution designed us that way. Conscious people survive better than those knocked unconscious.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#16

Post by joeberon »

nickelpro wrote: post #13
ivanbakel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with the "hard problem" of consciousness is that it's predicated on the possibility of the existence of p-zombies. Even if you don't know how a complex physical system gives rise to consciousness, you understand that a block of steel is not a complex physical system - so the fact that it isn't conscious isn't that contentious. If p-zombies could exist as complex systems without consciousness, then there w…

Really? A sufficiently advanced computer is a perfect P-zombie to me. This is the Chinese Room problem restated. A computer is capable of behaving as a conscious actor without any concept of knowledge or qualia as we would recognize it. But again this gets into a faith-based discussion. To me a sufficiently complex computer doesn't suddenly cross a "consciousness threshold" of complexity, but if to you it does there'…

A vast majority of people who believe that consciousness is an emergent property would also say that a sufficiently advanced computer is exactly as conscious as you or I. At least when I believed that human consciousness was an emergent property I believed that an advanced robot would be totally conscious.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#17

Post by joeberon »

nickelpro wrote: post #11
joeberon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we do know emergent phenomena that occur as abstractions. Probably the most obvious example is a computer program. At a basic level, the computer really doesn't look like it's doing useful work, it just processes lists of rules and stuff, but actually the emergent behaviour is that I am browsing Hacker News. What is the difference between a computer and a rock? Well there isn't actually a fundamental difference,…

Exactly, you have a handwave. A vague idea that when a system becomes "complex" enough it suddenly becomes conscious. There's no mechanism, no rigor, no cause and effect. With the browser you can chase down every bit through the hardware, down to the quantum tunneling effect dictating what's happening in the silicon and come up with a concrete explanation based in physical laws. With the browser example, at no level…

I don't have it, because it's not my argument, it's their argument, and it's clearly making you emotional so I think it's better to stop it here.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#18

Post by nickelpro »

tim333 wrote: post #15
nickelpro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

I'd go with a variation on 2: 2a) I am not like a block of steel, but I know why ("evolution") In the same way that a camera takes pictures while a block of steel doesn't because someone designed it that way, we are conscious because evolution designed us that way. Conscious people survive better than those knocked unconscious.

But then you are like a block of steel, you are deterministically governed by the laws of physics. Any block of matter arranged just so is conscious in that framing, which differs from the religious framing.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#19

Post by bondarchuk »

nickelpro wrote: post #3

Nothing in this essay addresses the single most prominent question of contemporary philosophy of mind, which is the hard problem of consciousness. It only addresses the soft problems, which everyone agrees are solvable "merely" with enough time, funding, and initiative. Nothing about the "beast machine" addresses how qualitative experience arises from physical phenomena, or as Chalmers puts it, "Why are we not philos…

If you are going to demand a precise, non-handwavey answer to the hard problem, then you must first give the hard problem in a precise, non-handwavey way, or at the very least prove in a precise, non-handwavey way that there even is such a thing as the hard problem. As far as I've seen nobody has really done this, it's always just "what breathes fire into the equations?" "what is it like to be a bat?" "I just feel it in my bones that there's something missing"... P-zombies are an attempt, except that "p-zombies are conceivable" is to be taken as axiomatic without any further explanation.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#20

Post by joeberon »

nickelpro wrote: post #18
tim333 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go with a variation on 2: 2a) I am not like a block of steel, but I know why ("evolution") In the same way that a camera takes pictures while a block of steel doesn't because someone designed it that way, we are conscious because evolution designed us that way. Conscious people survive better than those knocked unconscious.

But then you are like a block of steel, you are deterministically governed by the laws of physics. Any block of matter arranged just so is conscious in that framing, which differs from the religious framing.

> Any block of matter arranged just so is conscious in that framing, which differs from the religious framing.

That is literally the secular materialist view of consciousness, yes.

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