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I asked you four direct questions, the first three of which can be disposed of with a yes or a no. Do you not want to answer any of them?
I also asked a question. Could you answer that one first?
A few minutes after I stepped away from the keyboard, I had a revelation about your story - something that was probably obvious to you, but which just seemed like an odd non sequitur to me until now. My alter ego in your story doesn't just think that he sees a black disk, he thinks there's a black disk literally floating in front of him all his life, which is why he goes on about momentum, yes? I had thought momentum was just thrown in there as a random physics buzzword. And so your alter ego is doing nothing but explaining that hallucinations are possible, I think.
This is coming at the problem from the wrong level. The experience of blueness is a problem for physics whether it's veridical blueness or hallucinated blueness. Either way it's there at the level of experience, and either way it's not there at the level of neural physics. I will answer your four questions tomorrow, if you still want me to, but I think you're not engaging with the challenge here. Unless you intend to maintain that the whole of humanity's experience of color is unreal.
Why do you keep attributing this view to people here? I'm sure you've been corrected on it enough times. No one denies that people experience color. The claim is just that the reductionist materialist ontology is sufficient to explain why it happens, and it is due to a more fundamental phenomenon.
Yes.
Reading that was an aha moment for me in that I had not considered that that might be your position. Please allow me to explore your position a little.
If I step on a nail, the resulting sensation of pain is a problem for physics, too?
And if my toe non-painfully bumps into a marble, the resulting sensation of touch or bump is a problem, too?
If I get in my car to go to the store to buy some ice cream, but then I learn that the road to the store is closed, then I decide that finding an alternative way to get to the store is not worth the trouble of having the ice cream, is some aspect of that experience a problem for physics, too? Perhaps the desire for ice cream. Or the intention to satisfy the desire. Or the abandonment of the intention.
If the answer to all of those questions is yes, then is there any internal experience you have had or could have some day which is not a problem for physics?
Well, no need to answer the first two because I consider what I am replying to an answer to those two.
ADDED. Let me continue my exploration of your position a little. I am walking in the woods. I sit down. I become aware of a mushroom on a log. Then I change my position and I realize that what I thought was a mushroom is really just part of the log. Now I have a question about this transitory nonvericidal experience of a mushroom in my mind. Is it a problem for physics, too?
What I really want to ask is more complicated, and I am probably not setting up the question correctly, but let me ask anyway. Suppose I am sitting in the woods having the experience of seeing a log. Suspend your disbelief and suppose (against your belief) that there is a materialistic reductionistic account for that situation including my experience at that moment. Suppose my mental state then changes so that I think I have come to notice a particular species of very tasty mushroom on the log. Suppose the mushroom is not really there, but rather that my experience of noticing a mushroom is caused by an improbable coincidence in the shape and color of a small part of the log. Is my noticing the nonvericidal mushroom a problem for physics even if (counterfactually, according to your model of reality) my experience of seeing the log does not pose a problem for physics?
In the end, no. Physics as we know it contains neither qualia nor intentionality nor anything like the unity of consciousness, so no. But colors are particularly obviously not there in the physics we have.
Having taken such a radical stance, I want to emphasize what I'm not saying. I'm not saying conscious experience is indescribable. I'm not even saying it's indescribable mathematically. Consciousness is a sequence of states; those states have structure and can be compared to each other; we can describe those states using a formalism; we can also describe and analyze the transitions of state and theorize about a larger causal and ontological framework which would produce them and explain them.
I am saying two or three things.
First proposition: It would be a mistake to think that the descriptive formalism is the reality. It's more a calculus for reasoning about the reality.
Second proposition: Belief in physicalism is largely a belief that a particular descriptive formalism is the reality. Because the elements of the formalism are descended from elements of actual experience - e.g. geometry from the experience of space - when people think of reality in terms of physics, they do employ sensory intuitions and not just formal abstractions, so it's not just reification of formalism, but that is a large part of what goes on.
Third proposition - this is the controversial part: The formalism we have actually does not correspond to the manifest nature of consciousness; even if you try to see it in the proper way (according to the first proposition above), no part of the physics we have can in fact be identified with the consciousness we have. This is behind my proposals for minor modifications on the formal level (a single-world physics of transitions between spacelike-tensored Hilbert-space vectors, etc). The objective is to permit a nondualistic ontology true to the actual nature of consciousness.
Postscript: Given the categorical nature of my answer to your first question - all of experience poses a problem for physics - your final question is rendered a little unnecessary. But I should say something about it anyway. After all, I could re-pose it in a form that asked whether the situation described is a problem for monadological physics. I don't think it is, because the chief problems actually stem from the ontology of what Husserl called the "transcendental" aspect of consciousness, the part that transcends veridicality. This is really just a fancy way of saying: the properties of consciousness which are independent of whether appearances are correct. Qualia are there whether or not you're hallucinating, and even hallucinated objects (because they are interpreted sensations) have a structure of intentionality. And even a misinterpreted sensation is still an interpreted sensation, so the example of the illusory mushroom doesn't add anything new at that level.
Well, thanks for replying to my questions.
My guess is that you are the victim of a failure of imagination: specifically, you fail to imagine everything an imperfect information-processing model-maintaining agent might falsely believe. Specifically, such an agent might falsely believe that aspects of its own operation are irreducible primitives. You keep on asserting that subjective experiences are irreducible to the primitives of the standard physical model, but you have not presented anything that I consider evidence for that.
The only way I can think of for you to make progress on moving me towards your point of view is for you to point out a problem with the standard model of physics using the vocabulary of the technical theory of how any agent can come to have an accurate model of its environment (Jaynes, Pearl, universal prior, Solomonoff induction, etc).
Whereas from my perspective, no-one is explaining how any particular higher-level physical property can be identified with a color - for example. As I just asked Robin Z, please explain to me what's green about a causal disposition or a physical motion.
I have yet to see any such explanation. Instead I just see assertion of identity, or a discourse structured to avoid talking directly about color.
I am skeptical that quantitative epistemology is much use here, because it is usually practised in a mindset which is already treating everything abstractly.
Perhaps the key is to get people into a state of mind in which they are genuinely attending to the "qualia" themselves, and in which it is not assumed that they must be reducible to the physics we have, and then to have them ponder afresh whether the alleged identities above (green as a causal disposition, green as a physical motion) actually make sense. Also throw in a warning to beware treating the possibility of systematic association as identity: imagining that the occurrence of greenness is always accompanied by some physical process or condition, is not the same thing as perceiving that greenness could be identical to the physical counterpart.
And I've answered you several times, which is why it's specifically my comments that you avoid.
Let's go over this again: computer programs are in the very same dilemma. They use generated symbols. GensymA refers to this data. GensymB refers to that data. MetaGensym1 refers to the group {GensymA, GensymB, ...}.
It can tell any two gensyms apart. It can tell any metagensym group apart. But from the program's perspective, it cannot tell what is "GensymA-ish" about this data, or "GensymB-ish" about that data -- just whether they are or aren't. Between two program instances, all of this (within limits) could be switched around, and there would be no multi-program GensymA.
You already know how this situation arises from the physicalist reductionist account.
You simply have to recognize yourself as being in that same scenario. Your internal, truly-part-of-you labels for different phenomena are the qualia -- which accounts for the problematic aspects of qualia.
Does this resolve the issue completely? Of course not. Among many other things, we need to figure out what (seemingly efficient) data representation method the brain uses that causes the specific aspects of color, like its ability to vary in shade, and vary orthogonally to the sounds you hear. But there's a clear research program there and a coherent picture from a reductionist account.
Incidentally, it may amuse you that others have (independently, for all I can tell) come to entirely similar conclusions:
The above comes from Quining Qualia by Daniel Dennett - the citations are to:
You state the essence of your view here:
And I presume that the "blue data" is called blue, not because it is literally blue in the old-fashioned sense, but because it's caused by physical "blueness", or just because that's the name we're using for a particular range of data values.
To paraphrase what I just said to Richard: in effect, you are saying that the experience of color is the experience of colorlessness, plus a color label. Which is the same as saying that I don't actually see color, I just think I see color.
This is getting tiresome. The link you just gave was actually to a time when I was summarizing my previous attempt to correct a further previous misunderstanding of my position.
You haven't actually addressed any of it, including here. I gave a specific example of this model of qualia in a different context: generated symbols in programing. Instead of just an inflammatory strawman plus a non-sequitur,
how about you actually say where you think that model breaks down?
How about you stop repeating the same confusion between the linguistic label and the computational label, like you're doing here:
Again (this is at least the third time I've explained this to you): the phenomenal experience of blue is not the same thing as the name "blue". You experience seeing blue whether or not you have the term "blue" (or "azul" or "blau" or "bleu" or "aoi"). Rather, the phenomenal experience of blue is what it is like to be a program that has classified incoming data as being a certain kind of light, under the constraint of having to coherently represent all of its other data (other colors, other visual qualities, other senses, other combined extrapolations from multiple senses, etc) but with limited comparison abilities.
Yes, as part of your use of a language, you can assign the label "blue". But that's not how I'm explaining phenomenal blue. I'm explaining phenomenal blue as your architecture's direct label for a kind of light, below the level at which you can see it work. To experience blue is to feel your cognitive architecture assigning a label to sensory data.
Now, you may have a reason to reject this approach. You may have reason to believe that the associated research program will turn out surprisingly fruitless. You may have an alternative which looks more promising.
But I have no way of knowing that, when the only response that you give to the reasoning that I've just given (and have given in some form or another five times now) is to ignore it or respond to a mischaracterization of it.
Now, try again, and this time, communicate to me what caused you to reject this approach at the time you considered it during the last eight years. I would love to know what you uncovered in trying this out.
I have aggregated my latest responses here.
What do you think you do when you see, dance a minuet to the music of Bach? Seeing is an act of thought.
To move me toward your point of view, you would need to do one of three things. (1) Show me that I am wrong in my expectation that your proposal will lead to an "ontology" (an account of reality) with significantly higher Kolmogorov complexity than the conventional ontology. (2) Present evidence that outweighs the higher Kolmogorov complexity. In particular, present evidence that not only prefers an ontology consistent with your proposal, but also does so to such a degree so as to outweigh the higher Kolmogorov complexity. (3) Cause me to come to doubt the epistemology I am using (universal prior, Bayesian updating, etc).
It would interest me to know whether you find any fault in my position as expressed above, Mitchell, because your finding a fault would be a strong sign that our differences in this thread stem from differences over epistemology.
I have not assumed anything of the sort. I am simply noticing that in contrast to what you seem to believe, qualia are not sufficiently strong evidence against the conventional ontology to satisfy condition (2) above.
(I will now quote again from the same sentence I quoted from above, but this time I will omit a different passage.)
Do you sincerely believe that the people replying to you here neglected genuinely to attend to "the qualia themselves" when they considered your words and how to reply to them? I assure you that I for one did not. Just now, in fact, I caused myself to experience blueness while reflecting on your argument. It was no more persuasive than the last couple of times I did it.
Did you remind yourself that what you are experiencing is inside your head, which according to conventional physics is composed entirely of colorless entities, and notice that nonetheless, something inside your head - a particular sensation - managed to be blue? If so, how did you deal with the contradiction?
We can have a dispute about the Kolmogorov complexity of different explanations once we agree on what it is that we're trying to explain.
If I find that I am able to experience blueness and to experience redness, then my brain must have at least two states, one that corresponds to the blue experience and one that corresponds to the red experience, or we have a contradiction.
The state of my brain that corresponds with the blue experience can be a normal, ordinary, conventional physical state. You have made no progress in persuading me -- or as far as I can tell anyone else who has commented on Less Wrong -- that it must be a special state where a special state is defined as a state that cannot be modeled by the conventional ontological model.
The thing that you refer to as a contradiction is only a contradiction if one mistakenly clings to a particular causal model (or a particular set of causal models) of the sensation of blueness.
I am using "state" the way the computer scientists use it, namely, to mean a configuration of reality or of an "identifiable" aspect of reality (such as my brain) that can change as a function of time.
I have aggregated my latest responses here.
And a color blind person may never see green. I wonder, if everybody was color blind would green cease to be a fundamental property of physics?
Back up: since when has color been a fundamental property of physics? Wavelength is, but wavelength and color are not identical.
Some day I'm going to learn not to speak in facetious riddles.
Why not? Roughly speaking, if everyone was 2-dimensional, why would we see the world as 3-dimensional?
Edit: this came out wrong, for obscure reasons.
Are you substituting in "believed to be a fundamental property of physics" for "being a fundamental property of physics"?
My fault. That comment was some kind of cached thought that I can't quite examine now to explain what I thought I was writing.
Since we have good reason to believe that the manifest nature of consciousness (i.e., our own personal sense of it) is not true to the actual nature of consciousness, I do not find this lack of correspondence troubling.
Man, this thread is a karma mint. I think I'll just refrain from commenting unless I have something really good to say.
Upvoted. (;
Question: Is this post on the LW server at the level of semiconductor physics?
It's like asking whether a book is just ink on paper. As a physical object that's all it is. As a message it also has a semantic content, but that is ascribed rather than intrinsic.
As a physical object it's a complex arrangement of subatomic particles and photons - the ink and the paper are as much ascribed qualities as the text. To pretend that the levels above the physical are not real is to commit the fallacy of greedy reductionism. See the link about "explaining vs. explaining away", elsewhere.
To make my point more explicit: what relevant difference do you see between (1) the relationship between mental phenomena and the neural physics and (2) the relationship between the message and the ink on the paper? Or better, between (1) and (3) the relationship between the videogame and the physics of the electronic systems in the console?
Physical composition is not observer-dependent, interpretation is.
In a universe made solely of causally interacting particles in motion, there are plenty of complex higher-level properties: conjunctive properties, configurational properties, averaging properties, counterfactual properties. But you will find neither colors nor meanings. When dealing with problematic entities like these, physicalists either redefine them in purely physical terms, or posit untenable identities between the real thing and its supposed physical counterpart. The first class of explanation evades the problem and is really eliminativism, and the second class of explanation is a law of psychophysical correspondence and is really dualism.
So perhaps you can anticipate how I will answer your questions. If we posit a universe such as physicists presently posit, there simply are no mental phenomena, including the interpretations required to make patterns of ink into messages and patterns of phosphor into games. If we posit a "physics" which does include mentality, then such interpretations can exist, but they only exist in the lifeworlds of those who make them, and not intrinsically in the artefacts themselves.
You asked elsewhere what I thought of How An Algorithm Feels From Inside. It is the kernel of one possible explanation of why someone might "feel an impulse to go on arguing whether the object is really a blegg", and as an explanation it's incomplete both causally and ontologically. For a causally complete explanation, Network 1 and Network 2 would need to be embedded in some larger network that determines which questions actually get asked. For an ontologically complete explanation, something has to be said about how and why an algorithm feels like anything at all, and what a feeling is in the first place. And to really tie it all together, you would have to make the feeling of the algorithm causally relevant in the larger network (this would be bringing consciousness into contact with cognition).
I'm sorry, this is just assertion with a broader vocabulary. You, personally, don't find physicalist explanations of experience like Eliezer Yudkowsky's sufficient. Nobody needed the three hundred words of pleonastic vocabulary you just foisted upon us to learn this fact - you've already told us.
What evidence do you have that reductive explanations of subjective experience are wrong?
The fact that they don't explain it. (Feel free to explain what's green about an act of classification or a neuron firing at a particular frequency, two popular reductive "explanations" of color. There's a nice instance of green up in the site banner, if you need an actual example to contemplate.)
Why do you expect a reductive explanation of the perception of green to be green? The reductive explanation of the temperature of a gas isn't a temperature - it explains temperature in terms of things which are not temperature.
Either admit that you reject any reductive explanation of sensation or describe the phenomena which refute (i.e. render scientifically problematic) any possible explanation of color in terms of neuroscience.
Something somewhere is green. So if you propose an account of the world, reductive or otherwise, which purports to be about greenness, something in it had better actually be green.
Do you dispute in any significant way my assertion that the existing reductive accounts of color seek to reduce it either to causal properties or to configurational properties? Are you willing to defend any particular form of identity theory when it comes to color?
If someone presented an analysis of sensation into parts which, when combined, really did give you back what you started with, I certainly couldn't criticize it on these grounds. Though it's rather hard to imagine what such an analysis could be like. For example, I don't think you can say that color is made of hue, saturation and intensity, in the same way that a square is made of four line segments. The line segments each have an independent existence and being part of a square is a contingent matter for each of them, whereas HSI seem to me like dependent aspects of a necessary unity. You can't have "intensity of color" without actually having a color there.
The reductive analyses being proposed, however, are of a different character. When the parts are put back together, you have a quite different sort of entity, which is why I complain that they are really dualism or eliminativism.
Perhaps, then, color can't be reduced, only described. But that doesn't mean it has to be disconnected from a causal scientific account of the world. If the actual nature of color is that it is a component of certain monadic states, plays a certain specific causal role in the interaction of monads, etc - there's nothing there which is inherently beyond the reach of scientific reasoning.
I have to agree with you there: it feels like Mitchell_Porter unnecessarily throws around jargon in these discussions :-/ But the post you replied to wasn't the worst case: I'd nominate the fourth paragraph here.
You realize he can read this, right? :P
But seriously: Mitchell, drop the big words. We won't think less of you for it.
Yes, but he generally avoids reading my comments anyway ;-)
But just for the record:
@Mitchell_Porter: You unnecessarily throw around jargon in these discussions. A case in point is the fourth paragraph here.
ETA: Word of advice: Never criticize someone unless you'd be willing to say it directly to their monad ;-)