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PhilGoetz comments on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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WRT some recent posts on consciousness, mostly by Academician, eg "There must be something more":
There are 3 popular stances on consciousness:
Consciousness is spiritual, non-physical.
Consciousness can be explained by materialism.
Consciousness does not exist. (How I characterize the Dennett position.)
Suppose you provide a complete, materialistic account of how a human behaves, that explains every detail of how sensory stimuli are translated into beliefs and actions. A person holding position 2 will say, "Okay, but you still need to explain consciousness." A person holding position 3 denies that there's anything more to be explained.
I've found these posts perplexing, and I think this is why: What's happening is that someone who holds position 3 is arguing against position 2 by characterizing it as position 1.
I find your reading of these posts perplexing. I do not know of anyone who believes that consciousness does not exist and certainly not Dennett. 'Explaining how every detail of how sensory stimuli are translated into beliefs and actions' has very little to due with consciousness. Explaining how we are aware of sensory stimuli and beliefs and actions is what consciousness is about. It is not thought - it is awareness of thought. It is also about how we remember experience.
If you want to understand how someone can hold the positions they do, you will have to understand that they are not confusing cognition, action or perception with consciousness. Consciousness has to do with being aware of some of your cognition, action and perception.
This does not mean that consciousness is unimportant, it is extremely important.
I agree that Dennett does not explain consciousness by explaining cognition, action and perception in "Consciousness Explained". I, too, was a little disappointed in the title but it was written almost 20 years ago. 20 years ago the neuroscience revolution was just starting.
Dennet doesn't know that he doesn't belief in consciousness. But he doesn't believe in qualia. I interpret that as not believing in consciousness. And, the way he tries to explain consciousness indicates that he thinks that if you explain a system's input-output behavior, you've explained everything about the system. This also implies that there is no phenomena other than input-output to be explained; this implies there is no such thing as consciousness.
(Asking what a philosopher "believes" is a tricky question, since analysis usually show many important propositions that their writings imply both belief and disbelief of. This applies to all people, of course; it's just more problematic in philosophers.)
My point is that they are. They think that explaining the perception, cognition, and action is all they need to worry about, and all else is mysticism.
You seem very confused about Dennett's ideas. He believes in subjective experience; he just thinks that philosophers have used the term "qualia" in misleading and inaccurate ways, and it's better to just talk about subjective experience. He also thinks that it is important to explain people's perceptions of consciousness: he writes about the idea of "heterophenomenology", which is to treat people's perceptions and experience as data that needs to be explained, but is not necessarily completely accurate or reliable.
Taboo "qualia" and "consciousness". You are speaking with great confidence in a discussion involving philosophical terms, and this is always a mistake if you have not already unambiguously defined these terms. And unambiguous definitions of philosophical terms are always controversial, and always in my experience lead to argument. Rationalist taboo, please.
AI and rationality should then also be taboo. Unless you can unambiguously define them.
With respect to this forum:
That said, I should have made it clear how narrow the scope of my request was: I have no problem with colloquial use of the term "consciousness" under ordinary circumstances. I requested the restriction in this case specifically because this discussion hinges on details of the definition which are frequently perceived as obvious in contradictory ways by different participants. Tabooing the term avoids that tar pit.
what do we mean by rationality does a pretty good job of that. Though it should be noted that the notion of tabooing a term is for a particular situation where there is confusion / disagreement involving the term in question, and so "AI" at least is not worth tabooing in response to the parent comment.
I will take RobinZ's good advice the not talk about qualia (for some time anyway). It is a philosophical term. Consciousness is a different matter, needs to be discussed and is too important to put in the 'taboo' bin. We need consciousness to remember, to learn and to do the prediction involved in controlling movement. It is a scientific term as well as a philosophical one and an ordinary everyday one.
Controlled movement does not require consciousness, memory, learning, or prediction. This (simulated) machine has none of those things, yet it walks over uneven terrain and searches for (simulated) food. What controlled movement requires is control.
Memory, learning, and prediction do not require consciousness. Mundane machines and software exist that do all of these things without anyone attributing consciousness to them.
People may think they are conscious of how they move, but they are not. Unless you have studied human physiology, it is unlikely that you can say which of your muscles are exerted in performing any particular movement. People are conscious of muscular action only at a rather high level of abstraction: "pick up a cup" rather than "activate the abductor pollicis brevis". Most of the learning that happens when you learn Tai Chi, yoga, dance, or martial arts, is not accessible to consciousness. There are exercises that you can tell people exactly how to do, and demonstrate in front of them, and yet they will go wrong the first time they try. Then the instructor gives the class a metaphor for the required movement, involving, say, an imaginary lead-weighted diving boot on one foot, and suddenly the students get it. Where is consciousness in that process?
I believe there is scientific agreement that the memory of an event in episodic memory only can be done it the event is consciously experienced. No conscious experience = no episodic memory
A certain type of learning depends on episodic memory and so conscious experience.
The fine control of movement depends on the comparison between expectation and result, ie error signals. As it appears to be consciousness that gives access across the brain to a near future prediction, it is needed for fine control. Prediction is only valuable in it is accessible.
I am not saying that memory, learning or fine motor control is 'done' in consciousness (or even that in other systems, such as robots, there would not be other ways to do these things.) I am only saying that the science implies that in the human brain we need to have conscious experience in order for these processes to work properly.
Yes, consciousness is certainly involved in the way we do some of those things, but I don't see that as evidence that that is why we have consciousness. Consciousness is involved in many things: modelling other people, solving problems, imagining anticipated situations, and so on. But how did it come about and why?
FWIW, I don't think anyone has come close to explaining consciousness yet. Every attempt ends up pointing to some physical phenomenon, demonstrated or hypothesised, and saying "that's consciousness". But the most they explain is people's reports of being conscious, not the experience that they are reports of. I don't have an explanation for the experience either. I don't even have an idea of what an explanation would look like.
In terms of Eliezer's metaphor of the Explain/Worship/Ignore dialog box, I don't worship the ineffable mystery, nor ignore the question by declaring it solved, but I don't know how to hit the Explain button either. For the time being the dialog will just have to float there unanswered.
Concurred. I want to point out that Julian Jaynes presents a lot of evidence for the lack of a role for consciousness for these and many other things in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (And yes, I know his general thesis is kind of flaky, but he handles this very narrow topic well.)
One of his examples is how people, under experimental conditions and without even knowing it, adjust muscles that can't be consciously controlled, in order to optimally contain a source of irritation. They never report any conscious recognition of the correlation between that muscle's flexing and the irritation (which was ensured to exist by the experiment, and which irritation they were aware of).
It may in fact be possible to drive while unconscious, though not very well.
I'm fairly sure a friend of a friend was on a similar insomnia drug and held a long, apparently-coherent phone conversation with her sister, to whom she had not spoken in some time. And then woke up later and thought, "I should call my sister - we haven't spoken in a long time."
Let me just say I find the stories more plausible than the newswriters seem to.
I apologize - what I meant wasn't "drop the subject of consciousness", but "don't use the specific word 'consciousness'":
Besides the original essay linked and quoted above, there's elaboration on the value of the exercise here.
Edit: For example, were I to begin to contribute to this conversation, I would probably talk about self-awareness, the internal trace of successive experiences attended to, and the narrative chains of internal monologue or dialogue that we observe and recall on introspection - not "consciousness".
The "tree falling in a forest" question was posed before people knew that sound was caused by vibrations, or even that sound was a physical phenomenon. It wasn't asking the same question it's asking now. It may have been intended to ask, "Is sound a physical phenomenon?"
Confession: I always assumed (until EY's article, believe it or not!) that the "tree falling in a forest ..." philosophical dilemma was asking whether the tree makes vibrations.
That is, I thought the issue it's trying to address is, "If nothing is around to verify the vibrations, how do you know the vibrations really happen in that circumstance? What keeps you from believing that whenever nobody's around [nor e.g. any sensor], the vibrations just don't happen?"
(In yet other words, a question about belief in the implied invisible, or inaudible as the case may be.)
Over what period, exactly, was the question widely accepted to be making a point about the difference between vibrations and auditory experiences, as Eliezer seemed to imply is the common understanding?
I've encountered people asking the question with both meanings or sometimes a combination of meanings. Like many of these questions of a similar form, the questions are often so muddled as to be close to useless.
I don't think that's correct. The notion that sound is vibrations in air dates back to at least Aristotle. See for example here
I don't know, but Aristotle's writings were not well-known in Europe from the 6th through the end of the 12th centuries. They were re-introduced via the Crusades.
Do you have a citation for that? The earliest reference I see is Berkeley.
I don't. Sorry, I thought the question was medieval, but now can't remember why I thought that. Probably just from giving the question-asker the benefit of the doubt. If the original asker was Berkeley, then it was just a stupid question.
I take your point, I really do. I will for example avoid 'qualia' as a word and use other terms.
But here is my problem. I have been following what the scientists that research it have been saying about consciousness for some years. They call it consciousness. They call it that because the people they know and I know and you know call it that. Now you are suggesting nicely that I call it something else and there is no other simple word or phrase that describes consciousness.
When I wrote a post I defined as well as I could how I was using the word. I could invent a word like 'xness' but I would have to keep saying that 'xness' is like consciousness in everything but name. And it would not accomplish much because it is not the word or even particular philosophies that is the source of the problem. It is the how and where and why and when that the brain produces consciousness. If we disagreed about what an electron was, it would not help to change the name. In the same way, if we disagree about what consciousness is, this is not a semantic problem. We know what we are talking about as well as we would if we could point at it, we have a different views about its nature.
That's not quite what I meant either (although I actually approve of avoiding the term "qualia", full stop):
The specific advantage I see of cracking open the black-box of "consciousness" in this conversation is that I expect it to be the fastest way to one of the following useful outcomes:
"But you haven't talked about fribblety chacocoa opoloba." "I haven't talked about what? I don't think I've ever actually observed that."
"On page 8675309 of I Wrote "Consciousness Explained" Twenty Years Ago Haven't You Gotten It By Now by Daniel Dennett, he says that fribblety chacocoa opoloba doesn't exist - here's the quote." "Oh, I see the confusion! No, he's talking about albittiver rikvotil, as you can see from this context, that quote, and this journal paper."
"On page 8675309 of I Wrote "Consciousness Explained" Twenty Years Ago Haven't You Gotten It By Now by Daniel Dennett, he says that fribblety chacocoa opoloba doesn't exist - here's the quote." "But that doesn't exist, according to the four experiments described in these three research papers, and doesn't have to exist by this philosophical argument."
Edit: Also, there's no requirement that you actually solve the problem of what it is - a sufficiently specific and detailed map leading to the thing to be observed suffices.
Ok, its my bed time here in France. I will sleep on this and maybe I can be more positive in the morning. But the likelihood is that I will go back to the occassional lurck.
Your comment does not make a great deal of sense to me, no one appears to be interested in what I am interested in (contrary to what I thought previously), the horrid disagreement about Alicorn's posting is disturbing, and so was the discussion of asking for a drink. I was not upset at the time with the remarks about my spelling and I would correct them. But now I think, is there any latitude for a dyslexic? I thought the site was for discussion ideas not everything but.
Good night.
Good night.
I apologize for making a big deal of this, but my main point is that I want to know I'm talking about the thing you're interested in, not about something else. I wasn't even really trying to address what you said - just to make some suggestions to reduce the confusion floating around.
Have a good night - hope I can catch you on the flip side.
Apology accepted. You are not the problem - I would not go away because of one conversation.
I have decided that I will take a less active part in LW for a while. It is very time consuming and I have a lot of actually productive reading and blogging to do. By productive I mean things that add to my understanding. I will look to see what has been posted and will probably read the odd one. I may even write a small comment from time to time. The posting that I was preparing for LW will be abandoned. I would put in too much effort for too little serious productive useful discussion. Better to put the effort elsewhere.
Do we? That would be good news; but I doubt it's true.
I think I answered this in another sub-thread of this discussion. But, here it is again in outline.
We only remember in episodic memory events that we had conscious awareness of. Some types of learning rely on episodic memory. The remembering and the learning are not necessarily, not even probably, part of the conscious process but without consciousness we do not have them. The prediction is part of the monitoring and correcting of on-going motor actions. In order to create the prediction and to use it, various parts of the cortex doing different things have to have access to the prediction. This wide-ranging access seems to be one of the hallmarks of consciousness. So does the slight forward projection of the actual conscious awareness - ie there is a possibility that it is the actual prediction and well is the mode of access.
I hope this answers the question of why I said what I said. I don't wish to continue this discussion at the present time. As I told RobinZ, I currently have other things to do with my time and find LW has been going off-topic in ways that I don't find useful. However, you have always been willing to seriously debate and stay on topic, so I have answered your comment. I will probably return to LW at some time. Until then, good luck.
Thanks. I know you don't want to continue discussion; but I note, for others reading this, that in this explanation, you're using the word "conscious" to mean "at the center of attention". This is not the same question I'm asking, which is about "consciousness" as "the experience of qualia".
I made my comment because it's very important to know whether experiencing qualia is efficient. Is there any reason to expect that future AIs will have qualia; or can they do what they want to do just as well (maybe better) by not having that feature? If experiencing qualia does not confer an advantage to an AI, then we're headed for a universe devoid of qualia. That's the big lose for the universe.
Avoiding that common qualia/attention confusion is reason enough not to taboo "qualia", which is more precise than "consciousness".
I think what you're talking about needs a different name. 'Attention' might be an informal one and 'executive control' a more formal one, or just 'planning', if we're talking AI instead of psychology. 'Reflection', if we're talking about metacognition.
Like RichardKennaway said, the tasks you describe sound like things that existing narrow AI robotic systems can already do, yet it sounds quite odd to describe current-gen robots as conscious. Talking about consciousness here is confusing at least to me.
Outside qualia and Chalmers' hard probjem of consciousness, is the term consciousness really necessary for something that can't be expressed in more precise terms?
You seem to be missing the point about what he means to taboo a word. In LessWrong speak, this means to expand out what you mean by the term rather than just use the term itself. So for example, if we tabooed "prime number" we'd need to say instead something like "an integer greater than one that has no positive, non-trivial divisors." This sort of step is very important when discussing something like consciousness because so many people have different ideas about what the term means.
Do you see the symmetry of this situation? A Dennettian sees people who (by their lights) hold position (1), arguing against (2) (which they take to be their own) by characterising it as (3).
So, is AlephNeil pegging Academician as an advocate of (2) and PhilGoetz pegging A. as an advocate of (3)? But a non-Dennettian like me can admit that Dennett is in camp (2), just not a rich enough variant of (2).
There's an orthogonal distinction, which is whether one believes that it is possible to produce a complete materialistic account of behavior that does not explain consciousness. (IIRC EY has said "no" to this question in the past.) If the answer truly is "no", then (2) and (3) above would collapse into the same position, given enough knowledge.
I think I'm getting sidetracked... The problem with (3) is that it doesn't allow you to /try/ to explain consciousness, and criticizes anyone in camp (2) who tries to explain consciousness as being in camp (1). Camp (3) are people, like Dennett, who think there's no use trying to explain how qualia arise from material causes; we should just ignore them. As long as we can compute the output behavior from the input (they would presumably say), we understand everything material there is to understand; therefore, trying to understand anything else is non-materialism.
Help me here. What is it about qualia that has to be explained before there can be at least an outline theory of what consciousness is? Is it what they are? Is it where they are stored? Is it how they are selected? Is it how they get bound to an object? Is it how real they seem? Is it how they are sometimes inappropriate?
So we can't answer those questions today. But we probably can in the next decade. And it would be a lot easier to find answers if we had a idea of how consciousness worked and more exactly what it does and why. We are closer to answering those questions.
Taboo consciousness before you file Dennett, please.
Is (3) the only one that is compatible with a computational theory of mind?
(2) is too, if consciousness is defined such that it is either an epiphenomenon of other mental processes or a specific, well-defined feature that is necessary to certain things human minds do. (I take the latter position: consciousness does something (a mind without it wouldn't act the same, without intentionally imitating it) and there is no reason to expect it will not be compatible with materialism.)