I've never understood why Chalmer's reasoning is so captivating to people. The whole idea of p-zombies seems absurd on its face. Quoting the article:
(quote)
His core argument against materialism, in its original form, is deceptively (and delightfully) simple:
1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.
2. There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.
3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts.
4. So, materialism is false.
(endquote)
Point 2 is textbook begging the question: it imagines a world which is physically identical to ours but consciousness is different there. That is baking in the presupposition that consciousness is not a physical process. Points 3 and 4 then "cleverly" detect the very contradiction he has planted and claims victory.
If you believe that what we describe as "consciousness" is emergent from the ideas a material brain develops about itself, then it's in fact not logically possible to have a world that is physically identical to ours yet does not contain consciousness. So indeed, premise 2. sneaks in the conclusion.
To illustrate this point, here's an argument with the same structure that would similarly "prove" that gravity doesn't cause things to fall down:
1. In our world, there is gravity and things fall down.
2. There is a logically possible world where there is gravity yet things do not fall down.
3. Therefore, things falling down is a further fact about our world, over and above gravity.
4. So, gravity causing things to fall down is false.
I don't think your point 2 is directly analogous to his point 2.
Because a world where things do not fall down is not physically identical to a world in which they don't.
I think the point of arguing about p-zombies is this. Do you believe it's possible for a human being to exhibit all the external characteristics of consciousness without an internal conscious experience? And if you believe that's true, then you can posit a world which is physically indistinguishable from our world through any experiment in which consciousness simply does not exist, because, as far as I know, there is no test that can prove that an individual does have an internal consciousness, and isn't merely mimicking it. Most arguments that p-zombies don't exist sort of rely on the internal conscious experience of the person making it, which no one else has access to -- "I have an internal conscious experience of the world, other people are similar to me and so they must also have those experiences."
That is _not_ true about a world in which gravity does not exist for obvious reasons. That universe would be very different from ours and easily distinguishible through experiment.
I think his point does hinge on whether it's possible for p-zombies to exist, but it's not as silly as you all are making it out to be, and it is not begging the question.
I actually think his weakest point is part 3 and 4, because I think mostly the problem is that we don't really have good definitions of consciousness and related concepts let alone a complete physical explanation of their origins, and his whole argument hinges on the fact that we currently don't have a way to test for internal conscious experience, but I think that might not always be true.
To elaborate on your statement, we all think in very different ways. Recently there was an academic test posted here that evaluated “how” a person thinks (internal monologue, use of images, how memories are recalled, etc.). After my girlfriend and I both took the test and I saw how differently we both think, I was shocked. Had we not taken this quiz I’d have assumed the inside of her mind fundamentally worked the same way as mine does. But that is seemingly very far from the truth.
As where I can visualize, use internal monologue, vividly recall my memories, etc. at will, by default I do none of the above, and my thoughts are opaque to me. For her, she almost exclusively uses her internal monologue when thinking, and her entire thought process is consciously visible to her. It’s entirely conceivable that other people might not have an experience of “consciousness” resembling anything like what my idea of consciousness is.
> Do you believe it's possible for a human being to exhibit all the external characteristics of consciousness without an internal conscious experience?
Nobody knows whether conscious experience is a requirement or not to "exhibit all of the external characteristics".
It's possible that the only way to get from state N to state N+1 is to include the consciousness function as part of that calculation.
A counter to this would be that a lookup table of states would produce the same external characteristics without consciousness.
A counter to that counter would be that the consciousness function is required to produce state N+1 from state N. The creation of the lookup table must have invoked the consciousness function to arrive at and store state N+1.
The thing we just don't really know is whether state N+1 can be derived from state N without the consciousness function being invoked.
Is a video game a conscious experience for a computer?
Now imagine an internal video game in a computer system that is being generated from the real world inputs of what it sees/hears/feels around it. You take outside input, simulate it, record some information on it, and output feedback into the real world.
Many people would say this isn't consciousness, but I personally disagree. You have input, processing, introspection, and output. The loops that occur in the human brain are more complex, but you have the same things occurring. There is electrical processing and chemical reactions occurring in the humans mind. Just because we don't understand their exact processing doesn't mean they are unrelated to consciousness. Moreso we can turn this consciousness off with drugs and stop said electrical processing.
Midazolam/Versed sedation seems pretty close to a p-zombie. You can have someone who seems completely awake, walking around and interacting normally, but if you ask them later they were completely unconscious from their own perspective. So self-reported consciousness isn't always accurate. And it also seems that consciousness is very closely tied to memory.
(I'm not arguing a particular position, but trying to figure out what to make of this. Also, this is based on what I've read, not personal experience.)
> You can have someone who seems completely awake, walking around and interacting normally, but if you ask them later they were completely unconscious from their own perspective
Were they unconscious, or are they now unable to remember what they did? I.e. amnesiac.
If you ask a deceased person about their life, you will find that they also will offer no evidence of a previous conscious experience. Life, apparently, resembles unconsciousness.
You experience your own consciousness - your own model of your self, time, and the world as perceived through your physical sensory apparatus. This could give you a probability of 100% certainty of your own consciousness. You're a good skeptic, though, and after much consideration, you decide that, despite absence of evidence to the contrary, you'll allow for 2% uncertainty, since you might be a simulation specifically designed to "feel" conscious, or some other bizarre circumstance.
Knowing this, you compare your own experience with reports by others, and find that, despite some startling variety in social and cultural practice, humans all more or less go through life experiencing the world in a way that more or less maps to your own experiences. You find that even Helen Keller, despite her tragic disability, wrote about experiences which you can simulate for yourself. You conclude that if you somehow swapped places with her, she would be able to map the sensory input of your physical sensors to her own experience of the world, and vice versa.
This leads you to think that our physical brains are performing a process that models the world, and it does so consistently. After reading up on people's experiences, you also learn that our subjective experiences are constructed, moment by moment, by a combination of these world models, real-time stimulation, abstract feedback loops of conscious and unconscious thinking.
The more you read, the more evidence you have of this strange loop being the default case for every instance of a human having a brain and being alive.
The Bayesian probability that you are conscious, because of your brain, given all available evidence, approaches 100% certainty. You conclude your brain is more or less the same as anyone else's brain, broadly speaking, and this is supported by the evidence provided by a vast majority of accounts from other similarly brained individuals through all of human history.
Since your brain doesn't have a particular difference upon which to pin your experience of consciousness, and the evidence doesn't speak to any need for explanation, Occam's razor leads you to the conclusion that the simplest explanation is also the best. The living human brain is necessary and sufficient for consciousness, and consciousness is the default case for any living human brain.
The posterior probability that any given human (with a "normal" living brain) is conscious approaches 100% certainty, unless you can specifically provide evidence to the contrary. Saying "but what if p-zombies exist" makes for a diverting thought experiment, but it's rationally equivalent to saying "but what if little invisible unicorns are the ones actually experiencing things" or "what if we're all in the Matrix and it's a simulation" or "what if we're just an oddly persistent Boltzmann brain in an energetic nebula somewhere in the universe."
Without evidence, p-zombies are a plot device, not a legitimate rational launching off point for theorizing about anything serious.
Humans are conscious. We have neural correlates, endless recorded evidence, all sorts of second hand reporting which can compare and contrast our own first hand experiences and arrive at rational conclusions. Insisting on some arbitrary threshold of double blind, first hand, objective replicable evidence is not necessary, and even a bit shortsighted and silly, since the thing we are talking about cannot be directly shared or communicated. At some point, we'll be able to map engrams and share conscious experience directly between brains using BCI, and the translation layer between individuals will be studied, and we'll have chains of double blinded, replicable experiments that give us visibility into the algorithms of conscious experience.
Without direct interfaces to the brain and a robust knowledge of neural operation, we're left with tools of abstract reasoning. There's no good reason for p-zombies - they cannot exist, given the evidence, so we'd be better served by thinking about things that are real.
>since you might be a simulation specifically designed to "feel" conscious
I would argue this is actually consciousness also. If (and yea, it's a big if) consciousness is an internal model/simulation of how we experience reality, then a simulation of a simulation is still a simulation.
I agree - once you've settled your math on consciousness, you can go back and modify the priors based on new evidence. One of the crazier suppositions that actually makes a dent in the posterior probability is the simulation hypothesis.
If all civilizations that develop computation and simulation capabilities converge to the development of high fidelity simulations, then it's highly likely that they would create simulations of interesting periods of history, such as the period of time when computers, the internet, AI, and other technologies were developed. We just so happen to be living through that - I still put my odds of living in base reality somewhere above 98%, but there is a distinct possibility that we're all being simulated so that this period of history can be iterated and perturbed and studied, or some such scenario.
Maybe someone ought to start studying the science of universal adversarial simulation attacks, to elicit some glitches in the matrix. That'd be one hell of a paper.
Taking this as true, wouldn't that mean that a lack of published papers on this topic is light evidence of being in a simulation? Also that it would be fairly dangerous to bring the subject to the public's attention.
> If you believe that what we describe as "consciousness" is emergent from the ideas a material brain develops about itself, then it's in fact not logically possible to have a world that is physically identical to ours yet does not contain consciousness.
This sneaks in an implicit axiom: that the brain is not only necessary, but is also sufficient, necessarily, for consciousness (implicitly ruling out some unknown outside, non-materialistic force(s)).
What is Chalmers saying then? As i understand he is saying that there can be a world where conciousness does not exist, but all the possible physical experiments cannot distinguish between that world and our world. But that simply means the conciousness he is looking for has absolutely no consequence, and therefore his point has no value...
How is this related to the 2nd point in OP's comment?
The whole Chinese room argument is based merely on a misinterpretation of computentionalist/physicalist argument.
Of course the computer or person who executes the program does not understand Chinese, they are just performing arithmetic operations, the entity understanding Chinese is the program itself, not the medium on which the program runs.
But Chalmers doesn't think that approach works, nor any other physicalist attempt to explain consciousness. The problem with what you stated is that you're substituting ideas about consciousness for sensations. And those aren't the same thing. We experience sensations as part of being embodied organisms, and then we think about those sensations.
It's quite clear if you approach these things logically that Chalmers doesn't do a lot of thinking before coming up with these arguments. All of his arguments boil down to "if we assume that consciousness is different from everything else, then it's different from everything else". He gets way, way too much attention for someone who is sub mediocre in his reasoning.
He also doesn't understand what computation is, even though he often makes confident statements about it. He thinks computation is a subjective process, that something only counts as a computation if someone interprets it as such, which is simply wrong, not a debatable topic. And this is the core of one of his other arguments about why consciousness can't be a computational process.
There is not. It's by the far the most likely explanation, and even if you don't agree with that, it is at least completely consistent with everything we know about computation.
For one, you would have to determine whether physical laws are computational processes. Stephen Wolfram is trying this, but it requires some incredible assumptions.
The laws of physics we know right now are either computable or stochastic with computable probabilities. This was of course the only possible outcome if physics made any sense at all, since the purpose of physics is to compute outcomes, so a physical theory that was not computable would never have been invented.
Still, the laws of physics could be anything and it wouldn't matter for this question. The only relevant question is whether our brains are computers, regardless of how the physics work at the lowest level. After all, we have clear proof that you can make computers on the existing laws of physics (I'm typing this reply on one!), so all we need to know is whether our brains are bio-chemical computers. Neuroscience is nowhere near a level where it can answer this, but it at least remains a plausible explanation. After all, we humans can't compute any non-computable function, or at least none that we know of (the Church-Turing thesis).
The thing is we are acting like 99.9% p-zombies for most of our interactions with the world - that is we are acting unconsciosly for most of what we do.
The question is where does that subjective 0.01% - the rider on top of the elephant come from?
We generally do not pay attention to walking, breathing or brushing teeth and so on.
We can do more complex tasks as well once we achieve unconscious mastery in some subject.
With proper training we can play chess or tennis ("The Inner Game of Tennis") at a high level, without paying attention. In fact it can be detrimental to think about one's performance.
It is the Dennett's "multiple drafts model" - but where does the subjective experience arise when some model is brought to foreground "thread"?
Thus allure of Chalmer's zombies. Why not have a 100% zombie?
There are many stories of people seemingly being conscious, yet not really.
Black out drunks driving home from a bar.
Hypoglycemic shock is another example - my wife's diabetic friend was responding seemingly logically and claiming to be conscious, yet she was not and paramedics were barely able to save her.
A human being can achieve very high levels on unconscious mastery in multiple subjects.
A very tired me gave a remote lecture (on intermediate Python) during Covid where I switched spoken languages mid-lecture and even answered questions in a different language. Meanwhile I was was half asleep and thinking about a different subject matter. I was not really aware of the lecture material - I had given the same lecture many times before - I was on autopilot.
Only after watching the Zoom recording I realized what had happened.
Thus, are there are some actions that our zombie (unconscious) states unable to produce?
Presumably, subjective experience helps in planning future actions. That could be one avenue to explore.
Just wanted to say how much I like your answer. To me one of the bigger puzzles is why people have such different takes on consciousness. To some the idea of p-zombies is immediately clear. To others it is nonsense. But during my conversations about the topic I was never able to explain it adequately to someone sceptical. And from my perspective they (the sceptics) always conflate being conscious with talking, learning, thinking, remembering, etc.
Good points. Part of my issue with these discussions is the poor vocabulary we have for consciousness. Your comment alone probably touches on several types of consciousness. The kind of consciousness we're experiencing undoubtedly varies greatly by time and circumstance.
A simple counter-argument to p-zombies that I like (I first encountered from Yudkowski) is:
If there was no conscious experience in this identical p-zombie world, it would be impossible to explain why everybody falsely claims they have conscious experience. If people stop claiming this, then the world is physically different, as people no longer act and produce artifacts such as HN posts discussing the phenomenon.
Or, my summary would be: conscious experience is causal, and so you cannot get the same universe-wide effects without it.
A well simulated intelligence in a computer would speak and have discussions about 'conscious experience'. (Assuming that is possible, but that is implied by physicalism+Church-Turing)
If you think that the simulation has conscious experience/qualia.../X,
then X gets properties like being non-localized in space and time - you can break the simulation into multiple parts in an essential way and run these parts on data centers across the planet which communicate with each other. Further, you can freeze the simulation for a couple of days and reload. As long as there is no connection to outer signals like the system clock, the simulation wouldn't notice the gap.
If you think the simulation doesn't have consciousness/qualia/X despite accurately replicating humans as measured by instruments, then the simulation is a p-zombie.
Not impossible actually. People often claim falsehoods are real, eg. demons, ghosts, deities, etc. If you believe it's possible that p-zombies could generate false beliefs about these other things, then consciousness would just be another falsehood.
You would need some coordinating mechanism to ensure that all the p-zombies have the same hallucination. Including some detailed state machine that takes sense inputs, and processes it to produce the qualia present in each waking moment, plus the valence attributed to each moment of qualia.
Since a non-p-zombie can sit down and interrogate the details of their conscious experience, then write a book about it, which others read and agree upon the fine details - I find it hard to come up with a p-zombie substitute that wouldn’t just be consciousness by another name.
> You would need some coordinating mechanism to ensure that all the p-zombies have the same hallucination
You mean like talking and writing? As I said, how would p-zombies invent organized religion or other common spiritual beliefs that are false?
> Since a non-p-zombie can sit down and interrogate the details of their conscious experience, then write a book about it, which others read and agree upon the fine details
First, assuming you think that we're not p-zombies, not everybody agrees on the properties of consciousness even though we presumably have such an introspective ability. Therefore what you describe is a kind of fictional just-so story, and clearly doesn't actually happen in all cases.
Second, when there is no fact of the matter as with p-zombies and consciousness, any argument about consciousness only has to be rhetorically persuasive, not factual. Why do so many people agree on the broad properties of ghosts, eg. translucency, pass through physical objects, etc. despite such things not existing? There is no fact of the matter being described, so people just need to like the story being told, or perhaps how it's told.
In such a world, Chalmers and other philosophers of consciousness are just persuasive writers that spin a convincing just-so story connecting fictional internal states to real world observations, and people/p-zombies run with it thinking they learned something meaningful.
Suffice it to say, I think this is uncomfortably close to our world.
Some of the arguments I've read by philosophers seem like they are focusing on pure logic to prove a point or find weakness in another, but the linkage between those logic stmts and reality don't always seem to be considered.
It's almost like they are purely focused on symbolic logic, even if the stmts and symbols don't truly map to reality unambiguously, or without contradictions.
P-zombies are supposed to be physically identical to humans. They’re problematic because they lack consciousness, yet mysteriously talk about it anyway — among other reasons.
Advanced AI is definitely not physically identical to humans, and there’s a well understood reason why they might talk about consciousness despite lacking it which doesn’t apply to p-zombies.
I'm not sure that being physically identical to humans is a necessary characteristic of a p-zombie for anything important. If you can produce an ai which _acts in every observable way as if it were conscious_ without any actual consciousness that would indicate that p-zombies are possible. The current generations of AI don't qualify, but I can see how to get there from here.
> Point 2 is textbook begging the question: it imagines a world which is physically identical to ours but consciousness is different there.
It's not begging the question. He gives reasons for (2) that support the premise. That the premise essentially leads inexorably to (4) is a feature of the argument structure, not a bug. You have to engage with his reasons for (2) in determining whether or not the argument succeeds.
Can you give an outline of some of that evidence? I haven't read source Chalmers, just other people's discussions of the topic (including the article that is the subject of this thread).
The argument is roughly that (1) we can conceive of the physical dynamics of this world occurring without any associated consciousness, (2) if something is conceivable then it is logically possible, (3) It is logically possible that the physical dynamics of this world occur without any associated consciousness.
(1) is supported by noticing that all our explanations of physical dynamics appeals to other physical dynamics. We do not need to mention consciousness or qualitative anything to derive any of the physical dynamics we observe in this world. Thus there is nothing logically incoherent about physical dynamics without consciousness.
(2) follows from the fact that logical possibility just means no contradiction. If we cannot see any contradiction in two propositions being true, then that is defeasible evidence for the logical possibility of both propositions being true.
> if something is conceivable then it is logically possible
What does it mean to be "logically possible"?
We could conceive of something that is pure garbage due to our lack of knowledge. Something that could never exist due to nature of the universe, but just because we can conceive of it does not mean it's a valid and non-contradictory state for the universe.
It's possible it's a valid argument from the perspective that it forces us into the corner of stating one of these two conditions must be true: either p-zombies or consciousness requires attributes to our reality that are beyond our current physical understanding.
Logically possible just means there's no contradiction in accepting something as true. Usually it's used in the context of reasoning about what could have been true about the world. If some features of the world are varied, what else has to change to maintain consistency?
And sure, plenty of people argue that conceivability is a weak guide to possibility due to our limited knowledge, being imperfect reasoners, etc. That's a fair critique.
>either p-zombies or consciousness requires attributes to our reality that are beyond our current physical understanding.
To be clear, the impossibility of p-zombies implies that there is some as yet unidentified logical/semantic relationship between physical dynamics and consciousness. This would mean that there is no possible world where the physical dynamics is true but there is no consciousness. The possibility of p-zombies supports the idea that there is some further (non-logical) property of the world that supports consciousness. But such a property could have been false in a world very much like our own; one with all the same physical dynamics just without any consciousness. The p-zombie argument is used to raise the credence of there being a further fact about the world that supports consciousness.
The problem with p-zombie argument is that it is completely inconsequential.
It is like if i say there is some property let's call it phi-factor, i am certain i have it, some people have it too, and some do not, but there is absolutely no way for others to tell who has this phi-factor thing and who does not, because it doesn't cause any difference in behavior of people.
This kind of hypothesis doesn't explain anything and does not predict anything, and therefore it is not possible to build any logical chain based on it.
There are good versions of p-zombie argument, e.g. you could say that it is very hard to find difference in behavior of people and p-zombies, but if you create planet like simulation inhabited with p-zombies they will have large differences, e.g. they will never develop art, or science, or religion, or will die out because will not want to have children.
In any case there needs to be some measurable difference in behavior, for argument to be valid. But since this is a normal testable theory, it does not lead to the same kind of self-contradictory statements as p-zombie version, and therefore is not popular with philosophers who want to talk about things they have nothing to say about.
The argument is not inconsequential, you just need to understand the work the argument is trying to do. If you are only interested in testable hypotheses, then the argument isn't relevant. But that's not the only thing that matters in Science. Science doesn't operate free of assumptions or conceptual frameworks. An experiment is situated within a set of background assumptions that determine what the experiment outcome says about the world.
Our conceptual framework for understanding consciousness also matters, and the p-zombie argument is directly relevant to what conceptual framework is a plausible basis for doing a science of consciousness. The zombie argument puts limits on what the brain sciences can say about consciousness as such, i.e. the qualitative feel of subjective experience. The very point of the argument is to elucidate the limits of scientific explanation regarding consciousness. For that it is very consequential.
Could you bring any example where non-testable hypothesis have mattered in science, or even have been proposed?
As far as i can tell the p-zombie argument is a variant 2=3 "proofs" with hidden division by 0. People claim as truth a proposition with no consequence,then claim that a proposition they want to prove follows from it. It does not elucidate anything.
The limited variant of the argument which predicts something does help in understanding the limits, but p-zombie supporters do not like that argument because it also shows the boundaries of what brain sciences can't say, and that is not much.
>Could you bring any example where non-testable hypothesis have mattered in science, or even have been proposed?
If you think of science as just a collection of empirical data, then you won't find any value in untestable hypotheses. If you think of science as an enterprise that's aimed towards explanations about the world, then conceptual data matters. Interpretations of quantum mechanics are a fruitful ground for non-testable conceptual work to be relevant to science. Here is one example[1] of the Many Worlds interpretation providing conceptual and intuitive support that helped advance quantum computing.
But beyond that, what an experiment tells us depends on our conceptual framework. When we hear a click in a Geiger counter, are we merely detecting clicks in this particular device, or are we detecting electrons out in the world? This isn't something that an experiment will decide for us. The conceptual framework we are operating with allows us to say the click isn't just the detector going off, and our model of these clicks isn't just predicting when this device will click in the future, but rather that our experiments are detecting the existence of actual electrons too small to interact with without special devices.
Interpretations of quantum mechanics are testable, they have to produce quantum mechanics, which puts a very narrow constraint on possible theories.
The equivalent of p-zombie hypothesis with quantum mechanics would be if one said that particles in addition to coordinates have to be described by one more variable, which does not affect any of other equations of motion. These type of theories do not have to obey any constraint, and you can trivially produce an infinite amount of them.
You can say that this kind of variable has different value for particles in human brain, therefore study of this additional variable is more important than the study of the rest of physics. But this won't improve your understanding of either the brain or physics, just like p-zombie hypothesis does not.
>Interpretations of quantum mechanics are testable, they have to produce quantum mechanics, which puts a very narrow constraint on possible theories.
No, this is not what anyone means by a theory being testable. An interpretation of QM by assumption reproduces all the same results of QM. That's why its an interpretation. In the same way, the p-zombie thought experiment by assumption reproduces all of physics without any deviation. QM interpretations and the p-zombie argument are on the same footing here.
>These type of theories do not have to obey any constraint, and you can trivially produce an infinite amount of them.
This just shows a lack of understanding of what the p-zombie argument is claiming. Perhaps revisit your initial misconceptions rather than piling on the mistakes?
Interpretation of QM does not "reproduce results by assumption", it provides a computational scheme for obtaining equations of QM. P-zombie argument on the other hand does not produce anything.
Thanks for the response! But your syllogism seems to be different that the one presented in the linked article that attempted to summarize Chalmer's logic.
I don't contest your point 1 at all -- I believe in most of there universe there is no consciousness, and for much of Earth's history there was no consciousness here either.
For point 2 -- perhaps "logically possible" is a term of art that I'm not familiar with, so I am perhaps missing the point. But on a plain reading I can't support this point. Recycling a point I made earlier, I can conceive of a world where the center of the sun is made of chocolate, but it is not logically possible.
Point 3 -- the conclusion you have arrived at isn't contested. Materialists are not claiming consciousness is the cause of the physical processes, rather it is the result of them. As I said in my response to point 1, much of earth's history didn't have any conscious experiencers.
We could say: (1) we can conceive of the physical dynamics of this world occurring without waterfalls. (2) if something is conceivable then it is logically possible (3) It is logically possible that the physical dynamics of this world occur without any associated waterfalls.
I don't see what insight this syllogism is presenting: one can imagine a world where the set of actually realized manifestations of physical laws is different, but it doesn't speak to whether the unmanifested things are not present because they are non-physical (at least in part).
>I can conceive of a world where the center of the sun is made of chocolate, but it is not logically possible.
How do you know its logically impossible if you can conceive of it? If there's some fact you are aware of that makes it logically impossible, then that means its not conceivable, by the philosophically relevant meaning of the term.
P-zombies is a thought experiment to demonstrate the hard problem of consciousness, it is not, in itself, an argument against materialism.
I can certainly imagine a robot that imitates all of human behaviors. If you hit it, it goes "Ow" and retracts, if you ask it if its conscious it says "yes". We can this imagine being created out of our completely physical electrical components, so the question becomes what is the difference between the imitation of consciousness and the consciousness we experience? This is interesting as in this day and age, we can totally imagine building such a robot, yet we'd have a tough time believing it is actually conscious.
Now, whether you are a materialist or not depends entirely on whether or not you believe conscious experience like yours can emerge out of physical components.
My take on this is: Materialism/physicalism is ill defined and materialism/physicalism and dualism are compatible. We consider completely mysterious properties like energy and now even randomness (things happen one way or another for no reason) as being fundamental physical facts about the universe. Theoretically, how does this differ from saying consciousness is a fundamental physical property?
Moreover, you have to consider the fact that the "material" world IS an imagination of the mind. Whatever facts or attributes we assign to being material is limited to the mental facilities of the brain.
At the end of the day, the question is, what fundamental facts do we need to explain the observations that we make? I can observe that I feel, see, hear things. Can the fundamental facts of the current physics model explain this? No? Then we must add to it an additional property, making it part of the standard physics model. If you want proof, you must either A. explain how consciousness can emerge out of existing known "material" processes, B. Admit consciousness as a "material" property and define the process by which it combines, reduces, etc. (the combination problem of panpsychism)
Chalmers' argument is more of an intuition pump to clarify your thinking. If premise 2 seems plausible, then you probably cannot be a physicalist. If you're a die-hard physicalist, then you probably have to deny premise 1 and/or 2.
Why is phenomenological subjective experience a thing at all? Unless you're a proponent of panpsychism, we have to ask why living beings have it, but other natural processes do not. From this perspective, it's actually easier to conceive of a world like ours without subjective experience than one with it.
> Unless you're a proponent of panpsychism, we have to ask why living beings have it, but other natural processes do not.
No, we don't.
Because, while an individual may experience it, the conjecture that other things do or do not have it is without exception an unverifiable assumption, not an observed phenomenon which calls for an explanation.
> it's actually easier to conceive of a world like ours without subjective experience than one with it.
This is demonstrably false, because no experiencer can observe subjective experience other than their own, and, despite that, describing the world in terms of subjective experience occurring in a vast array of other beings beside the speaker is near-universal, to the point that we pathologize not viewing the universe that way.
The real problem with the p-zombies thing is why do p-zombies talk about consciousness?.
You and I have the experience of talking about being conscious because we have the experience of being conscious in the first place. But for a p-zombie to behave exactly the same as us, it would have to have some other mechanism for talking about being conscious that is not dependent on being conscious. So that would mean that our talking about consciousness can be explained by some mechanism other than our being conscious in the first place! Our experience of consciousness, and our talking about experiencing consciousness, could just happen to be one massive coincidence rather than being causally linked! Doesn't seem likely, ergo no p-zombies.
>we have to ask why living beings have it, but other natural processes do not.
The entropy gradient is the first one. Of course lots of natural processes have a bit of energy generated so it's not the only part.
Memory is the next one. Being able to take some of that entropy and put it in a more orderly fashion while rejecting the disorganized part. Crystals can use energy to create ordered systems, but they don't have any means of error correcting.
Execution/replay/updating of said memories based on input from the world around it.
Now before humans came along 'life' was the only thing that could readily manage these traits, and that was after a few billion years of trial and error. Humans now have been going down the path of giving other non-living objects these traits. Advanced computer systems are getting closer to the point of recording information and acting on it in a manner that certainly seems like a subjective experience.
I mean eletrons switch orbitals when photons are absorbed or released by said atom. The particular problem we have here is where is the memory at this subatomic level. Memory appears to be an emergent behavior at higher levels.
Although interesting, the question of why we have it is orthogonal to the question of whether we have it and whether p-zombies could exist that don't have it but are otherwise indistinguishable from us.
I skipped point 1 because I don't have a problem with it. I am a materialist until I hear compelling evidence that that is not sufficient. I don't deny we have consciousness, but I don't believe we have libertarian free will. I don't see why that is funny except to people who have never thought about it.
Here is an analogy. When playing a video game, the world is fictional and enemies are algorithmic creations. Yet, while playing that game, it is useful (that is, one plays the game better) by accepting the rules of that world and pretending as if the experiences are real at some level. Eg, "This guy is trying to kill me" vs the reality of "a microprocessor is reading state in memory and as a result is rewriting that state and some of that state shows up on my monitor as colored pixels and I'm not in actual danger."
Although I intellectually believe I'm an incredibly complex mechanism that is simply letting the laws of physics play out, it is useful while playing the game of life to utilize the evolutionary developed fiction that I do have free will.
Here is another intuition pump. Do you believe the weather has a free will, or is it just a physical phenomenon? (presumably the latter) Yet when we talk about the weather, we might say there is a 30% change of rain tomorrow. The reality is it will or it won't rain, but we can't measure the state of the system's initial conditions nor simulate its evolution accurately enough to say exactly what will happen. So we use the convenient fiction that whether it rains or not is statistical. People are too complex that we can't even calculate our own behavior, so it is a convenient fiction to act as if we have free will.
No, you have to take that argument in context of his other arguments against physical explanations for consciousness. What he's saying is that the physical facts do not adequately account for conscious experiences, which is why we can conceive of a universe physically identical lacking consciousness. Why he (and some other philosophers) think this is so is part of their larger arguments.
> which is why we can conceive of a universe physically identical lacking consciousness
I can conceive of it about as well as I can conceive of an identical universe lacking the Internet. Both seem like fairly direct logical contradictions, slightly disguised by referring to concepts that we generally think about more abstractly rather than their physical composition.
If you examine all of his arguments, they all end up in the same place. He assumes that consciousness is not necessary for human-like or even animal-like intelligence, and he works from there back to the same conclusion.
If p-zombies are logically incoherent, the consciousness does not exist. It's an illusion. This is the argument by Daniel Dennet. We are zombies.
I mean it's obvious to any physicalist that we don't really feel anything. There is no I, soul, no suffering in a in a rock, peas soup, or a human. It's all physical process.
Dennett was a determinist, but he preferred a compatibilist definition of free will. He didn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater so he kept the term but defined it to mean what he wanted it to mean. I have no problem with that. I don't use that definition of free will so I say I don't have free will.
"There is no I, soul, no suffering in ... a human. " You have an idiosyncratic definition of suffering. If I offer you the option of having a warm bath or having your skin flayed and then be dipped in lemon juice, which would you prefer?
Free will and the hard problem of consciousness are orthogonal concepts.
Completely unconscious automaton can have compatibilist free will and reverse. Compatibilist view does not require consciousness (in hard problem definition).
> which would you prefer?
Prefer is action, learned habituation response. There is nobody inside to see be aware of it according to Dennet. Simple control system with thermometer controlling heater has preference to homeostasis with certain temperature. Consciousness is illusion according to Dennet.
Just because I can verbally express my preferred state does not imply I'm consious.
Chalmers in point 2 is not saying to imagine such a world, but that such a world is logically possible. Chalmers gives as an example of a logical impossibility a male vixen since it is contradictory. He states "... a flying telephone is conceptually coherent, if a little out of the ordinary, so a flying telephone is logically possible. Nevertheless, that zombies are logically possible, may be begging the question, that consciousness is non physical.
But it's not logically possible if consciousness is a material process, a consequence of computation in the human brain (and potentially other places). So you can't prove that consciousness is not materialistic by assuming it's not materialistic.
I'm still missing the point, I guess, as I don't think the question is logically possible.
One might as well say: it is logically possible to have a universe where the physics are identical to our present world, except the core of the Sun is chocolate... therefore fusion can't be the explanation for why our Sun radiates so much energy.
Getting back to the zombies, presuming there could be a zombie clone of me which is indistinguishable from the real me but it isn't conscious is one that needs far more support than just asserting it. I've heard people try to explain: well, imagine if a powerful computer was simulating you in every respect, that would be a p-zombie. But that is question begging, as it presumes that such a creature wouldn't be conscious.
I feel the same way about Searle's Chinese Room -- the power of the argument is there only if you have already decided that consciousness is mystical.
"The implications of consciousness explanations or theories are assessed with respect to four questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); AI consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death."
This is theology. What's it doing in Elsevier's "Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology"?
Most of the classical arguments in this area are now obsolete. The classic big question, presented in the article, was, “Out of meat, how do you get thought?". That's no longer so mysterious. You get some basic processing elements from molecular biology. The puzzle, for a long time, was, can a large number of basic processing elements with no overall design self-organize into intelligence. Then came LLMs, which do exactly that.
As a thought experiment, imagine we were to scan the position of every molecule in the human body to the Heisenberg limit of accuracy. Imagine we were to plug the resulting model in a physics simulation that models every biochemical and physical interaction with perfect fidelity. This is a thought experiment, and what I suggest isn't ruled out by physics, so let's assume it's technologically possible. Would the simulated being be "conscious" in the same way the original human is? Would it experience "qualia"?
If you think the answer might be no, then congratulations, you actually believe in immaterial souls, no matter how materialist or rationalist you otherwise claim to be.
Only holds if whatever hardware that’s pretending to be the matter can act exactly like the matter without being the same thing.
For the distinction, consider the difference between a simulation of a simple chemical process in a computer—even a perfectly accurate one!—and the actual thing happening. Is the thing going on in the computer the same? No, no matter how perfect the simulation. It’s a little electricity moving around, looking nothing whatsoever like the real thing. The simulation is meaning that we impose on that electricity moving around.
That being the case, this reduces to “if we recreate the matter and state exactly, for-real, is that consciousness?” in which case yeah, sure, probably so.
This doesn’t work if the thing running the simulation requires interpretation.
>It’s a little electricity moving around, looking nothing whatsoever like the real thing.
Why does "looking ... like the real thing" have any relevance for consciousness? What property of a conscious substance is captured by this "looking like" criteria? Is consciousness (partially) a feature of the substrate itself or how the substrate moves through some background consciousness aether, or something else? If you can't articulate what this special criteria is, then why think a simulation isn't conscious, which by assumption reproduces all information dynamics of the physical phenomena?
You can’t replace a body cell by cell, and you can’t know if it’d ever going to be possible. To just assume it certainly would is the same wild kind of extrapolation from past scientific progress as assuming we would be able to resist gravity or clip through walls would be in earlier times. There are natural laws that you don’t know about. That should be a hint about the issues with naive monistic materialism.
The same function, down to quantum and gravity et c effects on everything around it, and accepting and reacting to same? Yeah probably, but we’re back to having to “run” this on the same arrangement of actual matter as the original.
[edit] there’s an obvious attack on this, but I’ll go ahead and note my position on it: the whole premise that we can do any of this without just using actual matter the ordinary way is so far into magical territory that we might as well ask “what if lephuchans simulated it?” or “what if god imagined the simulation?”—well ok, sure, I guess if magic is involved that could work, but what’s the point of even considering it?
“What if a miracle occurred?” isn’t a rebuttal to the position that consciousness as we know it likely can’t be simulated by simulating physics, because you can rebut anything with it. Its admission to a discussion is the same as giving up on figuring out anything.
> there’s an obvious attack on this, but I’ll go ahead and note my position on it: the whole premise that we can do any of this without just using actual matter the ordinary way is so far into magical territory that we might as well ask “what if lephuchans simulated it?” or “what if god imagined the simulation?”—well ok, sure, I guess if magic is involved that could work, but what’s the point of even considering it?
That's one of the main points of using a thought experiment: by declaring axioms explicitly, by fiat ("true" by definition), it prevents the mind from taking advantage of thought terminating get out of jail free cards like this, it forces people to argue their point.
Are you questioning if physics is computable? Even if it is not fully, we must be able to approximate it quite well.
Suppose we scan more than just the person, but a local environment around them and simulated the whole box.
The update that occurs as the person sits in the room involves them considering their own existence. Maybe they create art about it. If the simulation is to produce accurate results, they will need to feel alive to themselves.
We agree we can simulate an explosion and get accurate results; if we can’t get an accurate simulation of a person, why?
exactly, The parent post does not address the issue of representation vs reality.
You can simulate every molecular interaction in a fire, but that does not mean the simulation gives off the same heat. You can write a perfectly accurate equation for splitting an atom, but the equation does not release energy.
> You can simulate every molecular interaction in a fire, but that does not mean the simulation gives off the same heat
It would to a simulated being standing next to the fire.
> You can write a perfectly accurate equation for splitting an atom, but the equation does not release energy.
It releases simulated energy inside the simulation.
Every material interaction is simulated. If you believe that consciousness can't exist in the simulation, then you believe that consciousness is not a material interaction, q.e.d.
It’s some electrons moving around. Any further meaning of that is only what we assign to it.
Unless your “computer” is identical matter in the same arrangement and state is the original, actually doing stuff.
This is why the “what if you slowly simulated the entire universe on an infinite beach moving rocks around to represent the state? Could anything in it be conscious?” thing isn’t my very interesting.
No, you’re just shoving rocks around on sand. They don’t mean anything except what you decide they do. Easy answer.
Doesn't materialism imply that a perfectly accurate simulation of the universe would be identical to the universe we live in? If not, in what possible way could the two be distinguished?
>Every material interaction is simulated. If you believe that consciousness can't exist in the simulation, then you believe that consciousness is not a material interaction
I think that is missing the point. You are literally changing the material and medium by conducting a simulation.
Releasing simulated energy within a simulation is not identical to releasing real energy in the real world. The former is purely representational, and even a perfectly simulated object retains this property, and lack of equivalence.
a simulated atom is not a real atom, no mater their similarlity.
When we refer to heat we refer to the increase in entropy that has specific effects to things in our world. We can also describe a generic "disordered" state, which doesn't imply a similar kind of causal compatibility. A simulation of entropy is equally disordered with no caveats despite not being exactly entropy due to the causal compatibility issue. Why think consciousness is like entropy rather than like disorder?
In other words, why think consciousness is a physical property of some specific kind of matter rather than an abstract property that can supervene on any sufficiently robust physical substrate?
>why think consciousness is a physical property of some specific kind of matter rather than an abstract property that can supervene on any sufficiently robust physical substrate?
Im open to the idea that consciousness could arise on different substrates, but hold that the substrate is relevant, and we dont have a working definition of "robustness".
This is part of a bigger challenge in which I claim there is no such thing as a perfect simulation.
Simulation requires representation, which requires requires remaining differences unrepresented. Otherwise you just have just created the same thing, not a simulation.
You can simulate the interaction of physical object with other physical objects using electronic object interacting with other electronic objects, but the two are not the same. The electronic object still can not interact with a physical object.
>Simulation requires representation, which requires requires remaining differences unrepresented
Right. But presumably not all physical properties of brains are necessary for consciousness. For example, the fact that action potentials happen on the order of 1ms to 1 second probably isn't intrinsic to consciousness. That is, there is no in principle problem with having consciousness supervene on neural networks that have much longer cycles for the basic substrate of communication. It also probably doesn't matter that neurons communicate through opening and closing ion channels, are made of carbon atoms, are constructed by protein assemblies produced from DNA, etc.
What we need is to represent every necessary feature and relationship involved in manifesting consciousness. As a first pass estimation, it seems very likely that only the information-bearing structures are necessary for consciousness. But the information-bearing structures are substrate independent. It follows that a perfect simulation of these information-bearing structures engaged in their typical dynamics would be conscious.
>You can simulate the interaction [...] but the two are not the same.
This idea that something needs to be "the same" is doing a lot of work in your argument. But most relationships involved in brains are incidental to consciousness. We need to get clear on what the necessary features of consciousness are. This is the only measure of sameness that matters, not superficial resemblance.
Scott Aaronson’s take on this is certainly worth a read for anyone interested in consciousness , quantum mechanics, comparability theory, etc: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
Instead of one person, simulate the earth starting several million years before the dawn of man. If you think the humans that evolve in some simulation runs are not conscious, you believe in souls. If in the fake world you predict that in some large fraction of simulations of the unfeeling simulacra will nonetheless invent and argue about the concept of qualia, you believe in immaterial souls. If you suspect that because they don’t have souls they won’t write books about qualia you believe in material souls, souls that both affect and are affected by protons and electrons, souls that physics will eventually find.
Not necessarily, this assumes that it is possible to perfectly simulate physics on computers. It is not obvious that this is true. For one it assumes that physical interactions happen in discrete time steps (or at least be equivalent with a process that happens in discrete time steps). It also assumes that it is possible to perfectly scan the all the properties of some piece of matter (which we know is not possible)
The “total scan” argument, when presented to further a physicalist stance (“surely if we were to scan you using some fantasy tech X we would get an exact copy of you, including any consciousness if it exists, and to deny that is to believe in ghosts”), is unconvincing on at least two counts: 1) fantasy tech illustrating axiomatic belief in particular physical models that are in vogue today but will not hold in the long run (Heisenberg limit? who is she?); and 2) believing that the only alternative to monistic materialism is body-soul dualism, which is depressingly common among STEM folk philosophical naïveté.
The most obvious objection is that perceived time-space is a map of some fundamentally inaccessible to us territory, that modern physical models on which the argument depends are likely only covering (imperfectly) a minuscule part of that territory, and that the map may never be fully precise and complete regardless of technology (since a map that is fully precise and complete is the territory).
As a sibling comment put, the Scott Aaronson post has lots of interesting questions about this. Do the aliens who are watching us being simulated inside matrix think we are actually conscious? What if they freeze the program for 100 years, or run the computation encrypted, or if the 'computer' is just a human inside a room shuffling papers?
Is the computer simulation of a water drop wet ?
I found this article [0] very insightful, where they basically propose that consciousness is relative to whom you ask. We inside the simulation may attribute consciousness to each other. The aliens running it may not. What is relevant is the degree of isomorphism between our simulated brain processes and their real ones. So things will advance from all these back-and-forth nebulous arguments only when neuroscience becomes able to explain mechanistically why people claim to be conscious.
> If you think the answer might be no, then congratulations, you actually believe in immaterial souls
If you scan a body of water, and simulate it perfectly, the resulting simulation will not be wet. You can't separate a material process from the material completely. Consciousness may be a result of carbon being a substrate in the interactions. It might be because the brain is wet when those processes happen. There is plenty of room between believing a perfect computational simulation is not conscious and believing in immaterial souls.
Robert Kuhn is a really impressive dude. I've been occasionally running across his videos on YT from these interviews. I'm very impressed that he's rolling it all up into a written research project as well.
"I have discussed consciousness with over 200 scientists and philosophers who work on or think about consciousness and related fields (Closer To Truth YouTube; Closer To Truth website)."
What a massive and impressive coverage. The author, Robert Kuhn of Closer to Truth (https://closertotruth.com), ends this beast with a request to readers:
> Feedback is appreciated, critique too—especially explanations or theories of consciousness not included, or not described accurately, or not classified properly; also, improvements of the classification typology.
I think RK would enjoy Humberto Maturana’s take on cognition and self-cognition. Maturana usually does not use the word “consciousness”.
Start with Maturana’s book with Francisco Valera:
Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1970)
The appendix of this book is important (“The Nervous System”). Last few pages blew my brain or mind ;-)
Thinking about consciousness without thinking more deeply about temporality is one problem most (or perhaps even all) models of consciousness still have.
Since Robert Kuhn works in thalamocortical activity the theme of timing should resonant.
We don't know if dark matter exists, but we can still observe it by its gravitational effect on large astronomical objects. We can't be sure it's dark matter, but it's "likely" dark matter.
I believe we can do something similar with consciousness. We can make measurements or observations of a person and conclude they are "likely" consciousness.
Maybe we can't ever be 100% certain whether a person is conscious or not. But nothing in science is 100% certain. No matter how much evidence we have, it would only take a single counterexample to disprove a well established scientific theory.
Mechanical telepathy may be possible, and for me could possibly answer this question. You and they put on a device whereby you tap into their conscious experience, see through their eyes, hear the voices in their head...
Even then, you're still only experiencing your own, single, unitary stream of experience, you've just replaced or superimposed parts of it with signals from another nervous system. But even if you can somehow replace/superimpose the signals coming through their optic nerve, for example, into your own experience, that still doesn't answer the question of whether or not they have their own stream of experience to begin with. That is simply unknowable, outside of the reasonable assumptions we all make to avoid solipsism (but they are still assumptions at the end of the day).
That seems unlikely, as neural networks don't all develop exactly the same. There is some natural variance which brain regions perform which function. E.g. Broca's area (very important for speech) only 'usually' lies on your left hemisphere. We know from experiments that stimulating certain areas of the brain produces certain (predictable) feelings, but to stimulate the brain in such a way to transfer an exact thought or a specific vision would seem impossible without a very detailed scan of the source and destination brain, and a complex remapping in between. And some experiences may not be transferable if the target doesn't hawe the required circuitry.
Kuhn's compendium of theories is very comprehensive in many of the philosophical areas but could be more detailed in section 9.3 on Electromagnetic field theories, which is my favourite.
Vedic philosophy has an interesting take on the problem of consciousness.
It take consciousness to be emanating from particles the size of atoms. They word those atomic particles as 'atma' ( in english souls, some even call it spiriton!).Those particles are fundamental to the universe and indivisible like quarks, bosons etc. Like radiation emanating from sun, it handles consciousness as 'emanating' from soul.
Each and every living being starting from size of a cell has a soul feeling (partially) about mechanisms of its body. A multi-cellular organism is then explained as a universe in itself where millions of cells with souls are thriving. The organism will then contain a 'chief soul' directing the working of whole body (which will be us case of humans). Further the philosophy expands this concept to the real universe in which all organisms with their individual consciousness are directed by a chief 'super consciousness'( in Vedic terminology it is termed as paramatma, some translate that as equal to God Concept)
Although then it further expands by saying that there are infinite (almost) parallel universes but that's other thing...
That's a nice story but does it make any testable predictions? Because it appears to introduce many new concepts that would be measurable with particle physics, yet mysteriously have never been observed. And if these magic soul particles don't interact with matter in measurable ways, how do you know their size?
In 1970, an experiment was conducted where a monkey's head was implanted into another monkey's body. The monkey did gained consciousness but was not able to move it's new body( I can barely imagine the pain it must have been feeling).
If the possibility that the center of consciousness is completely independent of the body, I will say that the even though another monkey's head has been transplanted it will still have the consciousness and recognition of current body.
>Mysteriously never been observed
Was Higgs boson ever observed before 2012? Was it's theory ever proposed before 1964? Were people criticizing the attempt to discover it as 'magic particles mysteriously never observed'?
>Don't interact with matter
Yes those 'magic particles' can interact with matter through the curtain of probability and chances. The neurons firing inside a brain and subsequent signals passing to adjacent neurons are probabilistic. To direct the way a certain group of neurons towards a certain activity one has to tweak those probabilities, which can be changed via influence of external fields.
>Nice story
That's not a story but philosophy :) Vedic philosophy knew about the concept of atoms which it called 'anu' given by Kanad and it stated group of atoms as 'paramanu', way before Dalton proposed it.
Two things I'm absolutely convinced of at this point.
1. Consciousness is primitive. That is, interior experience is a fundamental property of the universe: any information system in the universe that has certain properties has an interior experience,
2. Within the human population, interior experience varies vastly between individuals.
Assertion 1 is informed though reading, introspection, meditation, and psychedelic experience. I've transitions the whole spectrum of being a die hard physical materialist to high conviction that consciousness is primitive. I'm not traditionally panpsychic, which most commonly postulates that every bit of matter has some level of conscious experience. I really think information and information processing is the fundamental unit (realized as certain configurations of matter) and certain information system's (e.g. our brain) have an interior experience.
Assertion 2 is informed through discussion with others. Denial of Chalmer's hard problem doesn't make sense to me. Like it seems logically flawed to argue that consciousness is emergent. Interior experience can't "emerge" from the traditional laws of physics, it's like a nonsense argument. The observation that folks really challenge this makes me deeply believe that the interior experience across humans is not at all uniform. The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.
> The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.
Internal experiences are probably a bit different, but it's a mistake to think this is the only reason to deny the hard problem. We all experience perceptual illusions of various types, auditory, visual, etc. In other words, perceptions are useful but deeply flawed. Why do you think your perceptions of subjective, qualitative experience doesn't have these same issues? I see no factual reason to treat them differently, therefore I simply don't naively trust what my perception of conscious experience suggests might be true, eg. that subjective experience is cohesive, without gaps, ineliminable, ineffable, etc.
Once you accept this fact, the hard problem starts looking a lot like a god of the gaps.
To me it seems your reply is conflating consciousness with perception. The perception is the consciousness. Auditory illusion, for example, is just signals to the senses and your senses miss-representing the inputs. The consciousness is the part which is aware of these sensations. If they are accurate or not - is not the point. The point is that you are aware of them.
> The consciousness is the part which is aware of these sensations
Why are you so sure this awareness is not itself a perception generated internally? A higher order perception parameterized/modulated by other perceptions perhaps, but still a perception, which is why subjectivity and qualia appears to have a perceptual characteristics, eg. I can focus on/attend to my subjective experience or qualitative experience and it becomes sharper, or I can ignore them and it fades more into the background, just like any other sense.
This places front and center the fact that it, like all perceptions, are fundamentally incomplete, and necessarily inaccurate because the brain "fills in" missing information, eg. your field of view might seem complete, but you have literal physical blind spots that your brain fills in. Perceptions are accurate enough to be useful, but not fully reliable. And so we should conclude the same of our apparent perception of subjective, qualitative experience.
Assertion 1 is quite weak. The stronger version is that consciousness is the mechanism by which the universe processes information, and choice (as we experience it) is the mechanism by which the universe updates its state. Under this assertion, the laws of physics are nothing more than an application of the central limit theorem on the distribution of conscious choices made by all the little bits of the universe involved in the system. This view also implies that space and reality are "virtual" or "imaginary" much like George Berkeley suggested 300 years ago.
I'm starting to buy this argument after rejecting it before (primarily thought ignorance of the meaning of "consciousness is the mechanism by which the universe processes information").
Also intersects with Hoffman's argument re: Conscious Realism. The only real thing is conscious experience, and "reality" as used in common parlance is just a multimodal user interface constructed to maximize evolutionary fitness.
I also incline to the view that experience is fundamental, but I'm not really sure that you mean by the term "information system". Who is deciding what counts as information? In everyday usage we usually speak of something containing information if it helps a person decide how to act. Perhaps agency is one of these "certain" properties that these special information systems need to possess. There does seem to be a lot of overlap between things that we grant the assumption of consciousness to and things that we grant some form of agency to.
I have an alternative, more generous explanation of your 2nd point - the people you talk about haven't done much reflection about consciousness yet and are so immersed in it that they cannot separate their own conscious experience as an entity to talk about. Like fish and water. Just like you said - it was also your position when you were younger. The people you label as having a different interior experience might be in the same position as your younger self.
I really buy his argument about our interior experience being a multimodal user interface (MUI) over stimulus from some information system. We describe the universe in terms of a 4D space-time with forces and particles, but this is really the MUI we've constructed (or evolution has constructed) that maximizes our predictive power when "actuating" our MUI (e.g interacting with that external system).
I haven't thought about this before, and kinda rejected it on first reading of Hoffman's work, but think I grok it now. Because our internal experience is a MUI, and that MUI (4D space time, particles) can't be considered a "true reality", it's just an interface, then other conscious entities are more "real" than our MUI. That is, the fundamental true reality that really matters is other conscious agents (e.g. Conscious Realism).
A slightly more wacky theory I like to think about is how this intersects with the simulation argument. If our reality isn't ring 0 (e.g. there's an outer reality that is actually time-stepping our universe), then the conscious interior experience we have in our reality may be due to the properties of reality in the outer universe "leaking through" into our simulation.
This actually aligns well with the Hoffman's MUI argument. We live in some information processing system. Through evolution we've constructed a MUI that we see as 4D space time. But this doesn't at all reflect the true reality of our universe being a process simulated in the ring 0 reality. Conscious Realism then arises because ring 0 reality has properties that imbue pattern of information processing with interior experience.
You don't come off as being a nuanced thinker if those are your two positions on Dawkins. I can understand disagreeing with him, but calling him an idiot impugns you more than him.
Well my position comes from some of the positions Dawkins has publicly stated, when he really didn't need to speak up in those circles.
Maybe you find 'idiot' a strong word? The problem with someone like Dawkins is he is 'clever' - someone who doesn't understand that in his position it's better to not wield it like a weapon. This is why I prefer someone like Sean Carroll, who absolutely entertains some bonkers ideas, but never from a position of superiority or dismissal - but rather challenges it rationally.
How many videos of him "destroying" theists have you watched on TikTok? I've seen 100+, and agree that he's an idiot, amazingly so. Watch carefully the words he uses as he "proves" his "facts".
I agree Dawkins shouldn't be talking about theology in general as he obviously hasn't studied it. He is fine to great in explaining the evolutionary evidence why young earth creationism is wrong, but is out of his depth when discussing the bigger picture. That doesn't make him an idiot.
Ok, what term do you believe should be applied to someone who professionally mocks people's intellectual shortcomings (real or imagined...this gets into another variation of the phenomenon), and in so doing demonstrates that he too suffers from the very same abstract problem, to the cheers of audiences who also suffer from the same problem (many of whom will then recommend his work, spreading this mind virus (both data & methodology) ever further)?
Is the irony of this circle jerk of delusion not a bit thick?
A full representation is not necessary. If a Human has errors in any single sentence, they have errors in their corresponding model. These details are the essence of the very point of contention.
> Do you use a purity testing approach to determining idiocy?
If one is claiming logical and epistemic superiority, as he literally and explicitly does, and arrogantly so (followed by roars of applause from the audience), I will judge him by those standards. I will also mock him, because he is sooooo dumb, while he chastises others for the same thing (which he is typically not wrong about, to be fair).
Oh yes, if I could bet money on it, I'd say it's even likely! However, I think this touches on an under realized phenomenon: the difference between what people say when they are "speaking their mind" in literature/studies (slow, deliberate, careful error checking, often including other people), versus the more real unfiltered version you get that comes out during real time speech (which emerges from cognition).
In the atheism community in particular, there are some very strange beliefs about human beliefs. For example, a recurring claim I hear from atheists is that what object level atheists believe, in fact, is the formal definition of atheism: merely/only a lack of belief in God(s), but no negative belief. The silliness of this should be obvious, but I've had no luck getting any of them to realize (or even contemplate) this, not even one person. The irony is mind boggling. (The same phenomenon exists in science as well interestingly, which is part of why I claim it is a fact that it is an underpowered methodology/ideology for navigating reality, a false prophet if you will.)
I propose that if he (and all other people) didn't actually hold these flawed beliefs in the first place, they wouldn't come out during real time speech... or if they did ~accidentally, they should be realized and corrected (which scientists in public venues tend to do, begrudgingly).
All people suffer from this problem, and I think our culture buries it, for reasons I have no theory about (some sort of psychological game theory maybe?).
Another way of putting it: if you only consume content from someone that is written offline, you are getting a misrepresentation of that person. I think this is a huge deal, yet another important part of reality that our culture behaves as if it is not there. We are like teenagers at best on an absolute scale imho.
I think both what you get in real time and what you get when someone has time to consider and check for errors and polish are "real". It's not that each person has a perfectly well-defined set of beliefs and ideas, and (1) you get to see them unfiltered in real time and only see a fake version when the person has time to polish, or (2) you get to see them accurately when the person has time to make sure they're getting it right, and only see a rough draft full of mistakes in real time. People are more complicated than that.
Some people are good at getting things right in real time. Some people are good at getting things right when they're careful. I think it is a mistake to call someone stupid because they're bad at one of those things -- unless for some reason one of them matters more than the other (e.g., they're in a position where they have to make quick decisions all the time; or they are primarily a writer who can always think and check and polish before publishing).
I'm not convinced that the definition-of-atheism thing has much to do with the real-time versus polished distinction. But:
I think both atheists and theists sometimes cherry-pick definitions for tactical purposes. "Oh no, I can't possibly be expected to offer evidence that there are no gods, because being an atheist just means not positively believing in gods." "Of course so-and-so's evil actions don't reflect badly on Christianity -- if he were a real Christian he'd be acting better." "Why should I care what liberal Muslims say? The most authentic Muslims are obviously the ones who behead people while shouting Allahu akbar." Etc., etc., etc.
But it's not silly to define "atheist" as "not positively believing in any gods"; that's a property that many people have, it's perfectly reasonable to have a name for it, and the only problem with using "atheist" for it is that most people use that word to mean something a bit different. And the trouble is that there aren't "enough" words; we've got "atheist" and "agnostic" and "deist" and "theist" but there are more gradations of belief than that. (Absolutely certain there are no gods. Of the opinion that on balance there are probably no gods. Of the opinion that whether there are gods is unknowable in principle. Of the opinion that it's knowable in principle but one doesn't in fact have enough evidence. Inclined to think that there's probably something godlike but we can't know anything much about it. Thoroughly convinced that there is something godlike, but that we can't know much about it. Somewhat convinced by arguments for a particular religion but still unsure. Firmly committed to a particular religion and confident that it's right. Etc.)
Personally, I use "atheist" to mean "overall of the opinion that there are no gods, whether or not certain of this", "non-theist" to mean "not positively believing in any gods", "agnostic" to mean "substantially unsure whether there are gods, whether or not one thinks it's knowable in principle", "theist" to mean "overall of the opinion that there is at least one god, whether or not certain of this", and I qualify those terms in whatever ways might be necessary if I want to say that someone's certain there's no god or kinda-halfheartedly-Hindu or whatever. I am somewhat prepared to argue that all those choices are better than the alternatives. But if someone else only uses "atheist" and "theist" for people who feel completely certain about whether there are any gods, or uses "atheist" to mean "not positively believing in gods", or something, that's a defensible choice so long as they take the trouble to be clear about what they mean and refrain from cheating by equivocation.
The distinction, or better: the phenomenon I am trying to get at is that people (including genuinely smart people) commonly mix up ~intent and ability / actual behaviour.
For example, consider someone who says "I am moral, because I am a Christian", but then sneaks off and cheats on his wife. Or, consider a physics teacher who says "You can learn physics from me, because I am knowledgeable in physics", but then starts lecturing and the content is incorrect.
So too with "atheists" who believe that simply declaring oneself to be a certain way is adequate to achieve the intent.
Note that atheists (also Scientific Materialist fundamentalists like Sean Carroll or NDT, etc) are just a particularly common (and hilarious, because of the irony + self-confidence) manifestation of this abstract phenomenon, it is common in any ideology, derived from fundamental flaws in how our culture teaches (or not) how to think ("Use logic, evidence, critical thinking, etc"...except no methodology accompanies the motto, people think simply declaring it to be so makes it so).
Or maybe another angle to think of it from: rewind 200 years and consider how Western culture was broadly ok with racism and slavery - that's how we currently are with our cultural norms on thinking.
This seems like a separate thing from what you were talking about before. (Unless you're referring again to the "no positive belief in gods" definition of "atheism", but I don't think you can be since in fact if you sincerely declare that you have no positive belief in any gods then that does pretty much mean that you in fact have no such belief.)
If all you're saying is that some people make a lot of fuss about being rational, informed by evidence, etc., and then fail to be sufficiently rational, informed by evidence, etc. -- well, yes, people are fallible and think too highly of themselves, and I expect that state of affairs to continue at least until the Glorious Transhuman Future, should any version of that ever arrive, and probably beyond. I don't see any particular reason to think that atheists overestimate themselves more than theists do.
Also, I think more highly of e.g. Sean Carroll's rationality than it seems you do, and I see absolutely no reason to think that he isn't genuinely attempting, with more success than most, to apply logic and critical thinking to evidence. If you claim he's just mouthing those words and thinks that saying them makes him rational, then I would be interested to know on what grounds you think so.
Also also, although I don't find Richard Dawkins super-impressive when he argues against religion[1], if you think he isn't substantially more rational and more evidence-led than most of the people he argues with[2] then I fear you're severely overstating his shortcomings.
[1] His writing on evolutionary biology is generally very good.
[2] Most, not all. I am not claiming that there is no one reasonable on Team Theism.
> since in fact if you sincerely declare that you have no positive belief in any gods then that does pretty much mean that you in fact have no such belief.
If one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way? How does that work? And what should one think about the plentiful evidence available online of Atheists (Scientists, Rationalists, Experts, etc) demonstrating that their perceived/intended cognition isn't how their actual cognition works? Shall we ignore it?
I am pointing to a genuinely interesting phenomenon here....it is always and everywhere, right in front of (behind?) our noses. Perhaps there's something about it that makes it ~not possible to see it?
> If all you're saying is that some people make a lot of fuss about being rational, informed by evidence, etc., and then fail to be sufficiently rational, informed by evidence, etc.
It isn't, and the evidence of that is right there above.
> well, yes, people are fallible and think too highly of themselves, and I expect that state of affairs to continue at least until the Glorious Transhuman Future, should any version of that ever arrive, and probably beyond.
This is an interesting and common (a literal philosophy professor succumbed to it under testing not more than a week ago) behavior when the idea of improving upon cultural defaults is suggested: framing it as an uninteresting, "everyone knows" fact of life, or an absurd strawman, or both.
Out of curiosity: do you ever observe patterns of cognitive behavior in (all!) Humans? It's really quite interesting, I highly recommend it!
> I don't see any particular reason to think that atheists overestimate themselves more than theists do.
Have you gone looking for it?
Regardless: this is not the point of contention, let's try to avoiding sliding the topic.
> Also, I think more highly of e.g. Sean Carroll's rationality than it seems you do, and I see absolutely no reason to think that he isn't genuinely attempting, with more success than most, to apply logic and critical thinking to evidence.
The point isn't whether he's better than most, the point is that he suffers from the very same problems he mocks others for - it is usually to a lesser degree, perhaps, but on an absolute scale, how bad is he?
It seems to me that Theists, Conspiracy Theorists, Trump supporters, all the usual suspects are always fair game for criticism, but when the same is done to The Right People, for some reason that's inappropriate, if not outright disallowed. And yet: is openness to criticism not often held up as why these superior disciplines are superior?
> If you claim he's just mouthing those words and thinks that saying them makes him rational, then I would be interested to know on what grounds you think so.
More like: "mouthing those words and thinking that he is rational" (in an ~absolute sense, as opposed to more rational).
> Also also, although I don't find Richard Dawkins super-impressive when he argues against religion[1], if you think he isn't substantially more rational and more evidence-led than most of the people he argues with[2] then I fear you're severely overstating his shortcomings.
To me, his debates are like the move Dumb and Dumber. Dawkins is dumb, his opponents are typically dumber. Have you ever seen him go up against someone with some mental horsepower? I haven't, but check out this video with NDT opining on philosophy, in discussion with Kurt Jaimungal (a heavyweight in my books):
"Philosophers Are USELESS!" Neil & Curt Clash on Physics
(I am finding your tone very disagreeable; I am pretty sure you have adopted it deliberately, and suspect you don't care if I find it diasgreeable, but I mention this just in case I'm wrong about any of that.)
I do not think that "if one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way" and did not say that; I said that in the specific case where what you are doing is declaring "I believe / don't believe X", if you do so sincerely, then indeed you have / don't have the belief in question.
This is unlike declarations like "I am being rational" or "I am fully informed about these issues"; the relevant difference is that in general, if you think you believe something then in fact you believe it. A declaration like "I have a headache" would have the same property.
(Of course 1. it is possible that some of these people are lying about what they believe, and 2. I guess there are cases where someone believes something "superficially" but deep down knows they're wrong. #1 seems unlikely to me in these cases. #2 is always possible (though of course just as possible for theists as for atheists) but I would want some concrete evidence before thinking it likely in any particular case.)
I regret that you have not yet succeeded in conveying to me exactly what divergence you see between atheists' statements about their cognition and their actual cognition. Perhaps it would be helpful if you would state it explicitly, rather than gesturing in the general direction and saying "look how stupid these people are".
(Three hypotheses. 1. "They say they don't have a positive belief in gods, but in fact they do." Seems super-implausible to me; show me your evidence. 2. "They say atheism just means not having a positive belief in gods, but in fact they positively believe there is no god." Perfectly plausible but not actually an error. 3. "They say they are being rational but actually they aren't". You have explicitly said that wasn't your meaning. Probably your actual meaning is something other than these three but I don't know what.)
Until we're on the same page about what it is you're claiming, I suspect we're going to be talking past one another a lot, so I could just stop here. But I'll try to address some of the other things you said:
> This is an interesting and common [...] behaviour [...]
Maybe it is, but if what you want to claim is that it's wrong then it would be more productive to say what's wrong with it. (And when the "behaviour" in question is two opposite things, I am not quite sure on what basis you're considering it a single thing.)
> on an absolute scale, how bad is he?
Twenty-three.
To make my point more explicit: I don't know how to answer that question "on an absolute scale" since so far as I know there isn't any sort of generally agreed absolute scale for rationality.
> all the usual suspects are fair game for criticism, but when the same is done to The Right People, for some reason that's inappropriate, if not outright disallowed
I'm deeply confused; I haven't said (and don't think) it's inappropriate to criticize the likes of Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll or whoever, and I've no idea at all where you get "outright disallowed" from. It's perfectly appropriate to criticize them. I'm just not convinced as yet that your criticism is very accurate -- but since I don't yet know for sure just what your criticism is, it's hard to tell for sure.
I think it is worth distinguishing "I disagree with your criticism of X" from "X should be above criticism". I am not sure you are actually making that distinction.
> Have you ever seen him go up against someone with some mental horsepower?
I'm not much of a debate-watcher and on any not strictly biological topic I would expect others to do better (in terms of intellectual rigour, or fun-to-watch-ness, or both) than Dawkins. So, no. A quick YouTube search suggests he's had a debate with William Lane Craig, who's pretty smart; I wouldn't expect there to be much enlightenment to be had from that one. There's also one on "humanity's ultimate origins" with Rowan Williams (with Anthony Kenny in the chair). I'm pretty sure Williams and Kenny are not creationists, so most likely the arguments there are philosophical rather than biological, so again I wouldn't bet on Dawkins being super-enlightening in this, but you never know.
I'm not sure what the relevance of a debate between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Curt Jaimungal is to the question of whether Richard Dawkins is any good. In any case, I had a listen to that and it's totally unclear to me what about it is "embarrassing". Would you care to be more explicit? I mean, I get that you think NdGT is being unimpressive in some respect, but I don't know what specific thing you think is bad. (For what it's worth, I was more unimpressed by Jaimungal, who seemed to me deeply superficial throughout, but it's hard to be sure of someone's qualities from a 10-minute clip of them talking to someone else.)
Anyway, this is all a bit of a tangent. You seemed to be saying that there's something particularly bad, intellectually, about atheists and scientists, with Dawkins as a typical case, which is why I think it's relevant to ask how he compares to the people he argues with, but it seems to me that nothing of importance really hangs on how smart / rational / deep / ... Richard Dawkins in particular is. It's not like anyone's going to say "OK, you convinced me that Richard Dawkins is really intelligent, so I shall abandon my religion now" or "OK, you convinced me that Richard Dawkins is rather an idiot; see you in church next Sunday".
> I guess there are cases where someone believes something "superficially" but deep down knows they're wrong.
Have you some sort of proof that people can accurately read the behavior of their mind (including the subconscious)?
You are making the claim, where is your (non-narrative based) evidence?
>> on an absolute scale, how bad is he?
> Twenty-three.
> To make my point more explicit: I don't know how to answer that question "on an absolute scale" since so far as I know there isn't any sort of generally agreed absolute scale for rationality.
The curiosity you exude is overwhelming.
> I'm not sure what the relevance of a debate between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Curt Jaimungal is to the question of whether Richard Dawkins is any good.
It is a demonstration of how dumb a scientist can be and still be widely respected if not idolized.
> You seemed to be saying that there's something particularly bad, intellectually, about atheists and scientists
Yes, it is the irony. Approximately, science improved upon religion, but they mistake their relative superiority/intelligence as absolute.
Your first question is very strange. I say "I guess X is a thing that happens sometimes" (and went on to say: but I don't see much sign that it's happening in these particular cases, and if you claim it is then I'd like to see some evidence). Your response is: "Can you prove that X doesn't happen?".
If you regard that discussion between NdGT and CJ as showing how dumb a well-respected scientist can be, then it seems to me it would be useful for you to explain what about it shows that.
(So far, my requests for clarification and explanation and explicitness from you have been completely ignored.)
Could you give a few examples to show that atheists and/or scientists (of course those two categories are not at all the same) think their intelligence or rationality is "absolute"? (It would also be nice to know what you mean by that; I don't know what it would mean to call someone "absolutely intelligent" or "absolutely rational", unless what it would mean is that they never make any mistakes, always draw all inferences that would be valid, etc., and if you think anyone believes that about themselves then once again I would like to see some evidence.)
Let's see if we can agree on a fundamental concept.
Imagine a child in grade 5 who gets straight A's, whereas his classmates do not. People will judge this child as smart. But put the child up against some PhD's in each respective field, and the child will no longer be considered smart (you would have to hide his age in the experiment perhaps); the child is only "smart" relative to his peers.
Hopefully you're with me so far. Here's the tricky part: the PhD's are (abstractly, but less so concretely) in the same situation as the child: they are only smart relative to their peers (~all other humans) - on an absolute scale (what is possible, as opposed to (what the person doing the thinking has knowledge of[1]) what exists, aka: "[the] reality"), they too are "dumb" (in a relative sense, in that (for example[1]) they cannot solve all solvable problems presented to them, without making errors).
[1] this, at both individual and societal/cultural levels, is fundamentally important to this class of problem space. There are many things that reliably (necessarily?[1]) trigger System 1 intuition/hallucination in humans, and at least three of them are in play here: the unknown, ideology, and culture (which dictates cognitive, conversational, logical, and many other norms; what "is" is downstream from culture (cultural / psychological conditioning...like training an LLM)).
Yes, obviously I agree that someone can be smart relative to one set of people (or criteria, or problems, or whatever) and stupid relative to another. And yes, I agree that we are all much stupider than a hypothetical superintelligence might be. And I have no idea why you call this "the tricky part"; it isn't tricky at all.
(Except that comparing against "what is possible" is tricky, because there are different sorts of possibility. How smart am I relative to what I might be if I had better habits and less self-deception? What about relative to if I had as good a brain as any mere human could have? Relative to the cleverest things that could exist within our universe, obeying the laws of physics? Relative to a god that isn't bound by such petty concerns? I think those answers might all be very different from one another.)
This all seems absolutely obvious to me, and I suspect it is approximately equally obvious to (say) Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll. In particular, I see no reason to think that those people or others like them think, still less claim, to be free of cognitive limitations and errors. Evidently you think there is something wrong with them in this general area -- but you seem strangely reluctant to be quite explicit about what your complaint is, and to my (doubtless not-perfectly-comprehending) eyes it seems that you alternate between implying, though not quite saying explicitly, that there is something specially, unusually, wrong about these people, and pointing out universal limitations that everyone, or pretty much everyone, suffers from.
I started writing a few paragraphs engaging with various actual possibilities for what you might be saying about those people and why you might think it bad, but instead of doing that I'll give you another opportunity to tell me. I'm getting bored of having to guess what you have in mind, and then having you ignore my attempts to engage with it.
This topic is so interesting. If I were creating a system for everything, it seems like empty space needs awareness of anything it could expand to contain, so all things would be aware of all other things as a base universal conscious hitbox.
You don't need empty space. All the processing power can be tied to entities, and space emerges from relationships between entities.
Want something fun to think about? What if the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is basically a function of the information capacity of the thing being examined. To make a computer analogy, imagine you have 8 bits of information - using 6 for position leaves 2 momentum, for example.
This is a wonderful project, I had no idea there was so much fragmentation n the topic of consciousness. Maybe we should feed these writings and concepts to AI and ask it to give us any grand unifying commonality among them, if any.
I would love to be wrong about this, but I don't think anyone knows how to do that yet. You're basically asking for automatic most-likely hypothesis generation given a set of input data. Concepts about consciousness in this case, but you could imagine doing the same with scientific data, system traces around bugs and crashes, etc. That would be wild!
It's precisely the type of thing that current LLMs are not suited for. They excel at extrapolating between existing writings and ideas. They do really poorly when trying to do something novel.
I've never understood why Chalmer's reasoning is so captivating to people. The whole idea of p-zombies seems absurd on its face. Quoting the article:
(quote)
(endquote)Point 2 is textbook begging the question: it imagines a world which is physically identical to ours but consciousness is different there. That is baking in the presupposition that consciousness is not a physical process. Points 3 and 4 then "cleverly" detect the very contradiction he has planted and claims victory.
If you believe that what we describe as "consciousness" is emergent from the ideas a material brain develops about itself, then it's in fact not logically possible to have a world that is physically identical to ours yet does not contain consciousness. So indeed, premise 2. sneaks in the conclusion.
To illustrate this point, here's an argument with the same structure that would similarly "prove" that gravity doesn't cause things to fall down:
1. In our world, there is gravity and things fall down.
2. There is a logically possible world where there is gravity yet things do not fall down.
3. Therefore, things falling down is a further fact about our world, over and above gravity.
4. So, gravity causing things to fall down is false.
I don't think your point 2 is directly analogous to his point 2.
Because a world where things do not fall down is not physically identical to a world in which they don't.
I think the point of arguing about p-zombies is this. Do you believe it's possible for a human being to exhibit all the external characteristics of consciousness without an internal conscious experience? And if you believe that's true, then you can posit a world which is physically indistinguishable from our world through any experiment in which consciousness simply does not exist, because, as far as I know, there is no test that can prove that an individual does have an internal consciousness, and isn't merely mimicking it. Most arguments that p-zombies don't exist sort of rely on the internal conscious experience of the person making it, which no one else has access to -- "I have an internal conscious experience of the world, other people are similar to me and so they must also have those experiences."
That is _not_ true about a world in which gravity does not exist for obvious reasons. That universe would be very different from ours and easily distinguishible through experiment.
I think his point does hinge on whether it's possible for p-zombies to exist, but it's not as silly as you all are making it out to be, and it is not begging the question.
I actually think his weakest point is part 3 and 4, because I think mostly the problem is that we don't really have good definitions of consciousness and related concepts let alone a complete physical explanation of their origins, and his whole argument hinges on the fact that we currently don't have a way to test for internal conscious experience, but I think that might not always be true.
To elaborate on your statement, we all think in very different ways. Recently there was an academic test posted here that evaluated “how” a person thinks (internal monologue, use of images, how memories are recalled, etc.). After my girlfriend and I both took the test and I saw how differently we both think, I was shocked. Had we not taken this quiz I’d have assumed the inside of her mind fundamentally worked the same way as mine does. But that is seemingly very far from the truth.
As where I can visualize, use internal monologue, vividly recall my memories, etc. at will, by default I do none of the above, and my thoughts are opaque to me. For her, she almost exclusively uses her internal monologue when thinking, and her entire thought process is consciously visible to her. It’s entirely conceivable that other people might not have an experience of “consciousness” resembling anything like what my idea of consciousness is.
That sounds like a really interesting test, do you have a link?
https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...
> Do you believe it's possible for a human being to exhibit all the external characteristics of consciousness without an internal conscious experience?
Nobody knows whether conscious experience is a requirement or not to "exhibit all of the external characteristics".
It's possible that the only way to get from state N to state N+1 is to include the consciousness function as part of that calculation.
A counter to this would be that a lookup table of states would produce the same external characteristics without consciousness.
A counter to that counter would be that the consciousness function is required to produce state N+1 from state N. The creation of the lookup table must have invoked the consciousness function to arrive at and store state N+1.
The thing we just don't really know is whether state N+1 can be derived from state N without the consciousness function being invoked.
Is a video game a conscious experience for a computer?
Now imagine an internal video game in a computer system that is being generated from the real world inputs of what it sees/hears/feels around it. You take outside input, simulate it, record some information on it, and output feedback into the real world.
Many people would say this isn't consciousness, but I personally disagree. You have input, processing, introspection, and output. The loops that occur in the human brain are more complex, but you have the same things occurring. There is electrical processing and chemical reactions occurring in the humans mind. Just because we don't understand their exact processing doesn't mean they are unrelated to consciousness. Moreso we can turn this consciousness off with drugs and stop said electrical processing.
Midazolam/Versed sedation seems pretty close to a p-zombie. You can have someone who seems completely awake, walking around and interacting normally, but if you ask them later they were completely unconscious from their own perspective. So self-reported consciousness isn't always accurate. And it also seems that consciousness is very closely tied to memory.
(I'm not arguing a particular position, but trying to figure out what to make of this. Also, this is based on what I've read, not personal experience.)
> You can have someone who seems completely awake, walking around and interacting normally, but if you ask them later they were completely unconscious from their own perspective
Were they unconscious, or are they now unable to remember what they did? I.e. amnesiac.
If you ask a deceased person about their life, you will find that they also will offer no evidence of a previous conscious experience. Life, apparently, resembles unconsciousness.
Thank you for making me laugh. I like how you think.
You experience your own consciousness - your own model of your self, time, and the world as perceived through your physical sensory apparatus. This could give you a probability of 100% certainty of your own consciousness. You're a good skeptic, though, and after much consideration, you decide that, despite absence of evidence to the contrary, you'll allow for 2% uncertainty, since you might be a simulation specifically designed to "feel" conscious, or some other bizarre circumstance.
Knowing this, you compare your own experience with reports by others, and find that, despite some startling variety in social and cultural practice, humans all more or less go through life experiencing the world in a way that more or less maps to your own experiences. You find that even Helen Keller, despite her tragic disability, wrote about experiences which you can simulate for yourself. You conclude that if you somehow swapped places with her, she would be able to map the sensory input of your physical sensors to her own experience of the world, and vice versa.
This leads you to think that our physical brains are performing a process that models the world, and it does so consistently. After reading up on people's experiences, you also learn that our subjective experiences are constructed, moment by moment, by a combination of these world models, real-time stimulation, abstract feedback loops of conscious and unconscious thinking.
The more you read, the more evidence you have of this strange loop being the default case for every instance of a human having a brain and being alive.
The Bayesian probability that you are conscious, because of your brain, given all available evidence, approaches 100% certainty. You conclude your brain is more or less the same as anyone else's brain, broadly speaking, and this is supported by the evidence provided by a vast majority of accounts from other similarly brained individuals through all of human history.
Since your brain doesn't have a particular difference upon which to pin your experience of consciousness, and the evidence doesn't speak to any need for explanation, Occam's razor leads you to the conclusion that the simplest explanation is also the best. The living human brain is necessary and sufficient for consciousness, and consciousness is the default case for any living human brain.
The posterior probability that any given human (with a "normal" living brain) is conscious approaches 100% certainty, unless you can specifically provide evidence to the contrary. Saying "but what if p-zombies exist" makes for a diverting thought experiment, but it's rationally equivalent to saying "but what if little invisible unicorns are the ones actually experiencing things" or "what if we're all in the Matrix and it's a simulation" or "what if we're just an oddly persistent Boltzmann brain in an energetic nebula somewhere in the universe."
Without evidence, p-zombies are a plot device, not a legitimate rational launching off point for theorizing about anything serious.
Humans are conscious. We have neural correlates, endless recorded evidence, all sorts of second hand reporting which can compare and contrast our own first hand experiences and arrive at rational conclusions. Insisting on some arbitrary threshold of double blind, first hand, objective replicable evidence is not necessary, and even a bit shortsighted and silly, since the thing we are talking about cannot be directly shared or communicated. At some point, we'll be able to map engrams and share conscious experience directly between brains using BCI, and the translation layer between individuals will be studied, and we'll have chains of double blinded, replicable experiments that give us visibility into the algorithms of conscious experience.
Without direct interfaces to the brain and a robust knowledge of neural operation, we're left with tools of abstract reasoning. There's no good reason for p-zombies - they cannot exist, given the evidence, so we'd be better served by thinking about things that are real.
>since you might be a simulation specifically designed to "feel" conscious
I would argue this is actually consciousness also. If (and yea, it's a big if) consciousness is an internal model/simulation of how we experience reality, then a simulation of a simulation is still a simulation.
I agree - once you've settled your math on consciousness, you can go back and modify the priors based on new evidence. One of the crazier suppositions that actually makes a dent in the posterior probability is the simulation hypothesis.
If all civilizations that develop computation and simulation capabilities converge to the development of high fidelity simulations, then it's highly likely that they would create simulations of interesting periods of history, such as the period of time when computers, the internet, AI, and other technologies were developed. We just so happen to be living through that - I still put my odds of living in base reality somewhere above 98%, but there is a distinct possibility that we're all being simulated so that this period of history can be iterated and perturbed and studied, or some such scenario.
Maybe someone ought to start studying the science of universal adversarial simulation attacks, to elicit some glitches in the matrix. That'd be one hell of a paper.
>That'd be one hell of a paper
Until 'they' restore the checkpoint and arrange your teams plane to fall out of the sky.
Taking this as true, wouldn't that mean that a lack of published papers on this topic is light evidence of being in a simulation? Also that it would be fairly dangerous to bring the subject to the public's attention.
> If you believe that what we describe as "consciousness" is emergent from the ideas a material brain develops about itself, then it's in fact not logically possible to have a world that is physically identical to ours yet does not contain consciousness.
This sneaks in an implicit axiom: that the brain is not only necessary, but is also sufficient, necessarily, for consciousness (implicitly ruling out some unknown outside, non-materialistic force(s)).
Your Step 2 is so off as an analogy, it’s possible you don’t understand Chalmer’s point.
What is Chalmers saying then? As i understand he is saying that there can be a world where conciousness does not exist, but all the possible physical experiments cannot distinguish between that world and our world. But that simply means the conciousness he is looking for has absolutely no consequence, and therefore his point has no value...
He is saying that the person in the Chinese room doesn’t understand Chinese.
How is this related to the 2nd point in OP's comment?
The whole Chinese room argument is based merely on a misinterpretation of computentionalist/physicalist argument.
Of course the computer or person who executes the program does not understand Chinese, they are just performing arithmetic operations, the entity understanding Chinese is the program itself, not the medium on which the program runs.
But Chalmers doesn't think that approach works, nor any other physicalist attempt to explain consciousness. The problem with what you stated is that you're substituting ideas about consciousness for sensations. And those aren't the same thing. We experience sensations as part of being embodied organisms, and then we think about those sensations.
It's quite clear if you approach these things logically that Chalmers doesn't do a lot of thinking before coming up with these arguments. All of his arguments boil down to "if we assume that consciousness is different from everything else, then it's different from everything else". He gets way, way too much attention for someone who is sub mediocre in his reasoning.
He also doesn't understand what computation is, even though he often makes confident statements about it. He thinks computation is a subjective process, that something only counts as a computation if someone interprets it as such, which is simply wrong, not a debatable topic. And this is the core of one of his other arguments about why consciousness can't be a computational process.
There are a number of ways to determine that consciousness is not a computational process. Roger Penrose is a good source on this.
There is not. It's by the far the most likely explanation, and even if you don't agree with that, it is at least completely consistent with everything we know about computation.
For one, you would have to determine whether physical laws are computational processes. Stephen Wolfram is trying this, but it requires some incredible assumptions.
The laws of physics we know right now are either computable or stochastic with computable probabilities. This was of course the only possible outcome if physics made any sense at all, since the purpose of physics is to compute outcomes, so a physical theory that was not computable would never have been invented.
Still, the laws of physics could be anything and it wouldn't matter for this question. The only relevant question is whether our brains are computers, regardless of how the physics work at the lowest level. After all, we have clear proof that you can make computers on the existing laws of physics (I'm typing this reply on one!), so all we need to know is whether our brains are bio-chemical computers. Neuroscience is nowhere near a level where it can answer this, but it at least remains a plausible explanation. After all, we humans can't compute any non-computable function, or at least none that we know of (the Church-Turing thesis).
I’m making an argument about the validity of an argument. A rebuttal to that can never be “but the conclusion is true”.
The thing is we are acting like 99.9% p-zombies for most of our interactions with the world - that is we are acting unconsciosly for most of what we do.
The question is where does that subjective 0.01% - the rider on top of the elephant come from?
We generally do not pay attention to walking, breathing or brushing teeth and so on.
We can do more complex tasks as well once we achieve unconscious mastery in some subject.
With proper training we can play chess or tennis ("The Inner Game of Tennis") at a high level, without paying attention. In fact it can be detrimental to think about one's performance.
It is the Dennett's "multiple drafts model" - but where does the subjective experience arise when some model is brought to foreground "thread"?
Thus allure of Chalmer's zombies. Why not have a 100% zombie?
There are many stories of people seemingly being conscious, yet not really.
Black out drunks driving home from a bar.
Hypoglycemic shock is another example - my wife's diabetic friend was responding seemingly logically and claiming to be conscious, yet she was not and paramedics were barely able to save her.
A human being can achieve very high levels on unconscious mastery in multiple subjects.
A very tired me gave a remote lecture (on intermediate Python) during Covid where I switched spoken languages mid-lecture and even answered questions in a different language. Meanwhile I was was half asleep and thinking about a different subject matter. I was not really aware of the lecture material - I had given the same lecture many times before - I was on autopilot.
Only after watching the Zoom recording I realized what had happened.
Thus, are there are some actions that our zombie (unconscious) states unable to produce?
Presumably, subjective experience helps in planning future actions. That could be one avenue to explore.
Just wanted to say how much I like your answer. To me one of the bigger puzzles is why people have such different takes on consciousness. To some the idea of p-zombies is immediately clear. To others it is nonsense. But during my conversations about the topic I was never able to explain it adequately to someone sceptical. And from my perspective they (the sceptics) always conflate being conscious with talking, learning, thinking, remembering, etc.
Good points. Part of my issue with these discussions is the poor vocabulary we have for consciousness. Your comment alone probably touches on several types of consciousness. The kind of consciousness we're experiencing undoubtedly varies greatly by time and circumstance.
A simple counter-argument to p-zombies that I like (I first encountered from Yudkowski) is:
If there was no conscious experience in this identical p-zombie world, it would be impossible to explain why everybody falsely claims they have conscious experience. If people stop claiming this, then the world is physically different, as people no longer act and produce artifacts such as HN posts discussing the phenomenon.
Or, my summary would be: conscious experience is causal, and so you cannot get the same universe-wide effects without it.
A well simulated intelligence in a computer would speak and have discussions about 'conscious experience'. (Assuming that is possible, but that is implied by physicalism+Church-Turing)
If you think that the simulation has conscious experience/qualia.../X, then X gets properties like being non-localized in space and time - you can break the simulation into multiple parts in an essential way and run these parts on data centers across the planet which communicate with each other. Further, you can freeze the simulation for a couple of days and reload. As long as there is no connection to outer signals like the system clock, the simulation wouldn't notice the gap.
If you think the simulation doesn't have consciousness/qualia/X despite accurately replicating humans as measured by instruments, then the simulation is a p-zombie.
Not impossible actually. People often claim falsehoods are real, eg. demons, ghosts, deities, etc. If you believe it's possible that p-zombies could generate false beliefs about these other things, then consciousness would just be another falsehood.
You would need some coordinating mechanism to ensure that all the p-zombies have the same hallucination. Including some detailed state machine that takes sense inputs, and processes it to produce the qualia present in each waking moment, plus the valence attributed to each moment of qualia.
Since a non-p-zombie can sit down and interrogate the details of their conscious experience, then write a book about it, which others read and agree upon the fine details - I find it hard to come up with a p-zombie substitute that wouldn’t just be consciousness by another name.
> You would need some coordinating mechanism to ensure that all the p-zombies have the same hallucination
You mean like talking and writing? As I said, how would p-zombies invent organized religion or other common spiritual beliefs that are false?
> Since a non-p-zombie can sit down and interrogate the details of their conscious experience, then write a book about it, which others read and agree upon the fine details
First, assuming you think that we're not p-zombies, not everybody agrees on the properties of consciousness even though we presumably have such an introspective ability. Therefore what you describe is a kind of fictional just-so story, and clearly doesn't actually happen in all cases.
Second, when there is no fact of the matter as with p-zombies and consciousness, any argument about consciousness only has to be rhetorically persuasive, not factual. Why do so many people agree on the broad properties of ghosts, eg. translucency, pass through physical objects, etc. despite such things not existing? There is no fact of the matter being described, so people just need to like the story being told, or perhaps how it's told.
In such a world, Chalmers and other philosophers of consciousness are just persuasive writers that spin a convincing just-so story connecting fictional internal states to real world observations, and people/p-zombies run with it thinking they learned something meaningful.
Suffice it to say, I think this is uncomfortably close to our world.
Well and succinctly put. One would have to be a philosopher to be willing to consider p-zombies further.
Some of the arguments I've read by philosophers seem like they are focusing on pure logic to prove a point or find weakness in another, but the linkage between those logic stmts and reality don't always seem to be considered.
It's almost like they are purely focused on symbolic logic, even if the stmts and symbols don't truly map to reality unambiguously, or without contradictions.
I actually think it's worth asking the question if these advanced AIs are a kind of p-zombie.
P-zombies are supposed to be physically identical to humans. They’re problematic because they lack consciousness, yet mysteriously talk about it anyway — among other reasons.
Advanced AI is definitely not physically identical to humans, and there’s a well understood reason why they might talk about consciousness despite lacking it which doesn’t apply to p-zombies.
I'm not sure that being physically identical to humans is a necessary characteristic of a p-zombie for anything important. If you can produce an ai which _acts in every observable way as if it were conscious_ without any actual consciousness that would indicate that p-zombies are possible. The current generations of AI don't qualify, but I can see how to get there from here.
> Point 2 is textbook begging the question: it imagines a world which is physically identical to ours but consciousness is different there.
It's not begging the question. He gives reasons for (2) that support the premise. That the premise essentially leads inexorably to (4) is a feature of the argument structure, not a bug. You have to engage with his reasons for (2) in determining whether or not the argument succeeds.
Can you give an outline of some of that evidence? I haven't read source Chalmers, just other people's discussions of the topic (including the article that is the subject of this thread).
The argument is roughly that (1) we can conceive of the physical dynamics of this world occurring without any associated consciousness, (2) if something is conceivable then it is logically possible, (3) It is logically possible that the physical dynamics of this world occur without any associated consciousness.
(1) is supported by noticing that all our explanations of physical dynamics appeals to other physical dynamics. We do not need to mention consciousness or qualitative anything to derive any of the physical dynamics we observe in this world. Thus there is nothing logically incoherent about physical dynamics without consciousness.
(2) follows from the fact that logical possibility just means no contradiction. If we cannot see any contradiction in two propositions being true, then that is defeasible evidence for the logical possibility of both propositions being true.
> if something is conceivable then it is logically possible
What does it mean to be "logically possible"?
We could conceive of something that is pure garbage due to our lack of knowledge. Something that could never exist due to nature of the universe, but just because we can conceive of it does not mean it's a valid and non-contradictory state for the universe.
It's possible it's a valid argument from the perspective that it forces us into the corner of stating one of these two conditions must be true: either p-zombies or consciousness requires attributes to our reality that are beyond our current physical understanding.
Logically possible just means there's no contradiction in accepting something as true. Usually it's used in the context of reasoning about what could have been true about the world. If some features of the world are varied, what else has to change to maintain consistency?
And sure, plenty of people argue that conceivability is a weak guide to possibility due to our limited knowledge, being imperfect reasoners, etc. That's a fair critique.
>either p-zombies or consciousness requires attributes to our reality that are beyond our current physical understanding.
To be clear, the impossibility of p-zombies implies that there is some as yet unidentified logical/semantic relationship between physical dynamics and consciousness. This would mean that there is no possible world where the physical dynamics is true but there is no consciousness. The possibility of p-zombies supports the idea that there is some further (non-logical) property of the world that supports consciousness. But such a property could have been false in a world very much like our own; one with all the same physical dynamics just without any consciousness. The p-zombie argument is used to raise the credence of there being a further fact about the world that supports consciousness.
The problem with p-zombie argument is that it is completely inconsequential.
It is like if i say there is some property let's call it phi-factor, i am certain i have it, some people have it too, and some do not, but there is absolutely no way for others to tell who has this phi-factor thing and who does not, because it doesn't cause any difference in behavior of people.
This kind of hypothesis doesn't explain anything and does not predict anything, and therefore it is not possible to build any logical chain based on it.
There are good versions of p-zombie argument, e.g. you could say that it is very hard to find difference in behavior of people and p-zombies, but if you create planet like simulation inhabited with p-zombies they will have large differences, e.g. they will never develop art, or science, or religion, or will die out because will not want to have children.
In any case there needs to be some measurable difference in behavior, for argument to be valid. But since this is a normal testable theory, it does not lead to the same kind of self-contradictory statements as p-zombie version, and therefore is not popular with philosophers who want to talk about things they have nothing to say about.
The argument is not inconsequential, you just need to understand the work the argument is trying to do. If you are only interested in testable hypotheses, then the argument isn't relevant. But that's not the only thing that matters in Science. Science doesn't operate free of assumptions or conceptual frameworks. An experiment is situated within a set of background assumptions that determine what the experiment outcome says about the world.
Our conceptual framework for understanding consciousness also matters, and the p-zombie argument is directly relevant to what conceptual framework is a plausible basis for doing a science of consciousness. The zombie argument puts limits on what the brain sciences can say about consciousness as such, i.e. the qualitative feel of subjective experience. The very point of the argument is to elucidate the limits of scientific explanation regarding consciousness. For that it is very consequential.
Could you bring any example where non-testable hypothesis have mattered in science, or even have been proposed?
As far as i can tell the p-zombie argument is a variant 2=3 "proofs" with hidden division by 0. People claim as truth a proposition with no consequence,then claim that a proposition they want to prove follows from it. It does not elucidate anything.
The limited variant of the argument which predicts something does help in understanding the limits, but p-zombie supporters do not like that argument because it also shows the boundaries of what brain sciences can't say, and that is not much.
>Could you bring any example where non-testable hypothesis have mattered in science, or even have been proposed?
If you think of science as just a collection of empirical data, then you won't find any value in untestable hypotheses. If you think of science as an enterprise that's aimed towards explanations about the world, then conceptual data matters. Interpretations of quantum mechanics are a fruitful ground for non-testable conceptual work to be relevant to science. Here is one example[1] of the Many Worlds interpretation providing conceptual and intuitive support that helped advance quantum computing.
But beyond that, what an experiment tells us depends on our conceptual framework. When we hear a click in a Geiger counter, are we merely detecting clicks in this particular device, or are we detecting electrons out in the world? This isn't something that an experiment will decide for us. The conceptual framework we are operating with allows us to say the click isn't just the detector going off, and our model of these clicks isn't just predicting when this device will click in the future, but rather that our experiments are detecting the existence of actual electrons too small to interact with without special devices.
[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/59346/does-quant...
Interpretations of quantum mechanics are testable, they have to produce quantum mechanics, which puts a very narrow constraint on possible theories.
The equivalent of p-zombie hypothesis with quantum mechanics would be if one said that particles in addition to coordinates have to be described by one more variable, which does not affect any of other equations of motion. These type of theories do not have to obey any constraint, and you can trivially produce an infinite amount of them.
You can say that this kind of variable has different value for particles in human brain, therefore study of this additional variable is more important than the study of the rest of physics. But this won't improve your understanding of either the brain or physics, just like p-zombie hypothesis does not.
>Interpretations of quantum mechanics are testable, they have to produce quantum mechanics, which puts a very narrow constraint on possible theories.
No, this is not what anyone means by a theory being testable. An interpretation of QM by assumption reproduces all the same results of QM. That's why its an interpretation. In the same way, the p-zombie thought experiment by assumption reproduces all of physics without any deviation. QM interpretations and the p-zombie argument are on the same footing here.
>These type of theories do not have to obey any constraint, and you can trivially produce an infinite amount of them.
This just shows a lack of understanding of what the p-zombie argument is claiming. Perhaps revisit your initial misconceptions rather than piling on the mistakes?
Interpretation of QM does not "reproduce results by assumption", it provides a computational scheme for obtaining equations of QM. P-zombie argument on the other hand does not produce anything.
Thanks for the response! But your syllogism seems to be different that the one presented in the linked article that attempted to summarize Chalmer's logic.
I don't contest your point 1 at all -- I believe in most of there universe there is no consciousness, and for much of Earth's history there was no consciousness here either.
For point 2 -- perhaps "logically possible" is a term of art that I'm not familiar with, so I am perhaps missing the point. But on a plain reading I can't support this point. Recycling a point I made earlier, I can conceive of a world where the center of the sun is made of chocolate, but it is not logically possible.
Point 3 -- the conclusion you have arrived at isn't contested. Materialists are not claiming consciousness is the cause of the physical processes, rather it is the result of them. As I said in my response to point 1, much of earth's history didn't have any conscious experiencers.
We could say: (1) we can conceive of the physical dynamics of this world occurring without waterfalls. (2) if something is conceivable then it is logically possible (3) It is logically possible that the physical dynamics of this world occur without any associated waterfalls.
I don't see what insight this syllogism is presenting: one can imagine a world where the set of actually realized manifestations of physical laws is different, but it doesn't speak to whether the unmanifested things are not present because they are non-physical (at least in part).
>I can conceive of a world where the center of the sun is made of chocolate, but it is not logically possible.
How do you know its logically impossible if you can conceive of it? If there's some fact you are aware of that makes it logically impossible, then that means its not conceivable, by the philosophically relevant meaning of the term.
P-zombies is a thought experiment to demonstrate the hard problem of consciousness, it is not, in itself, an argument against materialism.
I can certainly imagine a robot that imitates all of human behaviors. If you hit it, it goes "Ow" and retracts, if you ask it if its conscious it says "yes". We can this imagine being created out of our completely physical electrical components, so the question becomes what is the difference between the imitation of consciousness and the consciousness we experience? This is interesting as in this day and age, we can totally imagine building such a robot, yet we'd have a tough time believing it is actually conscious.
Now, whether you are a materialist or not depends entirely on whether or not you believe conscious experience like yours can emerge out of physical components.
My take on this is: Materialism/physicalism is ill defined and materialism/physicalism and dualism are compatible. We consider completely mysterious properties like energy and now even randomness (things happen one way or another for no reason) as being fundamental physical facts about the universe. Theoretically, how does this differ from saying consciousness is a fundamental physical property?
Moreover, you have to consider the fact that the "material" world IS an imagination of the mind. Whatever facts or attributes we assign to being material is limited to the mental facilities of the brain.
At the end of the day, the question is, what fundamental facts do we need to explain the observations that we make? I can observe that I feel, see, hear things. Can the fundamental facts of the current physics model explain this? No? Then we must add to it an additional property, making it part of the standard physics model. If you want proof, you must either A. explain how consciousness can emerge out of existing known "material" processes, B. Admit consciousness as a "material" property and define the process by which it combines, reduces, etc. (the combination problem of panpsychism)
Chalmers' argument is more of an intuition pump to clarify your thinking. If premise 2 seems plausible, then you probably cannot be a physicalist. If you're a die-hard physicalist, then you probably have to deny premise 1 and/or 2.
Why is phenomenological subjective experience a thing at all? Unless you're a proponent of panpsychism, we have to ask why living beings have it, but other natural processes do not. From this perspective, it's actually easier to conceive of a world like ours without subjective experience than one with it.
> Unless you're a proponent of panpsychism, we have to ask why living beings have it, but other natural processes do not.
No, we don't.
Because, while an individual may experience it, the conjecture that other things do or do not have it is without exception an unverifiable assumption, not an observed phenomenon which calls for an explanation.
> it's actually easier to conceive of a world like ours without subjective experience than one with it.
This is demonstrably false, because no experiencer can observe subjective experience other than their own, and, despite that, describing the world in terms of subjective experience occurring in a vast array of other beings beside the speaker is near-universal, to the point that we pathologize not viewing the universe that way.
> the conjecture that other things do or do not have it is without exception an unverifiable assumption
Yes, but ultimately, either they do or they don't, and the default assumption is that they don't, unless you favor panpsychism.
The real problem with the p-zombies thing is why do p-zombies talk about consciousness?.
You and I have the experience of talking about being conscious because we have the experience of being conscious in the first place. But for a p-zombie to behave exactly the same as us, it would have to have some other mechanism for talking about being conscious that is not dependent on being conscious. So that would mean that our talking about consciousness can be explained by some mechanism other than our being conscious in the first place! Our experience of consciousness, and our talking about experiencing consciousness, could just happen to be one massive coincidence rather than being causally linked! Doesn't seem likely, ergo no p-zombies.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kYAuNJX2ecH2uFqZ9/the-genera...
>we have to ask why living beings have it, but other natural processes do not.
The entropy gradient is the first one. Of course lots of natural processes have a bit of energy generated so it's not the only part.
Memory is the next one. Being able to take some of that entropy and put it in a more orderly fashion while rejecting the disorganized part. Crystals can use energy to create ordered systems, but they don't have any means of error correcting.
Execution/replay/updating of said memories based on input from the world around it.
Now before humans came along 'life' was the only thing that could readily manage these traits, and that was after a few billion years of trial and error. Humans now have been going down the path of giving other non-living objects these traits. Advanced computer systems are getting closer to the point of recording information and acting on it in a manner that certainly seems like a subjective experience.
Entropy gradients are non explanations.
Pointing to statistical mechanics and saying the derivative of an exponent is an exponent is an odd way to explain qualia.
They are not an explanation, they are a requirement. You don't have consciousness in a rock because nothing is happening in a rock.
Tell that to the quintillions of electrons hopping between orbitals taking tens of attoseconds to complete :)
I mean eletrons switch orbitals when photons are absorbed or released by said atom. The particular problem we have here is where is the memory at this subatomic level. Memory appears to be an emergent behavior at higher levels.
Although interesting, the question of why we have it is orthogonal to the question of whether we have it and whether p-zombies could exist that don't have it but are otherwise indistinguishable from us.
> From this perspective, it's actually easier to conceive of a world like ours without subjective experience than one with it.
Welcome to eliminative materialism!
We exist but p-zombies, as far as we can tell, do not. So their existence is a hypothesis we cannot assume.
You can’t skip over step 1, this is an axiom. I see more materialists denying they have consciousness and free will. Kind of funny actually.
I skipped point 1 because I don't have a problem with it. I am a materialist until I hear compelling evidence that that is not sufficient. I don't deny we have consciousness, but I don't believe we have libertarian free will. I don't see why that is funny except to people who have never thought about it.
Here is an analogy. When playing a video game, the world is fictional and enemies are algorithmic creations. Yet, while playing that game, it is useful (that is, one plays the game better) by accepting the rules of that world and pretending as if the experiences are real at some level. Eg, "This guy is trying to kill me" vs the reality of "a microprocessor is reading state in memory and as a result is rewriting that state and some of that state shows up on my monitor as colored pixels and I'm not in actual danger."
Although I intellectually believe I'm an incredibly complex mechanism that is simply letting the laws of physics play out, it is useful while playing the game of life to utilize the evolutionary developed fiction that I do have free will.
Here is another intuition pump. Do you believe the weather has a free will, or is it just a physical phenomenon? (presumably the latter) Yet when we talk about the weather, we might say there is a 30% change of rain tomorrow. The reality is it will or it won't rain, but we can't measure the state of the system's initial conditions nor simulate its evolution accurately enough to say exactly what will happen. So we use the convenient fiction that whether it rains or not is statistical. People are too complex that we can't even calculate our own behavior, so it is a convenient fiction to act as if we have free will.
No, you have to take that argument in context of his other arguments against physical explanations for consciousness. What he's saying is that the physical facts do not adequately account for conscious experiences, which is why we can conceive of a universe physically identical lacking consciousness. Why he (and some other philosophers) think this is so is part of their larger arguments.
> which is why we can conceive of a universe physically identical lacking consciousness
I can conceive of it about as well as I can conceive of an identical universe lacking the Internet. Both seem like fairly direct logical contradictions, slightly disguised by referring to concepts that we generally think about more abstractly rather than their physical composition.
If you examine all of his arguments, they all end up in the same place. He assumes that consciousness is not necessary for human-like or even animal-like intelligence, and he works from there back to the same conclusion.
"logically possible world physically identical"
"Point 2 is textbook begging the question"
-> It is a thought experiment.
He is proposing a possible postulate to spur talking about the ideas. It isn't a 'proof'.
Just like we don't argue with Schrodinger about the absurdity of a half dead cat.
> it imagines a world which is physically identical to ours but consciousness is different there
So a world where people discuss consciousness but where it does not exist? That sounds very implausible.
> 4. So, materialism is false.
Physicalism is conditionally false.
If p-zombies are logically incoherent, the consciousness does not exist. It's an illusion. This is the argument by Daniel Dennet. We are zombies.
I mean it's obvious to any physicalist that we don't really feel anything. There is no I, soul, no suffering in a in a rock, peas soup, or a human. It's all physical process.
Dennett was a determinist, but he preferred a compatibilist definition of free will. He didn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater so he kept the term but defined it to mean what he wanted it to mean. I have no problem with that. I don't use that definition of free will so I say I don't have free will.
"There is no I, soul, no suffering in ... a human. " You have an idiosyncratic definition of suffering. If I offer you the option of having a warm bath or having your skin flayed and then be dipped in lemon juice, which would you prefer?
Free will and the hard problem of consciousness are orthogonal concepts. Completely unconscious automaton can have compatibilist free will and reverse. Compatibilist view does not require consciousness (in hard problem definition).
> which would you prefer?
Prefer is action, learned habituation response. There is nobody inside to see be aware of it according to Dennet. Simple control system with thermometer controlling heater has preference to homeostasis with certain temperature. Consciousness is illusion according to Dennet.
Just because I can verbally express my preferred state does not imply I'm consious.
Chalmers in point 2 is not saying to imagine such a world, but that such a world is logically possible. Chalmers gives as an example of a logical impossibility a male vixen since it is contradictory. He states "... a flying telephone is conceptually coherent, if a little out of the ordinary, so a flying telephone is logically possible. Nevertheless, that zombies are logically possible, may be begging the question, that consciousness is non physical.
But it's not logically possible if consciousness is a material process, a consequence of computation in the human brain (and potentially other places). So you can't prove that consciousness is not materialistic by assuming it's not materialistic.
I'm still missing the point, I guess, as I don't think the question is logically possible.
One might as well say: it is logically possible to have a universe where the physics are identical to our present world, except the core of the Sun is chocolate... therefore fusion can't be the explanation for why our Sun radiates so much energy.
Getting back to the zombies, presuming there could be a zombie clone of me which is indistinguishable from the real me but it isn't conscious is one that needs far more support than just asserting it. I've heard people try to explain: well, imagine if a powerful computer was simulating you in every respect, that would be a p-zombie. But that is question begging, as it presumes that such a creature wouldn't be conscious.
I feel the same way about Searle's Chinese Room -- the power of the argument is there only if you have already decided that consciousness is mystical.
I have known some pretty vixen-y males...
"The implications of consciousness explanations or theories are assessed with respect to four questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); AI consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death."
This is theology. What's it doing in Elsevier's "Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology"?
Most of the classical arguments in this area are now obsolete. The classic big question, presented in the article, was, “Out of meat, how do you get thought?". That's no longer so mysterious. You get some basic processing elements from molecular biology. The puzzle, for a long time, was, can a large number of basic processing elements with no overall design self-organize into intelligence. Then came LLMs, which do exactly that.
As a thought experiment, imagine we were to scan the position of every molecule in the human body to the Heisenberg limit of accuracy. Imagine we were to plug the resulting model in a physics simulation that models every biochemical and physical interaction with perfect fidelity. This is a thought experiment, and what I suggest isn't ruled out by physics, so let's assume it's technologically possible. Would the simulated being be "conscious" in the same way the original human is? Would it experience "qualia"?
If you think the answer might be no, then congratulations, you actually believe in immaterial souls, no matter how materialist or rationalist you otherwise claim to be.
Only holds if whatever hardware that’s pretending to be the matter can act exactly like the matter without being the same thing.
For the distinction, consider the difference between a simulation of a simple chemical process in a computer—even a perfectly accurate one!—and the actual thing happening. Is the thing going on in the computer the same? No, no matter how perfect the simulation. It’s a little electricity moving around, looking nothing whatsoever like the real thing. The simulation is meaning that we impose on that electricity moving around.
That being the case, this reduces to “if we recreate the matter and state exactly, for-real, is that consciousness?” in which case yeah, sure, probably so.
This doesn’t work if the thing running the simulation requires interpretation.
>It’s a little electricity moving around, looking nothing whatsoever like the real thing.
Why does "looking ... like the real thing" have any relevance for consciousness? What property of a conscious substance is captured by this "looking like" criteria? Is consciousness (partially) a feature of the substrate itself or how the substrate moves through some background consciousness aether, or something else? If you can't articulate what this special criteria is, then why think a simulation isn't conscious, which by assumption reproduces all information dynamics of the physical phenomena?
Ok, next experiment.
Imagine you took a brain and replaced one neuron by a transistor (or gate) that performs the exact same function as the neuron.
Now replace more and more neurons until all neurons are now transistors.
Would the resulting being be conscious and experience qualia, like the original did? If not, at what point was there a notable change?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
You can’t replace a body cell by cell, and you can’t know if it’d ever going to be possible. To just assume it certainly would is the same wild kind of extrapolation from past scientific progress as assuming we would be able to resist gravity or clip through walls would be in earlier times. There are natural laws that you don’t know about. That should be a hint about the issues with naive monistic materialism.
The same function, down to quantum and gravity et c effects on everything around it, and accepting and reacting to same? Yeah probably, but we’re back to having to “run” this on the same arrangement of actual matter as the original.
[edit] there’s an obvious attack on this, but I’ll go ahead and note my position on it: the whole premise that we can do any of this without just using actual matter the ordinary way is so far into magical territory that we might as well ask “what if lephuchans simulated it?” or “what if god imagined the simulation?”—well ok, sure, I guess if magic is involved that could work, but what’s the point of even considering it?
“What if a miracle occurred?” isn’t a rebuttal to the position that consciousness as we know it likely can’t be simulated by simulating physics, because you can rebut anything with it. Its admission to a discussion is the same as giving up on figuring out anything.
> there’s an obvious attack on this, but I’ll go ahead and note my position on it: the whole premise that we can do any of this without just using actual matter the ordinary way is so far into magical territory that we might as well ask “what if lephuchans simulated it?” or “what if god imagined the simulation?”—well ok, sure, I guess if magic is involved that could work, but what’s the point of even considering it?
That's one of the main points of using a thought experiment: by declaring axioms explicitly, by fiat ("true" by definition), it prevents the mind from taking advantage of thought terminating get out of jail free cards like this, it forces people to argue their point.
Are you questioning if physics is computable? Even if it is not fully, we must be able to approximate it quite well.
Suppose we scan more than just the person, but a local environment around them and simulated the whole box.
The update that occurs as the person sits in the room involves them considering their own existence. Maybe they create art about it. If the simulation is to produce accurate results, they will need to feel alive to themselves.
We agree we can simulate an explosion and get accurate results; if we can’t get an accurate simulation of a person, why?
exactly, The parent post does not address the issue of representation vs reality.
You can simulate every molecular interaction in a fire, but that does not mean the simulation gives off the same heat. You can write a perfectly accurate equation for splitting an atom, but the equation does not release energy.
> You can simulate every molecular interaction in a fire, but that does not mean the simulation gives off the same heat
It would to a simulated being standing next to the fire.
> You can write a perfectly accurate equation for splitting an atom, but the equation does not release energy.
It releases simulated energy inside the simulation.
Every material interaction is simulated. If you believe that consciousness can't exist in the simulation, then you believe that consciousness is not a material interaction, q.e.d.
It’s some electrons moving around. Any further meaning of that is only what we assign to it.
Unless your “computer” is identical matter in the same arrangement and state is the original, actually doing stuff.
This is why the “what if you slowly simulated the entire universe on an infinite beach moving rocks around to represent the state? Could anything in it be conscious?” thing isn’t my very interesting.
No, you’re just shoving rocks around on sand. They don’t mean anything except what you decide they do. Easy answer.
Doesn't materialism imply that a perfectly accurate simulation of the universe would be identical to the universe we live in? If not, in what possible way could the two be distinguished?
>Every material interaction is simulated. If you believe that consciousness can't exist in the simulation, then you believe that consciousness is not a material interaction
I think that is missing the point. You are literally changing the material and medium by conducting a simulation.
Releasing simulated energy within a simulation is not identical to releasing real energy in the real world. The former is purely representational, and even a perfectly simulated object retains this property, and lack of equivalence.
a simulated atom is not a real atom, no mater their similarlity.
When we refer to heat we refer to the increase in entropy that has specific effects to things in our world. We can also describe a generic "disordered" state, which doesn't imply a similar kind of causal compatibility. A simulation of entropy is equally disordered with no caveats despite not being exactly entropy due to the causal compatibility issue. Why think consciousness is like entropy rather than like disorder?
In other words, why think consciousness is a physical property of some specific kind of matter rather than an abstract property that can supervene on any sufficiently robust physical substrate?
>why think consciousness is a physical property of some specific kind of matter rather than an abstract property that can supervene on any sufficiently robust physical substrate?
Im open to the idea that consciousness could arise on different substrates, but hold that the substrate is relevant, and we dont have a working definition of "robustness".
This is part of a bigger challenge in which I claim there is no such thing as a perfect simulation.
Simulation requires representation, which requires requires remaining differences unrepresented. Otherwise you just have just created the same thing, not a simulation.
You can simulate the interaction of physical object with other physical objects using electronic object interacting with other electronic objects, but the two are not the same. The electronic object still can not interact with a physical object.
>Simulation requires representation, which requires requires remaining differences unrepresented
Right. But presumably not all physical properties of brains are necessary for consciousness. For example, the fact that action potentials happen on the order of 1ms to 1 second probably isn't intrinsic to consciousness. That is, there is no in principle problem with having consciousness supervene on neural networks that have much longer cycles for the basic substrate of communication. It also probably doesn't matter that neurons communicate through opening and closing ion channels, are made of carbon atoms, are constructed by protein assemblies produced from DNA, etc.
What we need is to represent every necessary feature and relationship involved in manifesting consciousness. As a first pass estimation, it seems very likely that only the information-bearing structures are necessary for consciousness. But the information-bearing structures are substrate independent. It follows that a perfect simulation of these information-bearing structures engaged in their typical dynamics would be conscious.
>You can simulate the interaction [...] but the two are not the same.
This idea that something needs to be "the same" is doing a lot of work in your argument. But most relationships involved in brains are incidental to consciousness. We need to get clear on what the necessary features of consciousness are. This is the only measure of sameness that matters, not superficial resemblance.
> This is a thought experiment, and what I suggest isn't ruled out by physics
It is actually ruled out by the uncertainty principle. A simulation with perfect fidelity is not a simulation, it's the thing itself.
You're actually basically correct, but it's the no-clone theorem, not the uncertainty principle.
Scott Aaronson’s take on this is certainly worth a read for anyone interested in consciousness , quantum mechanics, comparability theory, etc: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
Instead of one person, simulate the earth starting several million years before the dawn of man. If you think the humans that evolve in some simulation runs are not conscious, you believe in souls. If in the fake world you predict that in some large fraction of simulations of the unfeeling simulacra will nonetheless invent and argue about the concept of qualia, you believe in immaterial souls. If you suspect that because they don’t have souls they won’t write books about qualia you believe in material souls, souls that both affect and are affected by protons and electrons, souls that physics will eventually find.
Not necessarily, this assumes that it is possible to perfectly simulate physics on computers. It is not obvious that this is true. For one it assumes that physical interactions happen in discrete time steps (or at least be equivalent with a process that happens in discrete time steps). It also assumes that it is possible to perfectly scan the all the properties of some piece of matter (which we know is not possible)
The “total scan” argument, when presented to further a physicalist stance (“surely if we were to scan you using some fantasy tech X we would get an exact copy of you, including any consciousness if it exists, and to deny that is to believe in ghosts”), is unconvincing on at least two counts: 1) fantasy tech illustrating axiomatic belief in particular physical models that are in vogue today but will not hold in the long run (Heisenberg limit? who is she?); and 2) believing that the only alternative to monistic materialism is body-soul dualism, which is depressingly common among STEM folk philosophical naïveté.
The most obvious objection is that perceived time-space is a map of some fundamentally inaccessible to us territory, that modern physical models on which the argument depends are likely only covering (imperfectly) a minuscule part of that territory, and that the map may never be fully precise and complete regardless of technology (since a map that is fully precise and complete is the territory).
As a sibling comment put, the Scott Aaronson post has lots of interesting questions about this. Do the aliens who are watching us being simulated inside matrix think we are actually conscious? What if they freeze the program for 100 years, or run the computation encrypted, or if the 'computer' is just a human inside a room shuffling papers? Is the computer simulation of a water drop wet ?
I found this article [0] very insightful, where they basically propose that consciousness is relative to whom you ask. We inside the simulation may attribute consciousness to each other. The aliens running it may not. What is relevant is the degree of isomorphism between our simulated brain processes and their real ones. So things will advance from all these back-and-forth nebulous arguments only when neuroscience becomes able to explain mechanistically why people claim to be conscious.
[0] A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
The answer might be no because it's neither proven nor disproven that the universe as we all perceive it is the fundamental layer of reality.
I feel like I've seen this exact post this week on the same topic on this website. Am I going mental, or is hackernews merging duplicate posts?
> If you think the answer might be no, then congratulations, you actually believe in immaterial souls
If you scan a body of water, and simulate it perfectly, the resulting simulation will not be wet. You can't separate a material process from the material completely. Consciousness may be a result of carbon being a substrate in the interactions. It might be because the brain is wet when those processes happen. There is plenty of room between believing a perfect computational simulation is not conscious and believing in immaterial souls.
> If you scan a body of water, and simulate it perfectly, the resulting simulation will not be wet.
It will be wet to the simulated being that's swimming in it.
> Consciousness may be a result of carbon being a substrate in the interactions.
Are you conscious? If so, how did you find out that you're made from actual carbon atoms and not simulated ones?
> It will be wet to the simulated being that's swimming in it.
Which has an entirely different qualia to us, the beings who consciousness we are trying to unravel.
> Are you conscious?
That's the big question.
> If so, how did you find out that you're made from actual carbon atoms and not simulated ones?
If I assume I'm conscious, whatever my atoms are, they are the atoms of concern with regard to said consciousness.
What if you forked the simulator? Would there be two consciousnesses experiencing qualia?
Not necessarily, one could be a Pedant.
I’m still thinking about what Helen Keller discussed in her paper on consciousness and language.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40466814 The paper is linked and disused in this thread. Her description of the void before having language is eye opening.
Robert Kuhn is a really impressive dude. I've been occasionally running across his videos on YT from these interviews. I'm very impressed that he's rolling it all up into a written research project as well.
"I have discussed consciousness with over 200 scientists and philosophers who work on or think about consciousness and related fields (Closer To Truth YouTube; Closer To Truth website)."
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFJr3pJl27pJKWEUWv9X5...
https://www.youtube.com/@CloserToTruthTV/videos
What a massive and impressive coverage. The author, Robert Kuhn of Closer to Truth (https://closertotruth.com), ends this beast with a request to readers:
> Feedback is appreciated, critique too—especially explanations or theories of consciousness not included, or not described accurately, or not classified properly; also, improvements of the classification typology.
I think RK would enjoy Humberto Maturana’s take on cognition and self-cognition. Maturana usually does not use the word “consciousness”.
Start with Maturana’s book with Francisco Valera:
Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1970)
The appendix of this book is important (“The Nervous System”). Last few pages blew my brain or mind ;-)
Thinking about consciousness without thinking more deeply about temporality is one problem most (or perhaps even all) models of consciousness still have.
Since Robert Kuhn works in thalamocortical activity the theme of timing should resonant.
To me it seems that the hard problem of consciousness can be stated a lot simpler, like so:
How can we tell if another person is conscious or not?
As far as I see, this is not possible and will never be possible. Hence the "hard problem".
We don't know if dark matter exists, but we can still observe it by its gravitational effect on large astronomical objects. We can't be sure it's dark matter, but it's "likely" dark matter.
I believe we can do something similar with consciousness. We can make measurements or observations of a person and conclude they are "likely" consciousness.
Maybe we can't ever be 100% certain whether a person is conscious or not. But nothing in science is 100% certain. No matter how much evidence we have, it would only take a single counterexample to disprove a well established scientific theory.
> But nothing in science is 100% certain.
Scientists are arguably "in" (a part of) science, and they are often extremely certain (as a consequence of being culturalized humans).
Mechanical telepathy may be possible, and for me could possibly answer this question. You and they put on a device whereby you tap into their conscious experience, see through their eyes, hear the voices in their head...
Even then, you're still only experiencing your own, single, unitary stream of experience, you've just replaced or superimposed parts of it with signals from another nervous system. But even if you can somehow replace/superimpose the signals coming through their optic nerve, for example, into your own experience, that still doesn't answer the question of whether or not they have their own stream of experience to begin with. That is simply unknowable, outside of the reasonable assumptions we all make to avoid solipsism (but they are still assumptions at the end of the day).
That seems unlikely, as neural networks don't all develop exactly the same. There is some natural variance which brain regions perform which function. E.g. Broca's area (very important for speech) only 'usually' lies on your left hemisphere. We know from experiments that stimulating certain areas of the brain produces certain (predictable) feelings, but to stimulate the brain in such a way to transfer an exact thought or a specific vision would seem impossible without a very detailed scan of the source and destination brain, and a complex remapping in between. And some experiences may not be transferable if the target doesn't hawe the required circuitry.
Kuhn's compendium of theories is very comprehensive in many of the philosophical areas but could be more detailed in section 9.3 on Electromagnetic field theories, which is my favourite.
Another up to date compilation of 15 articles on Electromagnetic Field Theories of Consciousness: Opportunities and Obstacles is available here https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/18437/electromag...
One of the authors (Joachim Keppler) has a very interesting recent paper here https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
Vedic philosophy has an interesting take on the problem of consciousness.
It take consciousness to be emanating from particles the size of atoms. They word those atomic particles as 'atma' ( in english souls, some even call it spiriton!).Those particles are fundamental to the universe and indivisible like quarks, bosons etc. Like radiation emanating from sun, it handles consciousness as 'emanating' from soul.
Each and every living being starting from size of a cell has a soul feeling (partially) about mechanisms of its body. A multi-cellular organism is then explained as a universe in itself where millions of cells with souls are thriving. The organism will then contain a 'chief soul' directing the working of whole body (which will be us case of humans). Further the philosophy expands this concept to the real universe in which all organisms with their individual consciousness are directed by a chief 'super consciousness'( in Vedic terminology it is termed as paramatma, some translate that as equal to God Concept) Although then it further expands by saying that there are infinite (almost) parallel universes but that's other thing...
That's a nice story but does it make any testable predictions? Because it appears to introduce many new concepts that would be measurable with particle physics, yet mysteriously have never been observed. And if these magic soul particles don't interact with matter in measurable ways, how do you know their size?
> testable predictions
In 1970, an experiment was conducted where a monkey's head was implanted into another monkey's body. The monkey did gained consciousness but was not able to move it's new body( I can barely imagine the pain it must have been feeling). If the possibility that the center of consciousness is completely independent of the body, I will say that the even though another monkey's head has been transplanted it will still have the consciousness and recognition of current body.
>Mysteriously never been observed
Was Higgs boson ever observed before 2012? Was it's theory ever proposed before 1964? Were people criticizing the attempt to discover it as 'magic particles mysteriously never observed'?
>Don't interact with matter
Yes those 'magic particles' can interact with matter through the curtain of probability and chances. The neurons firing inside a brain and subsequent signals passing to adjacent neurons are probabilistic. To direct the way a certain group of neurons towards a certain activity one has to tweak those probabilities, which can be changed via influence of external fields.
>Nice story
That's not a story but philosophy :) Vedic philosophy knew about the concept of atoms which it called 'anu' given by Kanad and it stated group of atoms as 'paramanu', way before Dalton proposed it.
Two things I'm absolutely convinced of at this point.
Assertion 1 is informed though reading, introspection, meditation, and psychedelic experience. I've transitions the whole spectrum of being a die hard physical materialist to high conviction that consciousness is primitive. I'm not traditionally panpsychic, which most commonly postulates that every bit of matter has some level of conscious experience. I really think information and information processing is the fundamental unit (realized as certain configurations of matter) and certain information system's (e.g. our brain) have an interior experience.Assertion 2 is informed through discussion with others. Denial of Chalmer's hard problem doesn't make sense to me. Like it seems logically flawed to argue that consciousness is emergent. Interior experience can't "emerge" from the traditional laws of physics, it's like a nonsense argument. The observation that folks really challenge this makes me deeply believe that the interior experience across humans is not at all uniform. The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.
> The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.
Internal experiences are probably a bit different, but it's a mistake to think this is the only reason to deny the hard problem. We all experience perceptual illusions of various types, auditory, visual, etc. In other words, perceptions are useful but deeply flawed. Why do you think your perceptions of subjective, qualitative experience doesn't have these same issues? I see no factual reason to treat them differently, therefore I simply don't naively trust what my perception of conscious experience suggests might be true, eg. that subjective experience is cohesive, without gaps, ineliminable, ineffable, etc.
Once you accept this fact, the hard problem starts looking a lot like a god of the gaps.
To me it seems your reply is conflating consciousness with perception. The perception is the consciousness. Auditory illusion, for example, is just signals to the senses and your senses miss-representing the inputs. The consciousness is the part which is aware of these sensations. If they are accurate or not - is not the point. The point is that you are aware of them.
> The consciousness is the part which is aware of these sensations
Why are you so sure this awareness is not itself a perception generated internally? A higher order perception parameterized/modulated by other perceptions perhaps, but still a perception, which is why subjectivity and qualia appears to have a perceptual characteristics, eg. I can focus on/attend to my subjective experience or qualitative experience and it becomes sharper, or I can ignore them and it fades more into the background, just like any other sense.
This places front and center the fact that it, like all perceptions, are fundamentally incomplete, and necessarily inaccurate because the brain "fills in" missing information, eg. your field of view might seem complete, but you have literal physical blind spots that your brain fills in. Perceptions are accurate enough to be useful, but not fully reliable. And so we should conclude the same of our apparent perception of subjective, qualitative experience.
Assertion 1 is quite weak. The stronger version is that consciousness is the mechanism by which the universe processes information, and choice (as we experience it) is the mechanism by which the universe updates its state. Under this assertion, the laws of physics are nothing more than an application of the central limit theorem on the distribution of conscious choices made by all the little bits of the universe involved in the system. This view also implies that space and reality are "virtual" or "imaginary" much like George Berkeley suggested 300 years ago.
I'm starting to buy this argument after rejecting it before (primarily thought ignorance of the meaning of "consciousness is the mechanism by which the universe processes information").
Also intersects with Hoffman's argument re: Conscious Realism. The only real thing is conscious experience, and "reality" as used in common parlance is just a multimodal user interface constructed to maximize evolutionary fitness.
I also incline to the view that experience is fundamental, but I'm not really sure that you mean by the term "information system". Who is deciding what counts as information? In everyday usage we usually speak of something containing information if it helps a person decide how to act. Perhaps agency is one of these "certain" properties that these special information systems need to possess. There does seem to be a lot of overlap between things that we grant the assumption of consciousness to and things that we grant some form of agency to.
I have an alternative, more generous explanation of your 2nd point - the people you talk about haven't done much reflection about consciousness yet and are so immersed in it that they cannot separate their own conscious experience as an entity to talk about. Like fish and water. Just like you said - it was also your position when you were younger. The people you label as having a different interior experience might be in the same position as your younger self.
What are your thoughts on what Donald Hoffman has been pursuing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman
Compelling.
I really buy his argument about our interior experience being a multimodal user interface (MUI) over stimulus from some information system. We describe the universe in terms of a 4D space-time with forces and particles, but this is really the MUI we've constructed (or evolution has constructed) that maximizes our predictive power when "actuating" our MUI (e.g interacting with that external system).
I haven't thought about this before, and kinda rejected it on first reading of Hoffman's work, but think I grok it now. Because our internal experience is a MUI, and that MUI (4D space time, particles) can't be considered a "true reality", it's just an interface, then other conscious entities are more "real" than our MUI. That is, the fundamental true reality that really matters is other conscious agents (e.g. Conscious Realism).
A slightly more wacky theory I like to think about is how this intersects with the simulation argument. If our reality isn't ring 0 (e.g. there's an outer reality that is actually time-stepping our universe), then the conscious interior experience we have in our reality may be due to the properties of reality in the outer universe "leaking through" into our simulation.
This actually aligns well with the Hoffman's MUI argument. We live in some information processing system. Through evolution we've constructed a MUI that we see as 4D space time. But this doesn't at all reflect the true reality of our universe being a process simulated in the ring 0 reality. Conscious Realism then arises because ring 0 reality has properties that imbue pattern of information processing with interior experience.
You word my position here too.
20's - a rabid Dawkins reading Athiest. 40's - I think Dawkins is an idiot and my favourite book is "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson"
You don't come off as being a nuanced thinker if those are your two positions on Dawkins. I can understand disagreeing with him, but calling him an idiot impugns you more than him.
Well my position comes from some of the positions Dawkins has publicly stated, when he really didn't need to speak up in those circles.
Maybe you find 'idiot' a strong word? The problem with someone like Dawkins is he is 'clever' - someone who doesn't understand that in his position it's better to not wield it like a weapon. This is why I prefer someone like Sean Carroll, who absolutely entertains some bonkers ideas, but never from a position of superiority or dismissal - but rather challenges it rationally.
Assuming your model of him is correct.
How many videos of him "destroying" theists have you watched on TikTok? I've seen 100+, and agree that he's an idiot, amazingly so. Watch carefully the words he uses as he "proves" his "facts".
I agree Dawkins shouldn't be talking about theology in general as he obviously hasn't studied it. He is fine to great in explaining the evolutionary evidence why young earth creationism is wrong, but is out of his depth when discussing the bigger picture. That doesn't make him an idiot.
Ok, what term do you believe should be applied to someone who professionally mocks people's intellectual shortcomings (real or imagined...this gets into another variation of the phenomenon), and in so doing demonstrates that he too suffers from the very same abstract problem, to the cheers of audiences who also suffer from the same problem (many of whom will then recommend his work, spreading this mind virus (both data & methodology) ever further)?
Is the irony of this circle jerk of delusion not a bit thick?
Have you considered that TikTok may not be a full representation of the human being?
It is one thing to say someone spews bullshit on tiktok, and another to claim them an idiot.
Do you use a purity testing approach to determining idiocy?
A full representation is not necessary. If a Human has errors in any single sentence, they have errors in their corresponding model. These details are the essence of the very point of contention.
> Do you use a purity testing approach to determining idiocy?
If one is claiming logical and epistemic superiority, as he literally and explicitly does, and arrogantly so (followed by roars of applause from the audience), I will judge him by those standards. I will also mock him, because he is sooooo dumb, while he chastises others for the same thing (which he is typically not wrong about, to be fair).
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Would you agree that this may make the error of judging them by their worst output, and not their best, or even average?
Oh yes, if I could bet money on it, I'd say it's even likely! However, I think this touches on an under realized phenomenon: the difference between what people say when they are "speaking their mind" in literature/studies (slow, deliberate, careful error checking, often including other people), versus the more real unfiltered version you get that comes out during real time speech (which emerges from cognition).
In the atheism community in particular, there are some very strange beliefs about human beliefs. For example, a recurring claim I hear from atheists is that what object level atheists believe, in fact, is the formal definition of atheism: merely/only a lack of belief in God(s), but no negative belief. The silliness of this should be obvious, but I've had no luck getting any of them to realize (or even contemplate) this, not even one person. The irony is mind boggling. (The same phenomenon exists in science as well interestingly, which is part of why I claim it is a fact that it is an underpowered methodology/ideology for navigating reality, a false prophet if you will.)
I propose that if he (and all other people) didn't actually hold these flawed beliefs in the first place, they wouldn't come out during real time speech... or if they did ~accidentally, they should be realized and corrected (which scientists in public venues tend to do, begrudgingly).
All people suffer from this problem, and I think our culture buries it, for reasons I have no theory about (some sort of psychological game theory maybe?).
Another way of putting it: if you only consume content from someone that is written offline, you are getting a misrepresentation of that person. I think this is a huge deal, yet another important part of reality that our culture behaves as if it is not there. We are like teenagers at best on an absolute scale imho.
I think both what you get in real time and what you get when someone has time to consider and check for errors and polish are "real". It's not that each person has a perfectly well-defined set of beliefs and ideas, and (1) you get to see them unfiltered in real time and only see a fake version when the person has time to polish, or (2) you get to see them accurately when the person has time to make sure they're getting it right, and only see a rough draft full of mistakes in real time. People are more complicated than that.
Some people are good at getting things right in real time. Some people are good at getting things right when they're careful. I think it is a mistake to call someone stupid because they're bad at one of those things -- unless for some reason one of them matters more than the other (e.g., they're in a position where they have to make quick decisions all the time; or they are primarily a writer who can always think and check and polish before publishing).
I'm not convinced that the definition-of-atheism thing has much to do with the real-time versus polished distinction. But:
I think both atheists and theists sometimes cherry-pick definitions for tactical purposes. "Oh no, I can't possibly be expected to offer evidence that there are no gods, because being an atheist just means not positively believing in gods." "Of course so-and-so's evil actions don't reflect badly on Christianity -- if he were a real Christian he'd be acting better." "Why should I care what liberal Muslims say? The most authentic Muslims are obviously the ones who behead people while shouting Allahu akbar." Etc., etc., etc.
But it's not silly to define "atheist" as "not positively believing in any gods"; that's a property that many people have, it's perfectly reasonable to have a name for it, and the only problem with using "atheist" for it is that most people use that word to mean something a bit different. And the trouble is that there aren't "enough" words; we've got "atheist" and "agnostic" and "deist" and "theist" but there are more gradations of belief than that. (Absolutely certain there are no gods. Of the opinion that on balance there are probably no gods. Of the opinion that whether there are gods is unknowable in principle. Of the opinion that it's knowable in principle but one doesn't in fact have enough evidence. Inclined to think that there's probably something godlike but we can't know anything much about it. Thoroughly convinced that there is something godlike, but that we can't know much about it. Somewhat convinced by arguments for a particular religion but still unsure. Firmly committed to a particular religion and confident that it's right. Etc.)
Personally, I use "atheist" to mean "overall of the opinion that there are no gods, whether or not certain of this", "non-theist" to mean "not positively believing in any gods", "agnostic" to mean "substantially unsure whether there are gods, whether or not one thinks it's knowable in principle", "theist" to mean "overall of the opinion that there is at least one god, whether or not certain of this", and I qualify those terms in whatever ways might be necessary if I want to say that someone's certain there's no god or kinda-halfheartedly-Hindu or whatever. I am somewhat prepared to argue that all those choices are better than the alternatives. But if someone else only uses "atheist" and "theist" for people who feel completely certain about whether there are any gods, or uses "atheist" to mean "not positively believing in gods", or something, that's a defensible choice so long as they take the trouble to be clear about what they mean and refrain from cheating by equivocation.
The distinction, or better: the phenomenon I am trying to get at is that people (including genuinely smart people) commonly mix up ~intent and ability / actual behaviour.
For example, consider someone who says "I am moral, because I am a Christian", but then sneaks off and cheats on his wife. Or, consider a physics teacher who says "You can learn physics from me, because I am knowledgeable in physics", but then starts lecturing and the content is incorrect.
So too with "atheists" who believe that simply declaring oneself to be a certain way is adequate to achieve the intent.
Note that atheists (also Scientific Materialist fundamentalists like Sean Carroll or NDT, etc) are just a particularly common (and hilarious, because of the irony + self-confidence) manifestation of this abstract phenomenon, it is common in any ideology, derived from fundamental flaws in how our culture teaches (or not) how to think ("Use logic, evidence, critical thinking, etc"...except no methodology accompanies the motto, people think simply declaring it to be so makes it so).
Or maybe another angle to think of it from: rewind 200 years and consider how Western culture was broadly ok with racism and slavery - that's how we currently are with our cultural norms on thinking.
This seems like a separate thing from what you were talking about before. (Unless you're referring again to the "no positive belief in gods" definition of "atheism", but I don't think you can be since in fact if you sincerely declare that you have no positive belief in any gods then that does pretty much mean that you in fact have no such belief.)
If all you're saying is that some people make a lot of fuss about being rational, informed by evidence, etc., and then fail to be sufficiently rational, informed by evidence, etc. -- well, yes, people are fallible and think too highly of themselves, and I expect that state of affairs to continue at least until the Glorious Transhuman Future, should any version of that ever arrive, and probably beyond. I don't see any particular reason to think that atheists overestimate themselves more than theists do.
Also, I think more highly of e.g. Sean Carroll's rationality than it seems you do, and I see absolutely no reason to think that he isn't genuinely attempting, with more success than most, to apply logic and critical thinking to evidence. If you claim he's just mouthing those words and thinks that saying them makes him rational, then I would be interested to know on what grounds you think so.
Also also, although I don't find Richard Dawkins super-impressive when he argues against religion[1], if you think he isn't substantially more rational and more evidence-led than most of the people he argues with[2] then I fear you're severely overstating his shortcomings.
[1] His writing on evolutionary biology is generally very good.
[2] Most, not all. I am not claiming that there is no one reasonable on Team Theism.
> since in fact if you sincerely declare that you have no positive belief in any gods then that does pretty much mean that you in fact have no such belief.
If one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way? How does that work? And what should one think about the plentiful evidence available online of Atheists (Scientists, Rationalists, Experts, etc) demonstrating that their perceived/intended cognition isn't how their actual cognition works? Shall we ignore it?
I am pointing to a genuinely interesting phenomenon here....it is always and everywhere, right in front of (behind?) our noses. Perhaps there's something about it that makes it ~not possible to see it?
> If all you're saying is that some people make a lot of fuss about being rational, informed by evidence, etc., and then fail to be sufficiently rational, informed by evidence, etc.
It isn't, and the evidence of that is right there above.
> well, yes, people are fallible and think too highly of themselves, and I expect that state of affairs to continue at least until the Glorious Transhuman Future, should any version of that ever arrive, and probably beyond.
This is an interesting and common (a literal philosophy professor succumbed to it under testing not more than a week ago) behavior when the idea of improving upon cultural defaults is suggested: framing it as an uninteresting, "everyone knows" fact of life, or an absurd strawman, or both.
Out of curiosity: do you ever observe patterns of cognitive behavior in (all!) Humans? It's really quite interesting, I highly recommend it!
> I don't see any particular reason to think that atheists overestimate themselves more than theists do.
Have you gone looking for it?
Regardless: this is not the point of contention, let's try to avoiding sliding the topic.
> Also, I think more highly of e.g. Sean Carroll's rationality than it seems you do, and I see absolutely no reason to think that he isn't genuinely attempting, with more success than most, to apply logic and critical thinking to evidence.
The point isn't whether he's better than most, the point is that he suffers from the very same problems he mocks others for - it is usually to a lesser degree, perhaps, but on an absolute scale, how bad is he?
It seems to me that Theists, Conspiracy Theorists, Trump supporters, all the usual suspects are always fair game for criticism, but when the same is done to The Right People, for some reason that's inappropriate, if not outright disallowed. And yet: is openness to criticism not often held up as why these superior disciplines are superior?
> If you claim he's just mouthing those words and thinks that saying them makes him rational, then I would be interested to know on what grounds you think so.
More like: "mouthing those words and thinking that he is rational" (in an ~absolute sense, as opposed to more rational).
> Also also, although I don't find Richard Dawkins super-impressive when he argues against religion[1], if you think he isn't substantially more rational and more evidence-led than most of the people he argues with[2] then I fear you're severely overstating his shortcomings.
To me, his debates are like the move Dumb and Dumber. Dawkins is dumb, his opponents are typically dumber. Have you ever seen him go up against someone with some mental horsepower? I haven't, but check out this video with NDT opining on philosophy, in discussion with Kurt Jaimungal (a heavyweight in my books):
"Philosophers Are USELESS!" Neil & Curt Clash on Physics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye9OkJih3-U
How embarrassing. But also useful - Neil (and Rich, and to a lesser degree Sean) are like walking poster boys for the phenomenon I'm discussing.
(I am finding your tone very disagreeable; I am pretty sure you have adopted it deliberately, and suspect you don't care if I find it diasgreeable, but I mention this just in case I'm wrong about any of that.)
I do not think that "if one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way" and did not say that; I said that in the specific case where what you are doing is declaring "I believe / don't believe X", if you do so sincerely, then indeed you have / don't have the belief in question.
This is unlike declarations like "I am being rational" or "I am fully informed about these issues"; the relevant difference is that in general, if you think you believe something then in fact you believe it. A declaration like "I have a headache" would have the same property.
(Of course 1. it is possible that some of these people are lying about what they believe, and 2. I guess there are cases where someone believes something "superficially" but deep down knows they're wrong. #1 seems unlikely to me in these cases. #2 is always possible (though of course just as possible for theists as for atheists) but I would want some concrete evidence before thinking it likely in any particular case.)
I regret that you have not yet succeeded in conveying to me exactly what divergence you see between atheists' statements about their cognition and their actual cognition. Perhaps it would be helpful if you would state it explicitly, rather than gesturing in the general direction and saying "look how stupid these people are".
(Three hypotheses. 1. "They say they don't have a positive belief in gods, but in fact they do." Seems super-implausible to me; show me your evidence. 2. "They say atheism just means not having a positive belief in gods, but in fact they positively believe there is no god." Perfectly plausible but not actually an error. 3. "They say they are being rational but actually they aren't". You have explicitly said that wasn't your meaning. Probably your actual meaning is something other than these three but I don't know what.)
Until we're on the same page about what it is you're claiming, I suspect we're going to be talking past one another a lot, so I could just stop here. But I'll try to address some of the other things you said:
> This is an interesting and common [...] behaviour [...]
Maybe it is, but if what you want to claim is that it's wrong then it would be more productive to say what's wrong with it. (And when the "behaviour" in question is two opposite things, I am not quite sure on what basis you're considering it a single thing.)
> on an absolute scale, how bad is he?
Twenty-three.
To make my point more explicit: I don't know how to answer that question "on an absolute scale" since so far as I know there isn't any sort of generally agreed absolute scale for rationality.
> all the usual suspects are fair game for criticism, but when the same is done to The Right People, for some reason that's inappropriate, if not outright disallowed
I'm deeply confused; I haven't said (and don't think) it's inappropriate to criticize the likes of Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll or whoever, and I've no idea at all where you get "outright disallowed" from. It's perfectly appropriate to criticize them. I'm just not convinced as yet that your criticism is very accurate -- but since I don't yet know for sure just what your criticism is, it's hard to tell for sure.
I think it is worth distinguishing "I disagree with your criticism of X" from "X should be above criticism". I am not sure you are actually making that distinction.
> Have you ever seen him go up against someone with some mental horsepower?
I'm not much of a debate-watcher and on any not strictly biological topic I would expect others to do better (in terms of intellectual rigour, or fun-to-watch-ness, or both) than Dawkins. So, no. A quick YouTube search suggests he's had a debate with William Lane Craig, who's pretty smart; I wouldn't expect there to be much enlightenment to be had from that one. There's also one on "humanity's ultimate origins" with Rowan Williams (with Anthony Kenny in the chair). I'm pretty sure Williams and Kenny are not creationists, so most likely the arguments there are philosophical rather than biological, so again I wouldn't bet on Dawkins being super-enlightening in this, but you never know.
I'm not sure what the relevance of a debate between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Curt Jaimungal is to the question of whether Richard Dawkins is any good. In any case, I had a listen to that and it's totally unclear to me what about it is "embarrassing". Would you care to be more explicit? I mean, I get that you think NdGT is being unimpressive in some respect, but I don't know what specific thing you think is bad. (For what it's worth, I was more unimpressed by Jaimungal, who seemed to me deeply superficial throughout, but it's hard to be sure of someone's qualities from a 10-minute clip of them talking to someone else.)
Anyway, this is all a bit of a tangent. You seemed to be saying that there's something particularly bad, intellectually, about atheists and scientists, with Dawkins as a typical case, which is why I think it's relevant to ask how he compares to the people he argues with, but it seems to me that nothing of importance really hangs on how smart / rational / deep / ... Richard Dawkins in particular is. It's not like anyone's going to say "OK, you convinced me that Richard Dawkins is really intelligent, so I shall abandon my religion now" or "OK, you convinced me that Richard Dawkins is rather an idiot; see you in church next Sunday".
> I guess there are cases where someone believes something "superficially" but deep down knows they're wrong.
Have you some sort of proof that people can accurately read the behavior of their mind (including the subconscious)?
You are making the claim, where is your (non-narrative based) evidence?
>> on an absolute scale, how bad is he?
> Twenty-three.
> To make my point more explicit: I don't know how to answer that question "on an absolute scale" since so far as I know there isn't any sort of generally agreed absolute scale for rationality.
The curiosity you exude is overwhelming.
> I'm not sure what the relevance of a debate between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Curt Jaimungal is to the question of whether Richard Dawkins is any good.
It is a demonstration of how dumb a scientist can be and still be widely respected if not idolized.
> You seemed to be saying that there's something particularly bad, intellectually, about atheists and scientists
Yes, it is the irony. Approximately, science improved upon religion, but they mistake their relative superiority/intelligence as absolute.
Your first question is very strange. I say "I guess X is a thing that happens sometimes" (and went on to say: but I don't see much sign that it's happening in these particular cases, and if you claim it is then I'd like to see some evidence). Your response is: "Can you prove that X doesn't happen?".
If you regard that discussion between NdGT and CJ as showing how dumb a well-respected scientist can be, then it seems to me it would be useful for you to explain what about it shows that.
(So far, my requests for clarification and explanation and explicitness from you have been completely ignored.)
Could you give a few examples to show that atheists and/or scientists (of course those two categories are not at all the same) think their intelligence or rationality is "absolute"? (It would also be nice to know what you mean by that; I don't know what it would mean to call someone "absolutely intelligent" or "absolutely rational", unless what it would mean is that they never make any mistakes, always draw all inferences that would be valid, etc., and if you think anyone believes that about themselves then once again I would like to see some evidence.)
Let's see if we can agree on a fundamental concept.
Imagine a child in grade 5 who gets straight A's, whereas his classmates do not. People will judge this child as smart. But put the child up against some PhD's in each respective field, and the child will no longer be considered smart (you would have to hide his age in the experiment perhaps); the child is only "smart" relative to his peers.
Hopefully you're with me so far. Here's the tricky part: the PhD's are (abstractly, but less so concretely) in the same situation as the child: they are only smart relative to their peers (~all other humans) - on an absolute scale (what is possible, as opposed to (what the person doing the thinking has knowledge of[1]) what exists, aka: "[the] reality"), they too are "dumb" (in a relative sense, in that (for example[1]) they cannot solve all solvable problems presented to them, without making errors).
[1] this, at both individual and societal/cultural levels, is fundamentally important to this class of problem space. There are many things that reliably (necessarily?[1]) trigger System 1 intuition/hallucination in humans, and at least three of them are in play here: the unknown, ideology, and culture (which dictates cognitive, conversational, logical, and many other norms; what "is" is downstream from culture (cultural / psychological conditioning...like training an LLM)).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn...
Noteworthy: the article is subject to the very phenomenon it is describing; it is recursively self-referential. So too is this conversation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Self-referential_pa...
https://www.astronomytrek.com/the-bootstrap-paradox-explaine...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaz...
EDIT: this popular anecdote might be the best articulation of the concept I'm trying to get at:
https://partsolutions.com/supersonic-speed-check-tales-from-...
Yes, obviously I agree that someone can be smart relative to one set of people (or criteria, or problems, or whatever) and stupid relative to another. And yes, I agree that we are all much stupider than a hypothetical superintelligence might be. And I have no idea why you call this "the tricky part"; it isn't tricky at all.
(Except that comparing against "what is possible" is tricky, because there are different sorts of possibility. How smart am I relative to what I might be if I had better habits and less self-deception? What about relative to if I had as good a brain as any mere human could have? Relative to the cleverest things that could exist within our universe, obeying the laws of physics? Relative to a god that isn't bound by such petty concerns? I think those answers might all be very different from one another.)
This all seems absolutely obvious to me, and I suspect it is approximately equally obvious to (say) Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll. In particular, I see no reason to think that those people or others like them think, still less claim, to be free of cognitive limitations and errors. Evidently you think there is something wrong with them in this general area -- but you seem strangely reluctant to be quite explicit about what your complaint is, and to my (doubtless not-perfectly-comprehending) eyes it seems that you alternate between implying, though not quite saying explicitly, that there is something specially, unusually, wrong about these people, and pointing out universal limitations that everyone, or pretty much everyone, suffers from.
I started writing a few paragraphs engaging with various actual possibilities for what you might be saying about those people and why you might think it bad, but instead of doing that I'll give you another opportunity to tell me. I'm getting bored of having to guess what you have in mind, and then having you ignore my attempts to engage with it.
This topic is so interesting. If I were creating a system for everything, it seems like empty space needs awareness of anything it could expand to contain, so all things would be aware of all other things as a base universal conscious hitbox.
Panpsychism seems neat to think about.
You don't need empty space. All the processing power can be tied to entities, and space emerges from relationships between entities.
Want something fun to think about? What if the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is basically a function of the information capacity of the thing being examined. To make a computer analogy, imagine you have 8 bits of information - using 6 for position leaves 2 momentum, for example.
This is a wonderful project, I had no idea there was so much fragmentation n the topic of consciousness. Maybe we should feed these writings and concepts to AI and ask it to give us any grand unifying commonality among them, if any.
I would love to be wrong about this, but I don't think anyone knows how to do that yet. You're basically asking for automatic most-likely hypothesis generation given a set of input data. Concepts about consciousness in this case, but you could imagine doing the same with scientific data, system traces around bugs and crashes, etc. That would be wild!
It's precisely the type of thing that current LLMs are not suited for. They excel at extrapolating between existing writings and ideas. They do really poorly when trying to do something novel.
On their own yes, but as human-like intelligent agents running within a larger framework it's a different story.
Why do people feel the need to AI everything?
Just skip all the thinking ourselves and see if some AI can come up with plausible sounding nonsense? I’m not interested
You should probably try thinking about it instead.
how is hegel and his science of logic not in this?