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Viliam_Bur comments on How do you notice when you are ignorant of necessary alternative hypotheses? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (69)
It's like eating a tasty cake, and asking: "How did you make this cake?", and receiving an answer: "It's made of atoms."
The answer is completely useless for cooking, and doesn't explain anything about how the person actually made the cake. If someone is using this as an explanation in a cake-making course, they should be fired, because they don't provide useful knowledge.
Technically, the answer remains true.
Also, consciousness has emerged from the interaction of atoms. But without more details, this answer is useless for any practical purpose. Yeah, there are atoms everywhere, and they interact all the time. Sometimes, consciousness emerges. Most of the time, it doesn't. The important question is what makes the difference.
Luckily with consciousness, we have a broad idea of how it emerges: The processing of information (a physically measurable property) by certain structures with many feedback loops (particularly brains) causes the emergence of consciousness; and in particular saying that it's emergent tells us that consciousness relates to the structure AND dynamics of the brain, and not to some intangible glob of soul attached to it.
So saying "emergence" plus the one sentence above actually gets us really far out of the land of mysticism.
Still, isn't "emerges" even there a shortcut for "then it somehow happens... but I don't know how specifically"?
To rephrase what you wrote:
Of course it feels much less convincing when written this way. As it should. Because it honestly admits that I actually don't know the details, and maybe some critical part is still missing.
It's incomplete, but that's okay.
Concretely, this hypothesis tells us to look at physical structures and neuronal activity in the brain and compare them across individuals and species, and that this
The field of neuroscience seems to bear this out. Our perceptions and emotions are accounted for by brain activity. Seemingly deeper issues like memory formation and temporal perception, have been successfully localized and understood to a great degree.
In particular, even though we don't understand there's no obvious gaps. The phenomena we still don't understand seem hard to understand because they are high-level or occur very diffusely, not because they aren't generated by the activity of neurons in the brain (hypothetical contradictory evidence would be people reporting some type of highly distinctive experience [say out-of-body, or less mystically deja vu] while an MRI shows no deviation from normal resting activity).
"Accounted for" is ambiguous between "correlated with", and "explained by".
By perceptions I mean our senses and by emotions I mean broad emotions like sadness, anger and excitement.
These sorts of lower-level experiences, which are also present in animals, are fully accounted for, correlated with AND explained by neural and chemical activity in the brain. By reading the electrical activity of your neurons, I could figure out what you were seeing. By electrically stimulating a certain part of the brain, I could make you feel angry or happy or sad.
This level of deep mechanistic understanding seems to be coming for other phenomena, but yes that is a prediction of the future so no I can't prove it right this second.
Train a blind from birth person in your technique.
Hand them a braille readout of the neural activity of someone looking at a tomato.
Would they now know how red the things look to a sighted person?
Yes, they could easily tell the distribution of color receptor activation.
Not what I asked.
Then what are you asking. Please, precisely define what it would mean to "know how red the things look".
This is a statement of materialism, not evidence or an argument that it is true.
The evidence for consciousness being a material phenomenon -- the only evidence, as far as I can see -- is the remarkable correspondence observed between physical brain phenomena and mental phenomena. But we have no knowledge of how matter produces consciousness. The hard example against which materialist woo (not all woo is mystical woo) generally fails is, "does this purported explanation predict the absence of consciousness in the cerebellum and motor control?"
ETA: Compare this with the materialist claim that the heart is a pump. Leonardo da Vinci could see that that it's a pump just by dissecting it. We can see the mechanism, model it, show how electrical signals trigger the beats, understand dysfunctions like fibrillation, implant artificial pacemakers that work pretty well, and use external pumps to take over the function during heart surgery. We know how the heart works to produce the "emergent" property of pumping blood, and we can make pumps to perform the same function. All of this is so far missing from our knowledge of consciousness.
The evidence of the materialist view seems very strong to me; in particular, pretty much all of neuroscience bears it out; as you note there is:
the remarkable correspondence observed between physical brain phenomena and mental phenomena
And I disagree that it fails at
"does this purported explanation predict the absence of consciousness in the cerebellum and motor control?"
Comparative neuroscience between species or patients with certain types of brain damage really does give us a concrete idea of how "more complex" and "higher-order" cognition, at the very least part of the puzzle of consciousness, correlates with the presence of certain types of anatomical structures.
Is the brain much more complex than a pump? Sure. Does that mean that any hypothesis is anywhere near the purely materialist one? No. And even weird quantum effects, though there's no strong evidence for them, still fall under the umbrella of materialism.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against materialism, just pointing out that we have no idea how it works.
A catalogue of brain regions that do correspond to conscious experience and those that do not does not amount to an explanation of how those that do, do, and those that don't, don't.
Not just a catalogue; an understanding of their anatomical differences at the macroscopic and microscopic level, detailed studies of their electrical activities, and soon enough a neuron-level connectome to complement ever-more-fine-grained monitoring of electrical activity. This would provide the means to match more and more experiences to specific neuronal activity (or large complex - but still quantifiable - patterns of neuronal activity), including activities like deep introspection, meditation and creative work.
In the more distant future, a brain simulation that behaves like a person would be very strong evidence of the materialist view. If the only Chinese Room or Philosophical Zombie objections remain, then I'd consider the question of consciousness solved or at least dissolved.
You can make the same argument about radios or other devices that are relays for information. Without understanding how a radio works it's really hard to know that the content that the radio plays isn't an emergent phenomena.
When a radio is damaged, all that is affected is the clarity or the presence of the material that is being transmitted. There is no damage to a radio that would make spoken word material sound just the same, except that all nouns naming animals were garbled. The material coming over the radio has aspects to it that malfunctions of the radio may obscure but never manipulate.
In contrast, the correspondences found between brain damage and phenomena of consciousness suggest a very broad connection of the brain to the hypothetical soul, a connection so broad that there seems little work left for the soul to do. "Brain as the antenna of the soul" is at present looking very like "God in the gaps".
I wouldn't see the names of animals as phenomena of consciousness. I would rather label them mental phenomena.
Plenty of people meditate in an effort to raise their level of consciousness and transcend the mind that goes around and labels and judges.
I don't know what distinction you're drawing there. I cannot find different meanings to attach to the phrases "mental phenomena" and "phenomena of consciousness".
I don't know what "raise their level of consciousness and transcend the mind" means either. Labelling and judging are ordinary functions of the mind. I can grok that the name is not the thing without having to regard "naming" as some sort of newage sin.
That's the point. If you are not familiar with the meaning of the terms that the other side of the debate uses, it's hard to understand arguments.
The mind is generally considered as something distinct from consciousness by those people who meditate a lot and have developed a certain kind of self awareness in the process.
I don't think that's a gap of understanding that can be fixed easily, because it's about gathering reference experiences.
Well, I have tried. None of the descriptions that I have read of the results of meditation match up to anything I have experienced. The various things I've read do not seem to agree with each other either. Do these people who meditate a lot even know what the others are talking about? Or am I looking at the equivalent of cryptozoologists describing the characteristics of the Loch Ness Monster?
The comment has about emergentism, but your reply was about soul theory, which is quite different.
Strong emergentism is notoriously badly defined, but a typical version might include:
1 mental phenomena are irreducible, or have an irreducible component
2 mental phenomena are not predictable from neural activity by standard physical laws
3 mental phenomena phenomena are related to neural activity by special psychophysical laws
Note that 3 guarantees a close relationship between neural activity and consciousness.
...
Is anyone claiming to have found any yet?
No, but that's another issue, again.
I do not get this analogy. We know quite a bit about how the brain work at the neuronal level. A rigorous program of research exists that should gives us an understanding of increasingly coarse modules over time. Simulating a brain in silico is an eventually-achievable method to extensively test almost any hypothesis we could develop.
When I say consciousness is emergent I'm saying that I believe neuroscience will eventually be able to pinpoint the mechanisms of almost any type of higher-order thought, and come up with as-useful-as-is-possible a definition of things like qualia and self-awareness, and that these mechanisms will all relate to complex, dynamic neuronal and chemical behavior in the brain.
An example non-emergent explanation of consciousness would be "the brain is an antenna for ethereal souls", which would be hard to test but would have to be given consideration if the program I outline above completely fails to fully account for thoughts and experiences above a certain complexity.
You just assume that's true. Before we actually do run that simulation in practice we don't know whether that's true.
Yes, and other people do believe in souls and God. We don't have evidence that proves either hypothesis.
Yes, and the brain as an antenna hypothesis is basically what parapsychologists like Dean Radin advocate these days. We don't have yet evidence to prove it wrong.
Saying we could in theory run experiments that if those experiments turn out a certain way would prove our theory right is not the same thing as arguing that there evidence for your theory.
Science lives from distinguishing what you know and what you don't know.
I am making predictions, but they are predictions that a concrete, existing program of research (the field of neuroscience) is trying to test.
I obviously can't conjure this evidence out of thin air, because it doesn't yet exist (and, sure, may never exist). But I am outlining why I believe that calling consciousness emergent is a perfectly valid, predictive hypothesis in the context of neuroscience (saying 'phenomena X is emergent' is, I believe, not an empty statement at all but instead more-or-less equivalent to saying "The question 'What singular external thing causes phenomena X' should be dissolved'; with panpsychism being the anti-emergent hypothesis in this case).
And I also believe that emergent consciousness is more likely to be the correct view, and I hope I've given clear reasons why that's so.
You're using "emergent" to mean "reductiomistic", which is pretty much the opposite
I think you don't understand what emergent means. Traffic jams emerge from individual drivers' behavior for instance.
Emergent has more than one meaning.
Are you actually confused by my terminology (in which case I'll clarify) or are you just being pedantic?
Cognition is the Easy Problem.
If I made an in silico simulation of a human brain that could convincingly match human cognition, what would stop you from believing that it was also conscious?
I wouldn't say it wasn't and I wouldn't say it was.
A functional duplicate of a qualiaphile would report qualia, even if it didn't have them, and a functional duplicate of a qualiaphobe would deny it had qualia even if it did.
Eta:
In other words, everything is predictable from who's brain is emulated. We need some other test.