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My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
PS: I like your P-Zombie joke :D
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we don't experience reality directly That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which is somewhat mediated by low-level expectations. This takes place at sub-conscious levels. Conscious perception comes much later, and is obviously more filtered. To call it a hallucination is word play.
> We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. Depending on how you define "reality" we only experience a tiny subset of it. We can only see/hear/touch/smell/taste a very restricted universe, only what our "antennas" can detect. In fact I would argue that we experience close to 0% of all of reality. On top of this extremely restricted input our processing of it is imperfect which means some of what we exp…
And in the context of hallucination, what we can't experience doesn't matter.
My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
To answer the hard part.... To be completely honest, I think qualia are dualistic emanations of the One Source of Truth and understanding, and describable as convex optimizations in the kinds of spaces that Incompleteness deals with. I think love and honor are hyperparameters for the hypercomputers that we refer to as our hearts and that simulation is much more likely than material because of dichotomy / reality gap.
> One point on which you both clearly agree is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, It probably is but I wouldn't be so sure it is. I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess. > we have the ineffable experience of being alive in this world The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separat…
If consciousness is not embodied that would imply metaphysics and body/mind dualism, e.i. something countrary what one might term the scientific world view.
"what one might term the scientific world view" is great and very practical but not perfect. There certainly are legitimate questions it probably has no way to address.
I feel pretty skeptical about exploring the nature of consciousness without employing techniques available in Buddhism, psychonetics[1] or something like that. These are fundamentally unscientific (although not imaginary - execution of the practices can be easily detected with EEG) but can at least let us observe the object of the study with at least some basic degree of objectivity, reason about it and do something useful with it.
If you zone out, are you still conscious? Or if you are watching a movie and not thinking about yourself, are you still conscious?
If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.
Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…
maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale)... also are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out...
This is my feeling too. Since the brain is just physical matter arranged a certain way, doing a certain type of processing, I really think it possible that some computer programs we use today are also doing the right kind of processing to grant them a simple subjective inner experience. Of course most programs don’t have a way to tell us if that’s the case, except maybe GPT-3 :)
> are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out
I have evidence for it being the latter: our higher brain functions let us rationalize, to ourselves, the decisions that were deterministically made by our subconscious, so it feels like “you” made the decisions “because you wanted to”. People who have the connection between their brain hemispheres severed can unconsciously reach a decision in one hemisphere, but then consciously rationalize it in the other hemisphere, without having experienced the making of the decision [0]:
>In one example of this kind of test, a picture of a chicken claw was flashed to the left hemisphere and a picture of a snow scene to the right hemisphere. Of the array of pictures placed in front of the subject, the obviously correct association is a chicken for the chicken claw and a shovel for the snow scene. Patient P.S. responded by choosing the shovel with the left hand and the chicken with the right. When asked why he chose these items, his left hemisphere replied `Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed'. Here the left brain, observing the left hand's response, interprets that response in a context consistent with its sphere of knowledge—one that does not include information about the left hemifield snow scene.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106
If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.
> Would you say that these more complicated states of emotion represent higher or more complex “levels” of consciousness?
> Seth: I’m personally very skeptical of this kind of labeling, of higher and lower levels of consciousness. There is a little truth to it, of course. Unless we can agree that human beings are in some sense, more conscious than, say, an ant, we’re missing some very important things about the nature of consciousness.
My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview.
Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but at the expense of forcibly ignoring the essence of what constitutes material reality. In the case of QM, the "just run the equations" view of the world has been dominant since Einstein reluctantly ceded ground on this issue. To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world.
(fwiw, I am something of a materialist, which is why I have thought of this problem beforehand.)
I believe people with psychedelic experiences can attest to the controlled hallucination theory of consciousness. But only those with a materialist world view while idealists may posit souls or alternate realities. Imagination is also a part in probabilistic decision making, an unhinged prediction machine.