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Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem
I encounter many intelligent people (not usually LWers, though) who say that despite our recent scientific advances, human consciousness remains a mystery and currently intractable to science. This is wrong. Empirically distinguishable theories of consciousness have been around for at least 15 years, and the data are beginning to favor some theories over others. For a recent example, see this August 2011 article from Lau & Rosenthal in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, one of my favorite journals. (Review articles, yay!)
Abstract:
Higher-order theories of consciousness argue that conscious awareness crucially depends on higher-order mental representations that represent oneself as being in particular mental states. These theories have featured prominently in recent debates on conscious awareness. We provide new leverage on these debates by reviewing the empirical evidence in support of the higher-order view. We focus on evidence that distinguishes the higher-order view from its alternatives, such as the first-order, global workspace and recurrent visual processing theories. We defend the higher-order view against several major criticisms, such as prefrontal activity reflects attention but not awareness, and prefrontal lesion does not abolish awareness. Although the higher-order approach originated in philosophical discussions, we show that it is testable and has received substantial empirical support.
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Comments (103)
Please can someone tell me/(tell me where to learn) what is meant by 'first order' and 'higher order' in this context? I am familiar with the terms from logic but I don't think this is what the terms mean here.
The definition from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher is too circular for me to understand:
edit: I think the background material necessary is all here http://davidrosenthal.jottit.com/ I will update this after reading it.
edit: Here are my notes so far:
From The Higher-Order Model of Consciousness I gather the following terms: mental state seems to be synonymous with thought, I am treating this term as an roughly undefined and trying to fill it in as I read. The first order thoughts are those direct from sensory modalities whereas higher order thoughts are those which observe thoughts. The example of being hungry is given: this is a first order thought but the observation that you are hungry is a second order thought and so on.
Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness goes into more depth about the historic context of the idea of HOTs (higher order thoughts) and how they relate to three subtle definitions centered around the notion of consciousness. Creature consciousness is defined as simply being awake, sentient and/or aware (presumably it simply means one is interpreting first order thoughts) and transitive consciousness is being conscious of something by thinking of it. The central question is posed: which mental states are state-conscious (to say that a mental state is "conscious" means that one is immediately transitive-conscious of it). The example is given: subliminal perception is not a conscious state, even though one is conscious of what they are perceiving.
The transitivity principle is introduced which states: a mental state is conscious if one is conscious of it in some suitable way. He claims this definition is not circular. The conclusion is:
In Explaining Consciousness a rough approach to the problem of state-consciousness is sketched: starting with the true statement "if one is not aware of a state, it is not a conscious one", we get "a state is conscious if one is aware of it" - but this is too strong a statement to be true (subliminal awareness is one counter-example) so eliminating all counter-examples should lead to a necessary and sufficient criteria for which mental states are conscious. The apparent circularity from before is clarified, he says "my strategy is to explain a state's being a [state-]conscious state in terms of our being [creature-]conscious of that state in some particular way".
He asks what is special about the way we are transitively conscious of our mental states when they are conscious states. He rejects the idea of an inner-sense or higher-order perception that observes thoughts as a modality, then poses the "only alternative" that we are conscious of our conscious states by virtue of having thoughts about them. It is immediately concluded that a conscious HOT must have content roughly describing that one is in a mental state. It is also argued that a a mental state is conscious when accompanied by a noninferential, nondispositional and assertoric higher order thought that one is in that mental state. He goes on to analyze this hypothesis.
The next section mentions that "when a mental state is not conscious we do not experience any of its qualitative properties", I don't know what "qualitative" means in this context. Apparently "there is nothing like it's like to be in that state" but that doesn't make sense.
Aren't most of the people who say consciousness is a mystery talking about the hard problem, whereas global-workspace theory and higher-order theory and the like address the easy problem?
Perhaps, though some - including Dennett - think that the hard problem will end up being solved by solving the easy problems. I tend to take this 'deflationary' view about the problems of consciousness.
Maybe it's antisocial to keep asking these sorts of questions, I hope not. Do either of you have any idea where I can find a less-wrongian friendly description of this "hard problem". Everything I've read that tries to describe it in the past is full of snippets like "something that it's like to be" and "subjective qualitative" and other such things I have no ability to understand...
It's kind of supposed to be hard to explain, but...hmmmm...maybe something like "why is there a subjectively perceived difference between sleepwalking through your life and being awake?"
If we imagine a sort of "perfect sleepwalker" who, while sleepwalking, could hold conversations, go to work, write poetry, and do anything else that people do while awake exactly as waking people do it - even to the point where if we ask her "Are you awake?" she answers "Yes." - then it might be necessarily impossible for us outsiders to distinguish her sleep from her waking.
But we feel an intuitive believe that she should be able to do so easily. If she's awake, she can notice her awakeness and all the sensations she's feeling and experiences she's having. If she's sleeping, then it doesn't even make sense to "experience" not being awake, because there's no one "at home" to do the experiencing.
An equivalent interpretation of the problem revolves around qualia. Suppose that your experience of "red" was everyone else's experience of "blue". You would never be able to confirm this by talking to other people - you would say things like "blue is the color of the sky and the sea and short-wavelength light" and they would agree with you, but you would be thinking of red when you said it, and everyone else would be thinking of blue. This "experience of blue" which is separate from statements about blue or concepts surrounding blue is the "quale" (plural "qualia") of blue.
Intuition tells us one difference between the sleepwalker and the awake person is that if you ask the sleepwalker what color a stop sign is, the light rays would hit her eyes, go through a chain of neurons in her brain, and produce the response "it's red". The same thing would happen in the awake person, but she'd also have the conscious visual experience qualia thing where she "sees" a certain color in her "mind's eye".
The hard problem is whether there's a difference between awake people with qualia and perfect sleepwalkers (aka "p-zombies") without qualia, and, if so, what causes that difference.
Is the answer even relevant ?
As far as I understand, there currently exists no "qualia-detector", and building one may be impossible in principle. Thus, in the absence of any ability to detect qualia, and given the way you'd set up your thought experiment about the sleepwalker, there's absolutely no way to tell a perfect sleepwalker from an awake person. As far as everyone -- including the potential sleepwalker -- is concerned, the two cases are completely functionally equivalent. Thus, it doesn't matter who has qualia and who doesn't, since these qualia do not affect anything that we can detect. They are kind of like souls or Saganesque teapots that way.
It certainly matters to the subject! I sure wouldn't want to lose my ability to experience regardless of whether others can ever notice (or whether it's possible).
Your objection here strikes me a little bit like behaviorism. Yes, there are valuable things to be gotten most of the time from such an approach, but behaviorism suffered from an unwillingness to acknowledge that people had thoughts. After all, thoughts didn't demonstrate themselves in behavior beyond being talked about, in which case it was the talk that was part of the scientific domain, not the thinking. The thing is, I know I think, and my strong impression is that others talk about "thoughts" for the same reason I do: they think. The fact that behaviorism didn't have a clear empirical approach to exploring these subjective experiences tagged "thoughts" didn't mean that they were uninteresting or irrelevant. This was the main reason why we switched away from behaviorism in the second half of the 20th century.
(Quick note: Yes, I know that not all behaviorism was like this. Some behaviorists simply said that they didn't want to make claims about what thinking entailed because they didn't know how to approach the matter empirically. However, it was common if not dominant among behaviorists to take the "If we can't study it then it doesn't exist or doesn't matter" approach.)
In exactly the same way, quale-type experience seems to be present for me, and my own impression is that everything I talk about in terms of empiricism gets filtered through qualia. There are no data that transmit information to my mind that I am aware of without that awareness taking on qualia. I'm under the strong impression that others experience the world similarly. The fact that we don't know what that means in reductionistic terms doesn't mean that it's irrelevant or that qualia don't exist. It just means that we don't know how to approach the question unambiguously as yet.
But according to the though experiment you'd set up, you wouldn't notice:
Granted, you go on to say,
But that to me seems like a contradiction. We asked the sleepwalker if she was awake, and she said "Yes", after all. If she could in fact determine that she was sleeping, she'd say "No". Which brings me to your next point:
As far as I understand, a hardcore behaviorist would actually claim that humans have no internal state and are basic reflex agents; that's obviously silly, so that is not my position. Instead, I actually agree almost completely with everything you'd said above.
You think thoughts, and your thoughts affect your actions. Unlike a simple reflex agent, you are able to actually think about your thoughts; this ability affects your actions even further. For example, when someone asks you, "are you awake ?", you can think about it for a moment, and say "Yes, probably", or "Most likely, not". You can also hold a lively discourse on the subject of your own thoughts. Thus, your actions -- including your speech -- are, in fact, evidence for your consciousness. A perfect sleepwalker, then, would have to perfectly emulate being conscious, as well; and I'm willing to stick my neck out and say that a perfect emulation of X is, in fact, X.
You say that you are "under the strong impression that others experience the world similarly" to yourself -- well, why is that ? I would argue that your "strong impression" is actually based on evidence (well, that, and possibly some biologically programmed response, but mostly evidence). You converse with others and they respond in certain ways that are consistent with the hypothesis that they, like yourself, are conscious. Sure, they could be perfect sleepwalkers, but that is a less parsimonious hypothesis.
Thus, again, I see no need for dualistic assumptions of any kind, which includes qualia. Besides, dualism doesn't actually explain anything, it just replaces one mystery with another, because now you have to explain how it is that qualia do what they do -- in the total absence of any empirical evidence, as well as any possibility of acquiring such. Well, ok, you don't have to explain it (I'm not the boss of you), but then you're stuck with a kind of mental elan vital that gets you nowhere.
P.S.: For what it's worth (which admittedly isn't much), I personally recall having both kinds of dreams: the kind where I knew I was dreaming, and the kind that seemed so real that, upon waking, it took me some time to figure out whether or not the events in the dream had actually occurred. Thus, I have no trouble imagining a perfect sleepwalker who would answer "No" when you asked her whether she was dreaming or not.
(edited for style)
I think you're confusing me and Yvain. I'll take that as a complement, though!
I agree with pretty much everything you've said here - but it's posed as though to stand as an argument against what I think, so I'm a little bit concerned that we're not talking about the same thing. For instance, you say:
I agree, dualism is unnecessary as far as we know. It's hard for me to conceive of a type of evidence that would ever suggest that we need dualism.
However, the existence of qualia does not immediately require dualism. The term "qualia" just points to the experiences we have that currently seem to sit on the "other side" of the hard problem of consciousness with respect to our current empirical knowledge. Presumably, we will eventually find a reductionist answer to the hard problem of consciousness. In the meantime, though, we still need a way of talking about the phenomenon in question. Qualia don't play the same role in this question that vis vitalis did with vitalism; it isn't that we're trying to answer the hard problem by saying "subjective experience is made up of qualia", but instead we're trying to describe how subjective experience presents itself to us. We see red, and this experience of redness seems to have a certain character to it, so we tag it with the descriptor of being the quale of red. The question is, how is it that there is a conscious experience induced by neurons firing in response to stimulation of the optic nerve? We know how visual perception works, but as far as I know we don't very well know how the quale of red appears from that. It's a statement of the question, not a phlogiston-class proclamation masquerading as an answer.
Does that clarify where I'm coming from on this? It's not dualism (or at least I'm pretty darn sure it's not!); it's just naming a confusion in as much detail as possible.
Oops, I think you may be right, I'm sorry and/or you're welcome. Heh.
Anyway, oddly enough, I understand the details of your argument, but I don't see the big picture that you're presenting. You reject the proposal that qualia are dualistic in nature, so we're definitely on the same page here. But then you ask,
I agree that this is a hard question (seeing as it hasn't been fully answered yet), but I don't see this question as categorically different from questions such as "how is our blood flow regulated ?" or "how does visual perception work in humans ?". Presumably, a sleepwalker's brain, or a robot's circuitry, or a zombie's... er... goo or whatever it is zombies have, would implement this functionality in different ways than normal human brains do; and we could tell whether the sleepwalker/robot/zombie implements this functionality or not by talking to them (as you have pointed out in your thought experiment).
So, would you agree that the question "how does consciousness work" is no different from "how does blood flow work" ? If not (as I suspect is the case), then what's the difference ?
By the way, when people talk about qualia, they usually claim that we all share the same ones. Thus, for example, when I see something that I experience as "red", and you see something else (or maybe even the same object) that you experience as "red", we are both using the same exact quale to experience that stuff with. There's pretty much nowhere to go from this premise other than toward dualism, which is why I'd originally assumed you were going toward that route. But now I think that you'd reject the premise just as I do -- is that correct ?
Ah, then perhaps I'm more confused than I thought! I still haven't identified the source of my confusion, though.
Er... Yes and no. I agree that eventually we should be able to find an answer that sounds as reduced as an answer to "How does blood flow work?" does. But from where we currently stand, they seem to be really, incredibly fundamentally different questions - as long as you understand the question "How does consciousness work?" to be in the hard sense rather than in the easy one.
I think you get near to the crux of the matter in this statement:
Yes, presumably that's the case, and eventually we'll nail that down. But from what we can currently tell, there doesn't seem to be even an in-principle plausible mechanism for adding qualia to a computer's way of processing things. A computer receives input, does some well-defined manipulations, and offers output. Where do qualia come into play? How is it we get the subjective impression of there being a "someone" who is "watching" what's going on in the Cartesian theater? The very concept is internally inconsistent (e.g., how does the homunculus experience?), but the point is the same: there doesn't seem to be any plausible way that we have currently thought of to get from neurons firing to qualia.
I guess the categorical difference is that when asking about blood flow, there's someone who experiences the question and the data and the subsequent answer; but when asking about consciousness, it's the very process of being able to understand the question in the first place that we're asking about. I'm not sure that's entirely equivalent to the hard problem, though.
You might find it helpful to read the Wikipedia page on the hard problem. That might help to explain some of the nuances better than I've been able to thus far. (In particular, it helps to point out that by "hard problem" I don't mean "a challenging problem" but rather "a problem whose potential to be answered even in theory seems in question.")
Again, I think that was Yvain.
How well established is it that they are equivalent? The second, qualia version seems much less mysterious to me.
ETA: I completely forgot that you wrote an article on that, sorry. There were two people in the comments whose comments seemed to suggest that they lack a "mind's eye", Garth and Blueberry.
Note that you are using potentially confusing analogies and therefore terminology here. Some people, e.g. my dad, are unable to see anything with their "mind's eye". Indeed, those people don't even know what you mean by that. If you ask them if they are able to imagine a beautiful sunset then they think that you are asking them if they could describe or paint a sunset (database query), they do not understand that you ask them to simulate a beautiful sunset visually and experience it with their "mind's eye" as if dreaming. My dad can only experience visual images if they actually happen live, but he has visual dreams when asleep. That's how I figured this out in the first place, by asking if he is able to deliberately cause dream-like sensory experiences that do not correlate with the outside world (he can't, it is all "black"). I asked others and there are quite a few people who are not capable of "daydreaming" (my mom is). I don't know how else to call this but a lack of a certain type of consciousness.
I find David Chalmers's explanation of what is meant by "qualia" and "subjective experience" and "something its like to be" the easiest to understand. For example, read the first chapter of <i>The Conscious Mind</i>.
The Knowledge Argument above refers to the fictional story of Mary the color scientist. She was raised in a black and white environment and never saw color. But she read textbooks on color theory (printed in black and white, of course.) The question is, when she finally experiences the color blue, how is that different from the previous knowledge she had about what the color blue would be like? That different extra aspect to the actual experience is what we refer to as qualia, and how such an experience can be caused by physical processes is (in Chalmers's terminology that has now been widely adopted) the Hard Problem.
That's a really clear description! Thanks for summarizing it.
I suspect it's highly relevant that if someone were to actually grow up in a grayscale environment, they wouldn't be capable of experiencing blue. Even if the optic nerve had somehow retained the ability to transmit data from cones, the brain simply would not be wired for blue-processing. I'm pretty sure her brain would interpret a colored world the way a black-and-white television would. (This is my understanding of neuroscience, by the way, not my stab at philosophy.)
I haven't taken the time to think carefully about the implications of this. It just seems suspicious to me that one of the clearest descriptions of qualia I've encountered involves a process that's neurologically implausible to enact.
Results of gene therapy for color blindness suggest otherwise. Maybe those monkeys and mice cannot experience colors, but they react as if they can.
I'm really want to try this myself. Infrared sensitive opsin in a retina, isn't it wonderful?
Does this article help? The knowledge argument is a famous argument that tries to pump the intuition about the existence of qualia, which are the source of the 'hard problem' of consciousness.
Thanks for the link but it still doesn't make sense to me (I've tried to understand what this qualia thing a few times before and I am still baffled about what it is and why everyone other than me thinks it's real).
I can't find the source but I recall reading the following interesting point: different people might possess different degrees of qualia, perhaps ranging down to none, and that perhaps some or all of the debate could be explained by this fact. So maybe it's just your brain. You've read the qualia wikipedia article I assume? It's a pretty obvious concept for most people- whether or not it is 'real'. Perhaps you recall wondering as a child if when other people saw something green they saw the same color you did: "Maybe what you see when you look at things called 'green' is what I see when I look at things called 'orange'. How would we know?'" The aspect of color that cannot be communicated and generates this worry is the qualia of 'greenness',
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Yeah. Except you're not the physically impossible kind since you're actually reporting your lack of qualia- and I'm not sure you actually lack qualia entirely- it's just very weak in you. +1 For Less Wrong neurodiversity. Would you be offended if I prodded you with questions about how you think? (Heck, I sort of think you should just start a discussion post called "I'm a zombie AMA".)
Yes quite happy to answering anything. In fact I sort of preemptively started already! I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough to make an AMA worthwhile for the people asking though.
If I get to anything too private, feel free to tell me to frack off.
Do you know your IQ? Have you been diagnosed with any condition listed in the DSM?
Are there any cognitive tasks that you find yourself notably worse than average (especially compared to those with similar IQs)? What about tasks that you find yourself to be notably better than average?
Can you got into detail about this:
What games/experiments?
Would you say you have a good sense of humor? Can you reliably read someone's emotions from non-verbal cues? Do you have empathy for others that are suffering? Does music evoke emotions in you? Ever been in love?
Let's say you are in a situation which could lead to either excitement or anxiety. When you learn that you are anxious and not excited does that information just come to you verbally? Do you read physical signs of your body? For most people the way we know whether we are excited or anxious is that these emotions feel different- their qualia are different (or at least that is how we report learning about our emotional state... I'm not entirely sure that story is right).
By the way, I'd be interested in your opinion on my comment here, are you able to deliberately cause dream-like, simulated sensory experiences that do not correlate with the outside world?
I am able to simulate sensory input, i.e. dream deliberately, enter my personal Matrix (Holodeck). I can see, hear, feel and smell without the presence of light, sound, tactile or olfactory sensory input. That is, I do not need to undergo certain conditions to consciously experience them. They do not have to happen live, I can imagine them, simulate them. I can replay previous and create new sensory experiences in my mind, i.e. perceive them with my minds eye. I can pursue and experience activities inside my head without any environmental circumstances, i.e. all I need is my body. I can walk through a park, see and hear children playing, feel and smell the air, while being weightlessness in a totally dark and quiet zero gravity environment. Can you do that?
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Well, "the philosophical zombie is a hypothetical person whose behavior is indistinguishable from an ordinary person, but who lacks conscious experience." That's nonsensical, but you could however lack conscious experience while acting differently, e.g. not being able to comprehend the concept of qualia.
Excellent point.
Maybe it's better to start from obvious things. Color experience, for example. Can you tell which light of traffic lights is illuminated while you are not using position of light and you aren't asking himself which color it is? Is there something in your perception of different lights that allows you to tell that they are different?
The cones in the eye detect three different aspects of light (redness, greenness, blueness) and these are sent to the brain in three different fibers. By this mechanism we see there's nothing magic going on in telling the difference between two colors. I guess the rods (which detect variation in brightness) are more relevant to the question of which light is on though.
I doubt that you think about rods and cones when you are deciding if it's safe to cross the road. The question is: is there something in your perception of illuminated traffic light, that allows you to say that it is red or green or yellow? Or maybe you just know that it is green or yellow, but you can't see any differences but position and luminosity?
I don't understand what the question is getting at. You're right that I don't think about cones when I check which color a light is, but this is the mechanism by which it enters my brain: since different lights enter my brain in different ways it is no surprise I can differentiate between them.
I am getting there. There's a phenomenon called blindsight type 1. Try to imagine that you have "color blindsight", i.e. you can't differentiate between colors, but you can guess above chance what color it is. In this condition you lack qualia of colors.
Not to be dismissive of a chunk of philosophy, but your post is akin to "I've tried to understand elan vital, but I keep running into problems integrating it with my biology course".
Materialists should be able to answer "why do people think they have qualia" without it being a mystery.
Even the most strident eliminative materialists understand what is meant by qualia. You don't have to integrate a concept into your theory to understand what it means.
It's hard to understand because it's confused.
I would ask them to state their definition of consciousness, "describe and model the principal features of consciousness", to be able to discern if they actually believe that science is inept or if the true problem is the terminological vagueness. Personally I don't know what is meant by consciousness.
Here is a starting point for those who wish to delve into the topic of consciousness and cognitive science (not a recommendation, just part of my personal ToDo list):
I liked the Ego Tunnel, and Metzinger has a longer more detailed (but worse written, prose-wise) book called Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity
There are in fact some plausible scientific hypotheses that try to isolate particular physical states associated with "qualia". Without giving references to those, obviously, as I'm sure you'll all agree, there is no reason to debate the truth of physicalism.
The mentioned approach is probably bogus, and seems to be a rip-off of Marvin Minsky's older A-B brain ideas in "The Society of Mind". I wish I were a "cognitive scientist" it would be so much easier to publish!
However, needless to say any such hypothesis must be founded on the correct philosophical explanation, which is pretty much neurophysiological identity theory. I don't see a need to debate that, either. Debates of dualism etc. are for the weak minded.
Furthermore, awareness is not quite the same thing as phenomenal consciousness, either. Awareness itself is a quite high cognitive function. But a system could have phenomenal consciousness without any discernible perceptual awareness. I suspect that these theories are not sufficiently informed by neuroscience and philosophy, but neither am I going to offer free clues about the solution to that :) For now, let us just say that it is entirely plausible that small nervous systems (like that of an insect) with no possibility of higher order representations still may have subjective experience. There is also a hint of anthropocentricism in the cited approach (we're conscious because we can make those higher order representations...), which I usually think points to the falsehood of a theory of mind (similar errors are often seen on this site, as well).
Is Dennett to blame here? I hope not :/ Dennett has many excellent ideas, but his approach to consciousness may push the people the wrong way (as it has some flavor of behaviorism, which is not the most advanced view).
I was looking some things up after you mentioned this, and after reading a bit about it, qualia appears to be extremely similar to sensory memory.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_memory)
These quotes about them from Wikipedia(with the names removed) seem to do a good job describing the similarity:
'The information represented in ### is the "raw data" which provides a snapshot of a person's overall sensory experience.' 'Another way of defining ### is as "raw feels." A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition.'
If you think about this in P-zombie terms, and someone attempts to say "A P-zombie is a person who has sensory memory, but not qualia." I'm not sure what would even be the difference between that and a regular person. Either one can call on their sensory memory to say "I am experiencing redness right now, and now I am experiencing my experiences of redness" and it would seem to be correct if that is what is in their sensory memory. There doesn't appear to be anything left for qualia to explain, and it feels a lot like the question is dissolved at that point.
Is this approximately correct, or is there something else that qualia attempts to explain that sensory memory doesn't that I'm not perceiving?
Subjective experience isn't limited to sensory experience, a headache, or any feeling, like happiness, without any sensory reason, would also count. The idea is that you can trace most of those to electrical/biochemical states. Might be why some drugs can make you feel happy and how anesthetics work!
I don't know what phenomenal consciousness or subjective experience means. Could you please give a reference or explanation for these terms?
Do you understand the difference between being asleep and being awake?
It seems like a subtle question which I could be missing the point of, so I'll explain my answer instead of just saying "yes": When awake someone is generally acting based on their sensory inputs and plan. When asleep they are in one of several different sleep stages, I don't know much about these different states but I'll say in general that I think they are still (using the HOT terminology) creature-conscious of sensory inputs (that's how you can wake from the alarm clock) but they are not transitive-conscious (except in the cases when you incorporate these into your dreams).
Let me also add that I've been re-reading the wiki and Stanford encyclopedia pages on all these terms and it makes just as much sense as last time I tried to understand what it's all about (none). I'm a bit worried about people getting angry at me for not "getting it" as fast as they did but hopefully people on LW are more forgiving than what I'm used to.
Chimera writes: I'm a bit worried about people getting angry at me for not "getting it"
You are what? Worried? Worried is a conscious experience. A movie of you being worried does not show someone else being worried, it shows an unconscious image that looks like you being worried. An automaton built to duplicate your behavior when you are worried feels nothing, there is nothing (no consciousness) there to feel anything, but when you are doing that stuff people know and more importantly, you know how you feel and what it means to feel worried.
Imagine a world filled with disney animatronic robots all programmed to behave like real world people in our world behaved. Unless you think all those singing ghosts in the Haunted Mansion at disneyland are feeling happy and scared, then you can know what is being discussed here by imagining the difference between what images of people feel (nothing) and what actual people feel.
Good luck with this.
I would argue that if someone constructed an automaton that behaved exactly like I would in any given real-world situation -- including novel situations, which Disney automatons can't handle -- then that automaton would, for all intents and purposes, be as conscious as I am. In fact, this automaton would, in fact, be a copy of me.
Let's imagine that tonight, while you sleep, evil aliens replace everyone else in your home town (except for yourself, that is) with one of those perfect automatons. Would you be able to tell that this had occurred ? If so, how would you determine this ?
Perhaps I might not know the difference, but I am not the only observer here. Would the people replaced know the difference?
Fooling you by replacing me is one thing. Fooling me by replacing me is an entirely more difficult thing to do.
Well, presumably, the original people who were replace would indeed know the difference, as they watch helplessly from within the bubbling storage tanks where the evil aliens / wizards / whomever had put them prior to replacing them with the automatons.
The more interesting question is, would the automatons believe that they were the originals ? My claim is that, in order to emulate the originals perfectly with 100% accuracy -- which is what this thought experiment requires -- the automatons would have to believe that they were, in fact, original; and thus they would have to be conscious.
You could probably say, "ah-hah, sure the automatons may believe that they are the originals, but they're wrong ! The originals are back on the mothership inside the storage vats !" This doesn't sound like a very fruitful objection to me, however, since it doesn't help you prove that the automatons are not conscious -- merely that they aren't composed of the same atoms as some other conscious beings (the ones inside the vats). So what, everyone is made of different atoms, you and I included.
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You skated past the hard problem of consciousness right there. Why does "acting based on sensory inputs and a plan" correlate with "being awake"?
It's just the term "awake" is defined that way, or is that wrong?
It depends on whether your definition of "sensory input" and "acting on a plan" already require the concept of being conscious. Functionalists have definitions of those concepts which are just about relations of causality (sensory input = something outside the nervous system affects something inside the nervous system) and isomorphism (plan = combinatorial structure in nervous system with limited isomorphism to possible future world-states). And the point of the original question is that when you know you're awake, it's not because you know that your nervous system currently contains a combinatorial structure possessing certain isomorphisms to the world, that stands in an appropriate causal relation to the actions of your body. In fact, that is something that you deduce from (1) knowing that you are awake (2) having a functionalist theory of consciousness.
So, when you are awake (or "conscious"), how do you know that you are conscious?
When awake you are not necessarily transitively conscious of it - I think usually we are but there are times when we 'zone out' and only have first order thoughts.
OK. But it seems (according to your answer) that when I am awake and knowing it, it's because I'm transitively conscious of something. Transitively conscious of what?
of being awake, as defined above: "I notice that I am taking audio-visual input from my environment and acting on it". (The quote should be 'noninferential, nondispositional and assertoric' but I am not completely sure it is of that nature, if not, my mistake)
That is the hard problem, actually. If we could operationalize those terms, we would be able to study what they refer to with a reductionist lens. Until then, we're kind of stuck using words to point at experience rather than at structural definitions.
In case you're honestly not sure what everyone is talking about, though: There's a difference between red as a certain frequency of light and red as experienced. Yes, we know there's a strong connection between the two, and we can describe in some fair detail how a certain frequency of light stimulates optic nerves and is processed in the brain and so on. But it's not at all clear how we get from those mechanical processes to the experience of red. We don't experience red as a frequency; we experience it as red! That latter bit, the redness of red, is what people refer to as the qualium of red. ("Qualium" is the singular form of "qualia".)
The reductionist thesis maintains that there must be a way to reduce the connection between physical mechanisms and qualia down to mechanisms. The hard problem of consciousness is that no one seems to be able to come up with even an in-principle plausible way of making that connection. In other words, everyone is confused but doesn't have a clear way to even start dispelling the confusion. People like Daniel Dennett have made efforts, but many people question whether their efforts even count as progress.
So in short: "phenomenal consciousness" refers to the experience of qualia, although we don't know what that means aside from pointing at the fact that everyone seems to experience qualia and that mechanisms affect but don't seem to be qualia. "Subjective experience" usually refers to the same thing, but is often used to emphasize the fact that the experience of qualia seems to depend on the individual; e.g., you don't experience my experiencing red the way I do and vice versa.
"Quale", according to Wiktionary, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and my 1993 Random House unabridged dictionary (which gives the pronunciations KWAH-lee, KWAH-lay, and KWAY-lee).
Edit for completeness:
For the plural, "qualia", the Random House gives the pronunciations KWAH-lee-uh and KWAY-lee-uh.
(The second edition OED pronunces "quale" as KWAY-lee but does not include "qualia" at all.)
Ah, I had been misinformed! I was informed it was the Latin neuter form, which uses "-um" for singular endings and "-a" for plural. Thanks for the correction!
Has anyone else on the site read/encountered Metzinger's work? I read the Ego Tunnel and am working through Being No One, and I'm fairly impressed.
He often refers to various mental disorders and abnormal phenomenal states in order to separate out individual parts of consciousness, and is one of the most hardcore materialists I've ever read.
I was reading through some of these comments, and now I'm not sure if I'm normal. When one imagines images, is it the same as dreaming or seeing? I can imagine what my room looks like around me, but all I "see" is black.
Is there a scientific/mechanical model that would enable a machine to feel pain? Not react to pain as if it did feel pain, but to actually feel pain in the same sense as a human does? The answer is no, there is nothing in science or philosophy that can come up with such a model even in theory, much less using current technology.
And that is only a small part of consciousness. Our abilities to understand and appreciate 'meaning', our vision, imagination, sense of free will....our general human experience of ourselves and our environment cannot be mathematically modeled or completely understood rationally. That makes some rationalists so uncomfortable that they deny the phenomenon of consciousness even exists at all, that its just an illusion. What an amazing conclusion that is!
Do you know how to distinguish "actually feeling pain" from "acting as if" it feels pain?
If so, do tell.
If not, would you perhaps also claim that a machine which passes the Turing test is not "actually" conscious, but merely "acts as if" it is conscious ?
Anti-reductionists are always quick to point at "qualia", "subjective experience", "consciousness" (or the subjective experience of pain, in this case) as examples of Great Big Unexplained Mysteries which have not been/can not be solved by science, but they can never quite explain what exactly the problem is, or what a solution would look like.
A solution would help dissolve our confusion about how the territory of our consciousness can be produced by the map that is our brain's computation.
I feel I've made some small progress on elements of that front after connecting some seperate ideas from other fields, like Tegmark IV, fractals and great attractors, and calculus. I hope to most some of these ideas later this month, or on February.
Well, I suppose you'd do it the same way you'd distinguish "actually has a cat in a box" from "pretending to have a cat in a box" (without checking the box).
I do think there's something weird going on with consciousness - why there is something that thinks it has the experience of having thoughts and experiences is as yet unexplained, and is tricky to talk about given the inability to directly access the subject matter - but I imagine it's in principle explicable.
And saying we need to find a "mysterious" way of understanding it... well, there are all sorts of reasons why that's not going to work.
If there is no way to check the content of the box, ever, in any conceivable way, then there is no difference, period.
Sure. But that's not true of cats / boxes, nor is it necessarily true of consciousness (based on the notion that consciousness is in principle explicable / reducible). The parallels being that we can't check now, the person acts in such a way that the cat/consciousness is/isn't a parsimonious explanation of their behavior, it might be difficult to check, you can fake it (to some degree), you can be wrong about it... and perhaps the cat might be a delusion.
Moreover, some people here claim to have values that encompass things that they cannot in principle interact with in any way (things external to their light cone, for example), so I'm not sure your assertion is unproblematic. If you're going to step on my box, it matters to me whether there's a cat in it, even if you can't check that, and it might in fact matter to you as well. But facts tend to have ripples, so it seems likely that there is, in principle at least, a way to check the catbox.
The fact that the problem cannot be explained is because of the limitations of language/logic/reason....the tools that we rely on to explain mechanical phenomenon. Things that require equal signs.
The fact that this subject is not easilly explainable is not a hit against our side, it is a hit against your side. It is the non-rational aspect of consciousness that makes it seemingly impossible to explain in the first place.
The reaction of reductionists and some rationalists (I argue that it is quite rational to conlude that this is indeed a mystery as of present time) that because we cannot explain what that sensation of 'pain' is then it may not exist to begin with is dubious at best.
"You can't explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury" is a hit against Newton's theory of gravity.
"You can't explain "zoink", and I can't tell you what "zoink" is, nor what an explanation of "zoink" would look like" is not a hit against anything.
Also, arguments are not soldiers, and talking about "hits" and "sides" is unwise.
There have, in history, been many occasions where something was not understood. When temperature was not understood, it was still possible to explain to someone what this ill-understood "temperature" was. Specifically, it is simple to make sure that your notion of "colour" or "temperature" is similar to my notion of "colour" or "temperature" even if I don't understand what "colour" and "temperature" are.
I predict that there has never been a concept that
was not understood at some point in time
was "not easily explicable" in the sense that "the subjective experience of pain" is not easily explicable
later turned out to be well-defined and to "cut reality at its joints"
If you can come up with an example of such a concept, I will start taking arguments from vague not-easily-explicable concepts far more seriously.
On the other hand, there are at least some concepts that
were not understood at some point in time
were "not easily explicable" in the sense that "the subjective experience of pain" is not easily explicable
turned out to be completely bogus
namely, the concepts of "soul", "god", etc...
Sorry for the allegorical language if it offended you.
There is a difference between not finding a solution for a problem, and not even understanding what a solution may look like even in the abstract form.
It is also not a good sign when the problem gets to be more of a mystery the more science we discover.
The concern here is that we have an irrational view that rationalism is a universal tool. The fact that we have unsolved scientific and intellectual problems is not a proof of that. The fact that there seem to be problems that in their very nature seem to be unsolvable by reason is.
I am not offended
Certainly. And further on that scale, there is "understanding so little of the problem that you're nor even sure there's a problem in the first place".
Progress on the the P vs NP problem has been largely limited to determining what the solution doesn't look like , and few if any people have any idea what it does look like, or if it (a solution) even exists (might be undecidable).
So, this scale goes
Solved problems
Unsolved problems where we have a pretty good idea what the solution looks like
Unsolved problems where we have no idea what the solution looks like : subjective experience is not here
problems we suspect exist, but can't even define properly in the first place : subjective experience is here!
Consciousness and the subjective experience of pain have not gotten more mysterious the more science we discover. At worst, we understand exactly as much now as we did when we started, i.e. nothing (and neurologists would certainly argue we do understand more now).
It is. Have a look at Solomonoff induction
It's not proof, but it is evidence.
What makes you think that these problems are "in their very nature unsolvable by reason" ? Is it because you think they are inherently mysterious ?
It is essentially certain that it is possible in principle to construct out of matter a thing which can feel pain, have an experience of self, etc., to the extent that these are meaningful concepts.
The proof is very simple.
Up to this point in human history no rational or scientific model has been presented that would explain how matter could be put together to feel pain. Or feel anything for that matter. Whether it is possible or impossible to do is another conversation.
Sure, no one does or has ever really had a clue where consciousness comes from. What's your point? The way you're saying "no rational or scientific model" rather than "no model whatsoever" implies you think these are poor tools - do you have some alternative in mind?
What we know is that reason is extremely useful when applied to mechanical/material subjects. We should continue to use it in that way.
We know that it has extreme difficulty in explaining and analyzing some key issues, including consciousness and all of its manifestations; pain/pleasure, emotions, imagination, and meaning in general as well as others. Once again, this seems to be the case because consciousness itself is extremely difficult to put into mechanical/material terms. Therefore reason has a problem with it.
If a tool is proficient in explaining some things but not other things, is it 'rational' to consider it a universal tool? In this way I am using reason itself to conclude that it is not a universal tool.
So your question is what then should we use to understand consciousness if not reason?
Just as reason seems to do well in understanding things of a certain nature (mechanical/physical), we can look at consciousness and conclude from its mysteries what kind of tool is needed to give us insight into it.
(Notice that I am still using reason throughout this process, it never really leaves our endeavors. We are just being honest in that we recognize something more is there that is beyond its limits.)
Consciousness does not seem to be mechanical or physical in nature because we are not able to even model in theory an explanation for it. Therefore the tool to be used to understand it should have a much more mysterious/abstract nature. Once we make that conclusion it is a whole other topic as to what that other 'tool' might be. Whatever it is, it will probably be more elusive and less universally apparent throughout the human population than reason is.