61–70 of 181 posts
It is existential being which is consciousness and our brains are localized composite self identifying subjectives of this phenomena.
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The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand,…
> you have an experience. What are "you"? And what is an "experience"? You highlight this like it's a magical phrase that cannot be explained, and your arguments suggest that you take it as a foundational assumption. But if you assume a fundamentally inexplicable nature to both personhood and experience, then you cannot possibly recognize any explanation for these, because doing so would require giving up your assump…
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People fundamentally disagree about whether there is anything besides the “of”. My personal introspection tells mere there is only “of”, because what I perceive as my consciousness, is, by virtue of being a perception, in the end just an “of” itself. There is some sort of recursivity involved in the whole construct of consciousness, which makes it hard to get a grasp on. In some sense, consciousness is just that, bei…
The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand,…
You might as well demand the atheist explanation for how god created the world. The atheist must deny the premise of the question, they can't give an answer in the terms of the question.
"We have no explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia"
We do, but not in the terms you set out. The explanation is that that there is not a you that experiences qualia, two separate things. Rather the experiences ARE YOU. There's nothing they happen to. Their happening is you.
You don't have to agree with it. But the hard question is not ducked. It is not a coherent question in this view.
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No, this totally missing the point again. It is not a question of what the sensor detects. It is a question of how it is possible for there to be an experience when sensing occurs. Your introspection is simply pointing out the likely nature of what you experience, and I actually agree (tentatively) with the idea that most of our conscious experience is rooted in a self-reflecting system. But none of that has any bear…
What you call “experience” for me is just sensing of internal information processing, of internal representations. This may need some dedicated introspection to fully realize. You’re making a distinction which I believe is a mirage. It’s just a special attributation we make in our minds to those inner perceptions. If you look closely, it vanishes. Think about it: How do you know that you have what you call an “experi…
We know that physical systems can sense phenomena in the world. We doubt that they experience anything when they do so. Even if we create a Hofstadterian "strange loop" so that we sense our own sensing, that does not give rise to "experience".
I concede that it could be a matter of scale, but a photosensor that knows that it glows yellow when it senses red does not have an experience.
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The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand,…
This argument is not "eliding" the hard problem. This argument is saying that Chalmers' hard problem does not actually exist. We have many explanations for what people describe as "the hard problem". But nobody who believes in "the hard problem" accepts these explanations, which have been given for decades by philosophers like Dennett. There is no way to reconcile your view, that there IS a hard problem and that no p…
For me, the hard problem is such an obvious and almost intractable thing that any folks who dismiss it clearly don’t understand it (or live an inner experience that lets them understand it).
And because I’ve never really seen anyone flip on their view of the hard problem, I’m 99% convinced it’s because they actually have a different lived conscious experience. Perhaps they process information different, or have more or less access to their internal state.
It’s possible that folks who dismiss the hard problem actually have more conscious access to their internal state and hence don’t understand why it’s an issue.
An analogy is aphantasia (folks who don’t have an internal visual experience). Somebody with an aphantasic brain simply doesn’t experience consciously like others. I feel that understanding that the hard problem exists is something rooted in a different internal experience.
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I'm familiar with IIT. I don't believe it suggests that a photosensor has qualia.
Isn't the parent and related answers pointing towards the idea that there's a level of complexity above which you need to be to see those qualia? A single little circuit might not be the one that is conscious, but a bunch of them connected together might exhibit patterns that we could call experience? Maybe the analogy is that a single DNA molecule is not a living thing but that molecule along with a bunch of others…
However, if this does turn out to be true, I suspect that it will not constitute an "explanation" of experience, merely a description of its prerequisites.
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People fundamentally disagree about whether there is anything besides the “of”. My personal introspection tells mere there is only “of”, because what I perceive as my consciousness, is, by virtue of being a perception, in the end just an “of” itself. There is some sort of recursivity involved in the whole construct of consciousness, which makes it hard to get a grasp on. In some sense, consciousness is just that, bei…
The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand,…
Your thought experiment actually shows why a materialistic model makes much more sense than any model that takes "the hard problem" seriously. It's trivially easy to show that the human brown is much more complex than an electronic circuit that registers red or blue light, and that the human brain is doing much more. It's no surprise to anyone that a simple circuit like that lacks an abstraction of the world around it.
But if you believe qualia is an actual thing, than how can you show that the circuit lacks it? No one seems to be able to come up with any way of measuring qualia, or even showing that it exists. There's no way to show that we have more of it than the circuit, and we're left relying on what "feels right."
Before demanding that models solve "the hard problem," we should first ask ourselves if there's any evidence that "the hard problem" even exists. The only evidence I've seen anyone provide for qualia is that they feel they have it, or extremely contrived thought experiments where people feel like it makes the most sense. Counter to this is the entirety of science showing that the world we live in is one that is an emergent one of physical properties. Which, yes, leads to a good number of surprising things.
Creationists thought that god had to have a role in creating life, because they couldn't conceive that something as complex as an eye could be an emergent feature of random physical properties. "Hard problem" folks think that there must be some sort of non-physical "qualia," because they can't comprehend that our experiences are simply an emergent feature of the extremely complex neurons in our brains. Yet scientists that actually study these things don't run into these problems, and keep using the physical model because it's the only one that has made any sense so far.
Aeon just had a great article on the consciousness, "Seeing and somethingness" https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-probl... It argues that consciousness evolved out of sensation, where we developed an "inner self" to predict how sensations would affect us, and it's that inner self that became our conscious. Don't miss out on the comments section, the author answers a lot of question in there.
Like Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained", the Aeon article falls into the category of explaining what we are conscious of , not how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all. It does not really tackle Chalmers "hard problem of consciousness", despite the subtitle.
I ... have always seen that as something obvious. On a high level, isn't consciousness the result of combining a bunch of neurons (a "hardware", of sorts) in certain preexisting configuration (a "software" of sorts) and stimuli (inputs) ?.
To me the problem is on the details. The separation between layers is not needed because there's no limited consciousness needing to understand the system in the first place. All the encodings and pathways in all 3 levels are tortuous and non-intuitive, and profoundly intertwined. An image being seen through the eyes will end up being encoded as a bunch of electrical signals that will then sent to neurons that will pass it to other neurons until eventually certain other neurons will release molecules will get released through another end and that will activate other neurons and that gets encoded as "pleasure".
But to me it is obvious that this is what's going on. The "hard part" is the reverse-engineering the software, the operative system and the hardware.
This would be a deeply challenging technical puzzle - perhaps beyond our capabilities to tackle, perhaps it would require many generations of people. But I don't understand where this "philosophical hardness" is. I only see the so-called "easy" problems.
What's mysterious about Consciousness the software/hardware it is part of is finicky and tricky, like something written by a crazy savant with a big ego.
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Like Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained", the Aeon article falls into the category of explaining what we are conscious of , not how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all. It does not really tackle Chalmers "hard problem of consciousness", despite the subtitle.
> how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all I ... have always seen that as something obvious. On a high level, isn't consciousness the result of combining a bunch of neurons (a "hardware", of sorts) in certain preexisting configuration (a "software" of sorts) and stimuli (inputs) ?. To me the problem is on the details. The separation between layers is not needed because there's no limited consciousness ne…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand,…
You're demanding a the hard problem be addressed from a point of view that doesn't see the hard problem as a thing. You might as well demand the atheist explanation for how god created the world. The atheist must deny the premise of the question, they can't give an answer in the terms of the question. "We have no explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia" We do, but not in the terms you set out. The explana…
Short of panpsychism (which could be a thing), I think we mostly all agree that there are almost certainly objects in the world in which there is no experience By contrast, I think we mostly all agree that we (each of us as individuals, and humans as a group) are things in which experience does occur.
This naturally gives rise to the question: if some set of things have no experience, and another set of things have experience, how does experience arise in the the second set of things?
There are subsidiary question, such as whether experiences may come in different "levels" thus creating a continuum between "none" and "definitely experiencing". But these are secondary, mostly, the question of how things in which experience occurs differ from the things where it does not.