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RobinHanson comments on Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up? - Less Wrong
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Your entire argument for preferring conscious over unconscious minds is this last quick throw away sentence? That's it? Come on, why can't unconscious minds be rational, informed by morality, or qualia-laden? And why are those the features that matter? Are you really implying this is so completely obvious that this one quick sentence is all that needs to be said? Declaring conscious goals to be the goals of the "person", versus unconscious goals as goals of the genome, just presupposes your answer.
Drawing conclusions from what little neuroscience I've managed to overhear, the conscious mind isn't even the part where you live most of the time. It fires up when you're paying it attention. Instantaneous experience ("qualia") exists outside it except the ephemeral experience of being conscious. Playback experience exists inside but references outside it. However it's the part where your human-level intents exist. If all the rest of the brain were copied to a sim, but not the conscious mind, I think you'd have no difficulty labeling that "not me". Miss a comparable sized chunk of your unconscious, and you might not even notice.
There's a series of posts on the foolishness of "qualia" here. I agree with it and share the low-regard for philosophy also found there (relevant for this post, that would also be low relative to cynical economics). I also think what pjeby said above makes sense. The common thread being to find little significant in what we call "consciousness", preventing it from holding privileged status.
"He sharply stubbed his toe on a large rock and proclaimed, 'Thus, I refute this!'"
That traditional anecdote (and its modified forms) only illustrate how little the pro-qualia advocates understand the arguments against the idea.
Dismissing 'qualia' does not, as many people frequently imply, require dismissing the idea that sensory stimuli can be distinguish and grouped into categories. That would be utterly absurd - it would render the senses useless and such a system would never have evolved.
All that's needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
Blatant strawman.
My understanding of qualia is that mysterious is not a definitional property, i.e. "Qualia can be explained in a reductionist sense" is not a self-contradictory statement. The existence of qualia simply means that sense-experience is a meaningful event, not that it is a supernatural one.
My view is that Mary's Room is fundamentally mistaken; what red looks like is a fact about Mary's brain, not about light of a certain wavelength. Mary can know everything there is to know about that wavelength of light without knowing the experience of a certain combination of neurons firing. Since we don't actually live in Mary's brain, we can't understand the qualia of "Mary's brain being stimulated by red light", but this is a limitation on our brains, not a "mystery." Perhaps a conscious being could exist that could construct others' brains and experience their qualia; we just don't know. But still, the fact that qualia are a potentially non-replicable hardware feature does not make them somehow supernatural.
I take a different but compatible objection to Mary's Room - that is, as Mary is said to know everything there is to know about the color red, she therefore knows exactly what it would be like to experience it, and so is not surprised.
I guess I did consider it that completely obvious. If it's causing so much controversy, maybe I need to think about it more.
I'm defining my "conscious self" as the part of my mind that creates my verbal stream of thought and which controls what I believe I would do if I had infinite willpower. I'm defining "unconscious self" as the source of my inability to always go through with my conscious mind's desires.
By definition, my unconscious mind has no qualia / experiences / awareness, because if it did it would be part of my conscious mind (I suppose it's possible that it is a "different person" who has experiences that are not my experiences, but I have never heard anyone propose this before and don't know of any evidence for it.)
When I use the word "I", I refer to the locus of my qualia and experiences, and thus to my conscious mind. I have no selfish reason to care about my unconscious mind, because its state as happy or unhappy has no relationship to my state as happy or unhappy except insofar as the unconscious mind can influence the conscious mind. And I have no moral reason to care about my unconscious mind, because in my moral system only aware beings deserve moral consideration; the unconscious mind has no more awareness than a rock and deserves no more moral consideration than a rock does.
Along with my qualia, I identify with my rationality. My rationality is what tells me that there's very probably no such thing as ghosts. This satisfies my conscious mind, which then accepts that there's no such thing as ghosts. It does not satisfy my unconscious mind, which continues to make me flee haunted mansions or sleep with the lights on or something. My rationality is what tells me that I should ask that girl out because the worst she could do is say no. My conscious mind accepts that. My unconscious mind continues to use all of its resources to hold me back from asking.
It seems vanishingly unlikely that my unconscious actually has as supergoals "Flee haunted mansions" and "Never ask girls out" and is rationally achieving them. It seems much more likely that the unconscious is enacting genetic directives like "Avoid danger" and "Avoid taking risks that could lower your social status", but is too irrational to realize that although equivalents of these situations might have been problems in the EEA, they are no longer problems today. It thinks that "Flee haunted mansions" and "Never ask girls out" are appropriate subgoals of the supergoals "Avoid danger" and "Avoid taking risks that could lower your social status", but in fact they aren't. Since it's too dumb to realize this, I feel suitably superior to it to ignore its opinions.
The same is true of morality. My unconscious is what tells me to value the life of a photogenic American more than the life of a starving Ethiopian, to value the life of one specific person more than the life of fifty statistical people, to refuse to push the fat man onto the tracks in the trolley problem no matter how many lives it would save, et cetera. If another person had this morality, I wouldn't respect it in them, and if my own unconscious has this morality, I don't respect it in it either.
Let me also admit that I have a bias here. I've got obsessive-compulsive disorder. It means that my unconscious mind frequently tells me things like "Close that door there eighty two times, or I will throw a fit and not let you feel comfortable for the rest of the day." I know that feeling is caused by miswired circuits in the basal ganglia. Why should I give miswired circuits in the basal ganglia the same respect as I give myself, a full intelligent human being?
All of my other unconscious urges seem closer to that urge to close the door eighty-two times than they do to anything rational or worth respecting.
The words "conscious" and "unconscious" are widely used; I don't think it helps for you to make up your own definitions. Your evidence about the rationality and morality of your conscious mind come many from your personal conscious beliefs about those features within yourself; these could easily be biased and self-serving. I'm still not entirely clear on what qualia mean, but from what I do understand about them I don't see why the parts of your mind other than the part I'm talking to couldn't have them.
But your rational/conscious/whatever mind is also made of neurons, and yet that makes mistakes, confuses morality etc, and does things you know aren't right. Why does that get described as 'a full, intelligent human being' while your unconscious mind is just basal ganglia?
All true enough, but to go on and say that one is 'better' or 'righter' is not as trivial as you seem to assume. If your supergoal is 'get laid' then asking her out is the correct decision. If 'don't look silly' has more utilons in your head, then that's correct. If you want to argue that 1 'conscious' utilon is worth more than 1 'unconscious' utilon, then that's fine, but you'll have to demonstrate how and why.
Yvain, can you re-summarise your argument drawing better boundaries than 'conscious' and 'unconscious', and without things like 'intelligent, rational human being' to describe parts of your head that, to an unbiased observer, look a lot like other parts? If not, perhaps the conscious/unconscious boundary you're trying to draw is a false (though highly intuitive) one.
I thought I was listing the standard definition of "conscious" and "unconscious" in a way that made it clearer why they led to my conclusion. If you have a different definition, what is it?
My beliefs about the rationality and morality of my unconscious mind do come from my conscious mind, this is where all my beliefs come from. When I say that a creationist is less rational than I am, or a Nazi is less moral than I am, I'm using those same beliefs from my conscious mind, and they are subject to the same biases. I have to either forfeit my right to judge entirely, or use those same judgments to judge my unconscious. I've learned (partly from you) ways to try to be less biased, and I try to use them here, but in the end all I have is reflective coherence
Just to clarify your position, are you suggesting I have a moral duty to respect my unconscious mind's preferences, in the same way I would have to respect the preferences of another person? Or are you suggesting it would benefit my conscious mind to have inner peace?
So to summarize, you think your conscious mind is more rational, moral, and qualia-full than your unconscious mind, and the evidence you cite for these conclusions is: your conscious mind has these opinions. Have I got this right? Any idea what opinions your unconscious mind has on these matters?
If it had any, do you think it would be incapable of letting us know about them? If so, why?
(Maybe Yvain should have a session with a Ouija board.)
You can phrase any argument that way:
"You think you're more likely to be correct about evolution than a creationist, and the evidence you cite for this conclusion is that this is your opinion."
Yes, it's my opinion. But it's my opinion for reasons. I thought I gave some good reasons why I thought my conscious mind makes better decisions than my unconscious. You rejected those because it was my conscious mind giving them. But if that were sufficient criteria to reject reasons, you would have to reject everyone's reasons on any subject, from evolution to the roundness of the Earth.
Even aside from all those reasons, I haven't heard any reasons to think the unconscious is aware, rational, or morally reflective, and I think the burden of proof is on that position, since it would basically be saying there's a second person inside my head.
As for what opinion my unconscious mind has, yes, I have some idea. I predict it has no opinions at all, and is more of a collection of drives, instincts, and processes than the sort of entity that forms rational opinions on complicated issues. I doubt my unconscious "disagrees" with me about this any more than my kidneys disagree with my position on tax reform, or my tibia disagrees with my interpretation of quantum mechanics.
If I had multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder, I would be prepared to treat my alternate personalities as worthy of respect and cooperation. But I think my unconscious is probably more like a kidney or a tibia than like a whole other personality. I realize this is a factual claim, and am willing to change my mind if I hear evidence that suggests otherwise.
I didn't see you offering reasons - I just saw you declaring that in general the conscious is more rational and moral, this conclusion being so obvious it didn't need reasons. You later gave specific examples of beliefs in yourself where your conscious part thinks your conscious beliefs are more correct and more moral than your unconscious beliefs, but surely you can't expect that to be considered a sufficient argument about the general trend in all people on all topics.
I do think you could stand to read a bit more about the unconscious; I think you will find it far more complex and capable than you realize.
Things I gave as evidence: the logical inconsistency of unconscious mind having conscious experience, irrationality of unconscious mind continuing to pursue subgoals when clearly no longer connected to supergoals, unconscious' vulnerability to proximity/scale biases when dealing with morality, and several others. I don't see how any of these can be dismissed as just "my conscious part thinks my conscious beliefs are more correct" with anything other than a Fully General Counterargument.
I've read plenty about the unconscious, and I admit it's astonishingly complex and capable. So are honeybees. But when bees perform unbelievably complicated tasks, I don't assume they therefore have human-level intelligence, and I think the unconscious' actions are more like the honeybees' than people's.
However, if there's something you think I should know more about, why not recommend me specific articles, authors, or books?
Just because your conscious mind isn't aware of experiences by your unconscious mind doesn't mean they don't exit. And just because your unconscious is subject to some biases doesn't mean your conscious mind does better on average.
I don't disagree with any of that, but it's all phrased sort of as "you can't prove it doesn't." What should make me single out the hypothesis that it does as worthy of further consideration?
The conscious is guilty of these too.
Okay, but carrying the analogy over, I'm sure you also don't trivialize the value of honey!
You could start with making yourself aware of the non-conscious mind's ability to solve CAPTCHAs, an AI-complete problem, and current conscious minds' inability to figure out how they do it with enough clarity to re-implement it in software.
Actually, it's funny you mention CAPTCHAs as your example. If you're going to go that far, why not also attribute skill at chess to the unconscious? After all, it's got to be the unconscious that screens out most of the several dozen possible chess moves each turn and lets your conscious concentrate on the few best, and you can generalize from chess to practically all matters of strategy. Or for that matter, how about language? All my knowledge of English grammar was purely unconscious until I started studying the subject in high school, and 99% of my grammar use still comes from there.
So the issue's not whether it can perform complex tasks. I don't know exactly what the issue is, but I think it connects to the concept of "personhood" somehow. I question whether the unconscious is more than a collection of very sophisticated mental modules, in the same way that a bird's brain may have a flight dynamics module, an astronomical navigation module, a mate-preference-analysis module, and so on.
The computing hardware of my brain contains a program for recognizing letters, a program that detects potential mates and responds with feelings of lust, a program that interacts with my reward system in such a way as to potentially create alcoholism, and so on. They're all computationally very impressive. But I don't see why I should assign them moral status any more than I would feel morally obligated to listen to a laptop on which I had installed a program that detected the presence of beautiful women nearby and then displayed the words "mate with this woman". I don't want to privilege these programs just because they happen to be located inside a human brain and they get reflected glory from some of the other things human brains can do.
To make me want to assign them moral status, you'd have to give me evidence that there was something that it felt like to be my lust. This seems kind of category-error-ish to me. I feel my lust, but my lust itself doesn't feel anything. You may feel sorry for me for having to deal with my lust, but feeling sorry for my lust because I don't choose to satisfy it is in my opinion a waste of sorrow. It's also an infinite regress. If I feel unhappy because I have unfulfilled desire, and my desire feels unhappy because it's unfulfilled, does my desire's unhappiness feel something? Why stop there?
I have a feeling this problem requires more rigor than I can throw at it right now. I've been trying to think about it more clearly so as to hopefully eventually get some top-level posts out of it, but this is the best I can do at the moment.
The conscious mind does some pretty stupid things too. Like becoming a catholic priest. That sort of thing consigns your potentially-immortal essence that's responsible for your very exisence to the trash bin.
If this is a battle to see which system is the more stupid, we could be looking at examples of insanity from both sides all day.
Maybe individual honeybees aren't very intelligent, but hives are moreso. Hopefully Anonymous often makes a similar point about markets, corporations or other collective entities and suggests some might even be (or become) . I don't really care much about consciousness, but viewed as persisting and replicating entities they might be lumped in with other life (just like multicellular and unicellular life are).
Your definitions of "conscious" and "unconscious" seem highly irregular to me. Best to stick to the dictionary here - I figure.
I'd dispute this. Just as an example, it is your unconscious mind which provides the processing power for you to read this statement, to understand spoken words, etc. It is largely your unconscious mind which declared some words interesting and others boring. It is your unconscious mind which declares things pleasant (and therefore morally good if you value hedonism). It is your unconscious that contains mirror neurons, without which your morality might be rather different. It is your unconscious that remembers and forgets, though with repeated effort and a consequent use of willpower your conscious can demand a few specific facts be remembered. Your conscious mind may have devised your moral system, but where did the initial values you seek to maximize come from?
Does it do you any good to judge your unconscious? If you could accomplish more of your conscious goals if you had more willpower, perhaps you could accomplish more of your conscious goals if you found a way to spend less willpower fighting your unconscious.
Which is why you then experience akrasia. Or, if I was going to anthropomorphize(?), I'd say, "which is why it feels entitled to ignore your opinions right back". ;-)
See, "your" opinions don't count for all that much in what you actually do. If you want to change your behavior, it's your "unconscious" opinions that you need to change. But you won't change them without first being aware of them, and if you keep the attitude you have, you'll have no real inclination to pay attention to them or seriously consider them when designing for your requirements... thereby ensuring that your unconscious mind will be stuck with low-quality ways of getting those requirements met!
In other words, the reason your unconscious desires have such poor quality of thought-throughness and execution is precisely because you refuse to consciously participate in the process.
Clearly, argument for which of the two points of view is the right one wasn't the focus of the post, the problem statement was.