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It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

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Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#61

Post by zetalyrae »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #50
zetalyrae wrote: post #11

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove? > A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible cons…

>Either all the computation happens "in the dark" [...] or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets Why exclude the option that only specific kinds of computations are conscious, e.g. recursive control systems?

For two reasons:

1. This requires explaining why only some kinds of information processing are privileged to be conscious, which seems rather arbitrary.

2. There's the question of levels of abstraction. Which information processor is conscious? The physical CPU, the zeroth VM, the first VM, the second VM, etc.

3. And there's the question of interpretation. What is computation? A CPU is "just" electrons moving about. Who says the motion of these 10^12 electrons represents arithmetic, or string concatenation, or anything else? The idea of abstract information processing above the bare causality of particles and fields is in itself a kind of dualism (or n-alism, because Turing completeness lets you emulate machines inside machines).

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#62

Post by thepasch »

selcuka wrote: post #49
solveiga wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of t…

I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists. It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our unders…

This does not seem like a particularly difficult question to answer to me, and I suspect it's because I'm not particularly precious about what it means to "be me."

The logical answer is that this spreadsheet, supposing identical mechanical processes - inputs, outputs, stored data - and I would both be convinced that they're "me", and they'd both be correct in that they'd both be something that functions, and therefore thinks, acts, and experiences things identically to me. Two different processes on different hardware running the same code. The concept of "ego" is a result of this code. To me, I'd be "me" and the spreadsheet would be "a copy of me". To the spreadsheet, it would be the exact opposite.

Of course, that predisposes that the software isn't hardware-dependent. But even then, I wouldn't discount the possibility of an emulation layer.

It really isn't hard once you accept that we're not special for being able to think about ourselves.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#63

Post by solveiga »

selcuka wrote: post #49
solveiga wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of t…

I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists. It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our unders…

I think the key point in my theory is that my brain simply hasn't evolved to intuitively conceptualize it. I've asked similar questions before, including what it's like to die and be dead forever, and I can't form an intuitive understanding of it. My brain rejects the premise. But just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it won't happen. I'm pretty sure I will still be dead for trillions of years into the future.

To your question, the answer is similar. If we remove this limitation of intuition, there doesn't seem to be a real paradox. Both you and a spreadsheet-like copy of you would each claim to be the real you, and from an outside observer's perspective, there is no contradiction.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#64

Post by zetalyrae »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #32

I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain…

Very well explained.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#65

Post by selcuka »

thepasch wrote: post #48
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off. > That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon. That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses th…

That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience." And this bit: > I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that c…

> So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"

Those are not conflicting arguments.

The former means that we understand all the processeses, but they are complex, therefore we don't have enough brain/compute power to properly model it.

The latter means that we don't understand some of those processes, so we need additional theories that explain them.

One can dismiss the first while finding the second plausible.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#66

Post by smokedetector1 »

argee wrote: post #58
smokedetector1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something? I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination. What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory,…

> What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. It might not make sense to you now, but that's because of what we know or what we think we know, today (hence my ancient Greeks analogue). Look at the Gazzaniga effect, people seamlessly make up an "experience" narrative out of absolutely nothing. Whatever experience was claimed there probably didn…

Sorry, who make up an experience narrative?

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#67

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

thepasch wrote: post #48
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off. > That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon. That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses th…

That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience." And this bit: > I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that c…

OK, I'll try another attempt. I thought this other comment explained it better than I could have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 .

The reason TFA (and, frankly, your comment as well) pissed me off is that they drip with condescension to the core while completely sidestepping the problem in the first place. We have plenty of other examples of places where complexity can give rise to emergent behavior, but those behaviors are still easy to understand in the problem space of the domain - e.g. I may be amazed that I can converse with an LLM and it feels like it completely "understands" the conversation, but I don't have any conceptual problems with the fact that it's still just next token prediction under the covers.

But as hackinthebochs put it very well, in my opinion: "The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function."

So my negative reaction is based in the belief that what the TFA is doing is saying "there is no hard problem", and the response is "but why, because 'phenomenal consciousness' can't be described in terms of structure and function like every other instance that we understand that arises from complexity", and then TFA just gives a host of complexity examples that are completely unconvincing (and, again, feel like they completely miss the problem is the first place) and just basically ends with a dangling, unwarranted "q.e.d."

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#68

Post by thepasch »

zetalyrae wrote: post #46
thepasch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways: 1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a s…

> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind? > Impli…

> If all information processing leads to consciousness

Did you actually read what you just responded to?

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#69

Post by GoblinSlayer »

zetalyrae wrote: post #11

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove? > A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible cons…

>We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.

Map the process by which you learn that you have experience. Then determine if this process works correctly. Alien needs to learn to code; they have difficulty, because they try to learn integrals without arithmetic and algebra. Before you can solve a complex problem, you should first train on easy problems.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#70

Post by selcuka »

solveiga wrote: post #63
selcuka wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists. It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our unders…

I think the key point in my theory is that my brain simply hasn't evolved to intuitively conceptualize it. I've asked similar questions before, including what it's like to die and be dead forever, and I can't form an intuitive understanding of it. My brain rejects the premise. But just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it won't happen. I'm pretty sure I will still be dead for trillions of years into the future.…

> from an outside observer’s perspective, there is no contradiction

Indeed. As I said, the question is meaningless from an outside observer's perspective. The paper "Against Egalitarianism" by Benj Hellie [1] explains it better than I can:

> I trace this odd commitment to an egalitarian stance concerning the ontological status of personal perspectives—roughly, fundamental reality treats mine and yours as on a par.

[1] http://individual.utoronto.ca/benj/ae.pdf

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