IlyaShpitser comments on Building Phenomenological Bridges - Less Wrong

56 Post author: RobbBB 23 December 2013 07:57PM

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Comment author: IlyaShpitser 23 December 2013 09:51:15PM 1 point [-]

Indeed, it's precisely because these type errors happen explicitly within a mind that humans go around talking about a "hard problem of conscious experience". The problem of selecting a phenomenological bridge hypothesis is a generalization of the problem of reducing human-style conscious experience to unconscious computation.

This is a great post, but it is not made better by this quote.

Comment author: Benito 24 December 2013 12:54:30PM 2 points [-]

I think the value is increased by this section - could you make your criticism more precise?

Comment author: RobbBB 23 December 2013 10:53:39PM 2 points [-]

Are you objecting to talking about the hard problem here? Or to something about the way I talked about it?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 24 December 2013 04:34:42PM *  3 points [-]

I guess I think it is distracting. Someone like Chalmers is unlikely to be convinced (since he thinks there's something more to the problem than a reductive explanation), and the resulting argument is sort of orthogonal to the main thrust of the post (which is naturalized induction). I think it's unwise to fight on multiple fronts at once.

Similar situation would be: someone writes a great post on decision theory and concludes with "btw deontologists are confused."

Comment author: RobbBB 24 December 2013 07:05:41PM *  3 points [-]

I guess I think it is distracting. Someone like Chalmers is unlikely to be convinced

Convinced of what? The only thing the paragraph you cited mentions is that (a) the hard problem concerns bridge hypotheses, and (b) the hard problem arises for minds (and not, say, squirrels or digestion) and is noticed by minds because minds type their subprocesses differently. Are those especially partisan or extreme statements? What would Chalmers' alternatives to (a) or (b) be?

I bring up the hard problem here because it's genuinely relevant. It's a real problem, and it really is hard. It's not a confusion, or if it is then it's not obvious how best to dissolve it. If the framework I provide above helps philosophers and psychological theorists like Chalmers come up with new and better theories for how human consciousness relates to neural computations, so much the better.

Comment author: HoverHell 13 January 2014 04:21:17PM 1 point [-]

It's not a confusion, or if it is then it's not obvious how best to dissolve it.

Note that there are many views and formulations that are all called “the hard problem of consciousness”, even though some of them are sufficienty different to need separate consideration (and sufficiently different for one formulation to need a conclusion and other one to need dissolution).

Also, I suspect that least one formulation that is called “hard problem of consciousness” can be interpreted as “figuring out the most plausible bridge mapping (given a physical world) for myself”.