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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Nature: Red, in Truth and Qualia - Less Wrong
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This is basically how Drescher explains qualia in Good and Real (section 2.5.2). He makes a reference to gensyms, in this context tags that can only be tested for equality and make no other semantics available.
I had read that, but it didn't "click" with me, probably because I had never programed in Lisp before. I'm guessing the OS handle analogy would make more intuitive sense to the typical programmer.
BTW, in this line of thinking, there's nothing really special or mysterious about consciousness. It's just a mind or a part of a mind with verbal abilities. But that seems to rule out the approach of defining pain (as a moral disvalue) as negative reinforcement experienced by a conscious mind. If consciousness is just possession of verbal abilities, there seems no reason to assign special moral status to it. But then what is pain, and what is morally bad about it?
A related and horrible thought: has anyone thought to ask the right lobe of a split-brain patient whether it's in pain? Or, more horribly: has anyone tried to suppress the corpus callosum for a moment (there's a specialized helmet which targets electromagnetic waves to do this for various areas) and ask the right lobe of an ordinary person how they feel?
Huh? I am conscious of a lot of things that don't involve words. In fact, words are a very small part of my awareness, except when I'm actually using them, e.g. composing a comment like this one. They're a major way of communicating one's state of mind to someone else, but to identify consciousness with that facility would be like mistaking a computer screen for the computer.
I suppose that might change if one were to practice one of those meditation exercises in which one deliberately labels every moment of experience; but I don't know why one would want to do that.
I'm not sure that identifying consciousness with access to verbal ability is the right way to go, but it is the approach taken "in this line of thinking", and I was trying to explore its implications. Quoting from the second post in orthonormal's sequence:
I notice that you didn't object when orthonormal wrote that. Do you think what I wrote is substantially different, or ....? (ETA: we can discuss your disagreement with this approach too, but first I'd like to know whether I've misunderstood orthonormal somehow.)
I don't necessarily read everything on LW. I didn't pay all that much attention to the original post, because a wall of text on yet another thought experiment designed to elucidate the nature of qualia wasn't something I wanted to read. But I noticed your comment, and my response, had I made one, to orthonormal's "we'll call this her conscious subgraph" would have been on the same lines.
I think that this line of thinking leads nowhere, as every other line of thinking on the subject has done. Maybe I should write a top-level post on this, but it seems to me that no-one, on LessWrong or anywhere else that I've read, has explicitly faced up to the basic problem of consciousness/subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it. You have the unstoppable force of materialism, the fundamental insight that "it's all atoms!", which has successfully solved or dissolved so many questions about the world, and then you have the immovable rock of conscious experience. The two are starkly incompatible. The question is too big to Ignore, Worshipping the mystery isn't an option (and is just a way of Ignoring while pretending not to), but no-one has any idea of what an Explanation could even look like. Every purported explanation of consciousness, on closer examination, turns out to be an explanation of something else, such as how an unconscious system might come to make assertions about consciousness.
I don't have a solution either. Explain, Worship, or Ignore? I can't hit any of those buttons.
I'd seriously like to read such a post, were you to get round to writing it. Something very odd is going on, it seems to me, but I can't even express the problem.
I think it's more accurate to say that the part of our mind that is conscious is the part that uses words, since when you want to tell if someone knows something consciously or unconsciously, you ask them about it.
That's the same fallacy as I was trying to get at. I am conscious of a thing, or not, whether or not I tell anyone else, and it is easy to think of situations in which I can tell whether someone else is conscious of something without their saying anything. Words can tell you a lot, but they're telling you about something which is not those words, and is not the mechanism of producing those words.
I don't understand the transition of this conversation to consciousness, or what motivates the particular "verbal abilities" reference you've made. What do you mean by "in this line of thinking"? (I didn't really follow the posts.)
(With consciousness, I too prefer Drescher's unpacking, where the word refers to observation of the process of thinking (which is part of the thinking and can in turn be observed).)
I was referring to orthonormal's unpacking of consciousness. (If people comment under posts that they have not read, could they please say so right away, instead of waiting until confusion arises? Sorry, but I'm a bit frustrated that both you and my other correspondent in this thread didn't read the posts and failed to say so earlier.)
Unfortunately, that also does not seem to help with understanding pain as a moral disvalue, since it's unclear why we should assign special moral status to minds that can observe their own thinking.
My previous comment didn't depend on knowledge of the post, while this one probably did, and that is where I noted that I didn't follow the post.