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AlephNeil 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.
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.