What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

- Why is there something rather than nothing?

- Does a universe with no one in it to observe it count as something or nothing?

Then, imagine we're building an AI and want to know whether it's reached our level or not:

- How can we determine whether the AI experiences qualia the same (or similar) way we do, and isn't lying?

- Where to draw the line between conscious being and computer?

What I’m imagining is that the registering mechanism would itself have sensors placed on its wires that measure the currency levels on those wires, and have the measurements of those sensors as additional inputs into the cognition automaton. And then have sensors on the gates and wires of that automaton, which again feed as additional inputs into that same automaton. Add memory and timing delays. And then multiply all that some million times to get to the level of complexity of our inner mind, of our sensory and movement apparatus, and of our mental models.

When introspecting myself, I don’t see or feel or think anything that couldn’t be explained by such a setup. The different textures (qualia, if you will) of what I perceive in my mind have a certain complexity, but that is merely quantitative and structural, not qualitative.

I therefore simply do not agree that there is a hard problem of consciousness to begin with, in the usually given sense. I don’t agree that there is a qualitative difference between the perception of “qualia” and other perceptions. “Qualia” are just a perception of representations and processes happening in my brain. I see no puzzling mystery that would require solving.

There is a theory, Integrated Information Theory (IIT) [0], which argues exactly that [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

[1]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.2307/25470707#_i2

After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense:

(Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machinery of consciousness works would not tell us anything about how it is possible to be truly conscious of anything at all" they are commonly underestimating what it would actually mean to understand how the machinery of consciousness works.)

1. There is a scanning device. You can strap yourself into this for half an hour, during which time it shows you images, plays you sounds, asks you to think particular kinds of thoughts, etc., all the while watching all your neurons, how they connect, which ones fire when under what circumstances, etc. It tries to model your peripheral as well as central nervous system, so it has a pretty good model of how all the bits of your body connect to your brain, and of how those bits of body actually operate.

2. There is a simulator. It can, in something approximating real time, pretty much duplicate the operation of a brain that has been scanned using the scanning device. It also has enough simulation of the body the brain's part of that it can e.g. provide the simulated brain with fairly realistic sensory inputs, and respond fairly realistically to its motor outputs. There's a UI that lets you see and hear what the simulated person is doing.

3. Researchers have figured out pretty much everything about the architecture of the brain, and it turns out to be reasonably modular, and they've built into the simulator a UI for looking at the structure, so that you can take a running simulation and explore it top-down or bottom-up or middle-out, either from the point of view of brain structure or that of cognition, perception, etc.

4. So, for instance, you can do the following. Inside the simulation, arrange for something fairly striking to happen to the simulated person. E.g., they're having a conversation with a friend, and the friend suddenly kicks them painfully in the shin. Some time passes and then (still, for the avoidance of doubt, in the simulation) they are asked about that experience, and they say (as the "real" person would) things like "I felt a sharp pain in my leg, and I felt surprised and also a bit betrayed. I trust that person less now." And you can watch the simulation at whatever level of abstraction you like, and observe the brain mechanisms that make all that happen. E.g., when they get kicked you can see the flow of neuron-activation from the place that's kicked, up the spinal cord, into the brain; the system can tell you "these neurons are active whenever the subject feels physical pain, and sometimes when they feel emotional distress, and sometimes when they remember being in pain" and "this cascade of visual processing is identifying the face in front of them as that of Joe Blorfle, and you can see here how these neurons associated with Joe Blorfle are firing while the conversation is happening, and when the pain happens you can see how these connections between the Joe Blorfle neurons and the pain neurons get strengthened a bit, and later on when the subject is asked about Joe Blorfle and the Joe Blorfle neurons fire, so do the pain ones. And you can see this big chunk of neural machinery here is making records of what happened so that the subject can remember it later; here's how the order in which things happen is represented, and here's how memories get linked up to the people and things and experiences involved, etc. And when he's asked about Joe Blorfle, you can see these bits of language-processing brain tissue are active. These bits here are taking input from the ears and identifying syllable boundaries, and these bits are identifying good candidates for the syllable being heard right now, and these other bits are linking together nearby syllables looking for plausible words, with plausibility being influenced by what notions the subject is attending to, and these other bits are putting together something that turns out to be rather like a parse tree, and, and, and ...".

5. That is: the linkage -- at least in terms of actual physical goings-on within the brain -- between being kicked in the shin by Joe Blorfle on Thursday, and expressing resentment when asked about Joe Blorfle on Saturday, is being accurately simulated, and the structure of what's being simulated is understood well enough that you can see its "moving parts" at higher or lower levels of abstraction.

OK, so that's the scenario. I reiterate that it would be wildly optimistic to expect anything like this any time soon, but so far as I know nothing in it is impossible in principle.

Question 1: Do you agree that something along these lines is possible in principle?

[EDITED to add:] For the avoidance of doubt, of course it might well turn out that some of the analysis has to be done in terms not of particular neural "circuits" but e.g. of particular patterns of neural activation. (Consider a computer running a chess-playing program. You can't point to any part of its hardware and say "that bit is computing king safety", but you can explain what processes it goes through that compute king safety and how they relate to the hardware and its states. Similar things may happen in the brain. Or very different things that likewise mean that particular bits of computation aren't always done by specific bits of brain "hardware".)

Question 2: If it happened, would you think there is still a "hard problem" left unsolved?

Question 3: If you think there would still be a "hard problem" left unsolved, is that because you think someone in this scenario could imagine all the machinery revealed by the simulator operating perfectly without any actual qualia?

(My answers, for reference: I think this is possible in principle. I think there would be no "hard problem" left, which makes me disinclined to believe that even now there is a "hard problem" that's as completely separate from the "easy" problem of "just" explaining how everything works as e.g. Chalmers suggests. I think that anyone who thinks they can imagine all the processes that give rise to (e.g.) a philosopher saying "I know how it feels for me to experience being kicked in the shin, and I think no mere simulation could truly capture that", in full detail, without any qualia being present, is simply fooling themselves, in the same way as I would be fooling myself if I said "I can imagine my computer doing all the things it does, exactly as it does, without any actual electrons being present".)