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WrongBot comments on Book Review: The Root of Thought - Less Wrong
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The wavelength of light maps pretty straightforwardly onto our perception of color. We can trace the activation of cones in our eyes to patterns of neuron firing in the optic nerve to neurons firing in the visual cortex. "Redness" isn't magic. "Redness" is a particular configuration (or, more properly, a set of configurations) of neurons. The only reason it seems special to you is because you are experiencing the algorithm from the inside. Consciousness is what thinking feels like, not magic.
Sure... I'm with you until you get to the part where some (all?) configurations of matter have experiences from the inside, which nobody can detect or describe, and the only evidence that these "experiences" exist is that people say they can feel them... isn't this exactly the kind of thinking we ought to dismiss as crazy? But on the other hand, I think I feel experiences too!
You're making this more mysterious than it needs to be. No matter what our experiences felt like, we'd still call them qualia. No matter how we used our senses to acquire information about the world, we'd still call that process experience.
Are you claiming that any sufficiently complex agent will report a mysterious feeling of consciousness? That can't be right.
I wouldn't feel comfortable making that claim until I'd tested it on a couple of non-human agents, and in any case I wouldn't call it mysterious.
Really all I have is the suspicion that consciousness is much more normal than people tend to think. The only thing I'm confident of is that explaining consciousness won't require magic or special exceptions to the laws of physics.
What sort of answer, do you think, will people accept as explanation of consciousness? I ask that because I suspect that however deep understanding of thought will not destroy all the feeling of mystery. Even after we become able to model human brains on computers and after we discover which parts of brain are responsible for each exact feeling, I can't imagine how this knowledge stops people wonder about qualia, zombies and Chinese rooms.
I imagine Lord Kelvin felt similarly when he thought of the elan vital. It didn't work for that, and it didn't work for a very good reason: your ignorance of the realm of possibilities is not good evidence. An inability to come up with alternatives may be better support for a claim than showing that you have not yet been compelled to admit defeat, but it's still nearly worthless.
I didn't mean my question as a Kelvinian declaration that we will never understand. I was only curious whether WrongBot has some more specific idea what sort of answer can destroy the feeling of confusion when thinking about qualia. I am even not sure whether there is a question to be answered.
Right. I apologize, I didn't read your comment very clearly. The Kelvin case offers some hope, though - after all, the New Age life-is-energy meme is a lot weaker than elan vital was.
I haven't yet encountered a sufficiently precise definition of qualia (or consciousness, for that matter) to be able to say what exactly the confusion is, much less where it's coming from or how it can be destroyed. The hard problem of consciousness is a wrong question, and I suspect that for any given untangling of it, the answer will be trivial.
You're missing the basic problem: 'neurons' are part of the map, not the territory. The territory is made up of quarks, spacetime and probability amplitudes. What's the set of configurations of quarks which feels from the inside like thinking or like the color red? How can you be so confident that no magic is involved in this "how it feels from the inside" business, while casually talking about configurations of neurons?
I usually find Occam's Razor to be sufficient. You are misapplying reductionism: if consciousness maps to a set of configurations of neurons, and neurons map to quarks, spacetime, and probability amplitudes, then we have no need of mysteriously specific exceptions to physical laws. Indeed, such hypothetical and entirely unsupported exceptions have no explanatory power at all.
Why, the set of configurations of quarks which describe any member of the set of neurons which feel from the inside like thinking or like the color red, of course.
No, he's not. Neurons are part of the territory. They are composed of other parts of the territory which are composed of quarks, spacetime, etc. But that doesn't make a neuron not part of the territory. Just because something is ontologically reducible doesn't mean it isn't part of the territory. It just means that you need to be very careful not to treat it is as ontologically fundamental when it isn't.
Fine, substitute "not ontologically fundamental" for "not part of the territory" if you must.
The problem is that most philosophers who care about phenomenology at all would assign at least some ontologically foundational status to it, simply because it is foundational enough to you and anyone else with subjective experience. There is a reasonable argument to be made that "the way it feels from the inside" is just as fundamental as the basic physics of how the world works.
This does not imply that the two are necessarily related (for instance, P-zombies or robots can be unconscious yet physically talk about subjective experience). It does mean that Occam's razor should apply to "the way it feels from the inside", which tends to weigh against complex explanations like "configurations of neurons" and in favor of either exotic physics or a spooky superintelligence who can figure out how to run debugger sessions on our physical brains.
Unfortunately, this is close to nonsense. Just because something strikes me as foundational to me doesn't give me any decent reason for thinking it has any such actually foundational status. Humans suck as introspection. We really, really suck at intuiting out the differences in how we process things unless things are going drastically wrong. For example, it isn't obvious to most humans that we use different sections of our brains to add and multiply. But, there's a lot of evidence for this. For example, fMRI scans show different areas lighting up, with areas corresponding to memory lighting up for multiplication and areas corresponding to reasoning lighting up for addition. Similarly, there are stroke victims who only lose the ability to do one or the other operation. And this is but one example of how humans fail. Relying on human feelings to get an idea about how anything in the world, especially our own mind, works is not a good idea.
I don't follow this logic at all. I'm not completely sure what you are trying to do here but it sounds suspiciously like the theistic argument that God is a simple hypothesis. Just because I can posit something as a single, irreducible entity does not make that thing simple. (Also, can you expand on what you mean by a spooky superintelligence running debugging sessions since I can't parse this is in any coherent way)
Small nitpick: I am not talking about what is foundational to the way our world works. I am only making the fairly trite obsevation that subjective experience/qualia is the only thing we can directly experience; it would be really, really strange if something so basic to us turned out to be dependent on complicated configurations of neurons and glial cells, as naive physicalists suggest.
What this is actually saying is that phenomenology (the stuff we can access by introspection) cannot directly map physical areas of the brain of the kind which might get damaged in a stroke. In itself, this is not evidence that humans "suck" at introspection; especially if our consciousness really is a quantum state with $bignum degrees of freedom, rather than a classical system with spatially separate subparts.
God is not a simple hypothesis, but "this was affected by an optimization process which cares about X or something like it" is simpler than "this configuration which happens to be near-optimal for X arose by sheer luck". Which is pretty much what one would have to posit in order to explain our subjective experience of the extremely complicated physical systems we call "brains". There are other avenues such as the anthropic principle, but ISTM that at some point one would start to run into circularities.
What else can it depend on? Your original claim was that it has to do something with quantum superpositions, so can you tell, how these superpositions are going to explain qualia any better? Seems like you demand the explanation be black box without internal structure; this is contrary to what actual explanations are.
The "naive physicalists" don't maintain anything like that. Evolution isn't sheer luck.
Do you question the consensus that you see using your eyes? Because the eye is a blatantly complicated mechanism directly in the middle of one of the direct experiences of the world you stake your theory on.
I'm not questioning the fact that complicated mechanisms are involved in creating your subjective experience; I question the physical description of that subjective experience as an incredibly complicated configuration in the brain. If your qualia are at all real in some sense, they should correspond to something far simpler than that on Occam's Razor grounds. Alternately, you might just be a P-zombie. But then you'd have serious problems experiencing how your brain feels from the inside, although your brain would definitely be talking about its internal experiences.
Why aren't you? You just said that "[qualia] should correspond to something far simpler than that". If a (say) visual quale is simple, then why does the human system need a complicated mechanism to capture large numbers of photons such that they form a coherent image on a surface coated with photosensitive neurons, which are wired so as to cause large-scale effects on other parts of the neural (and glial) system of the brain, starting with the visual cortex and spreading from there ... to cause something simple? Light was simple to start with! If you expect things to be simple at the Cartesian theater, the visual system moves the wrong way.
Light is simple, but evolved organisms care very little about the fundamental qualities of light. They care a lot about running efficient computations using various inputs, including the excitation of photosensitive neurons. This is probably why the Cartesian theather feels very much like computation on high-level inputs and outputs, rather than objectively fundamental things such as wavelengths of light. And the computations which transform low-level data like excitation of sensory neurons into high-level inputs are probably unconscious because they are qualitatively different from conscious computation.
Well, what is it, then?
Ahhhh, I see now. Subjective experience must be ontologically foundational because it feels foundational, subjectively. This seems oddly... circular.
Configurations of neurons are not complex. They are complicated, but they can still be explained by the same physics as everything else in the world. You are proposing a more complex universe. Or possibly a god. They are equally implausible without supporting evidence.
Do you demand the exact wave function?
I was never much comfortable with "consciousness is how thinking feels from inside" explanation, since it hardly explains anything. However, the alternatives are non-explanations even more. Unless the hypothesis predicts something testable, it is useless. The position that no non-standard physics is involved is a kind of default which is held whenever there are no clear reasons to think otherwise, that's all.