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CronoDAS comments on By Which It May Be Judged - LessWrong
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If I knew how the brain worked in sufficient detail, I think I'd be able to explain why this was wrong; I'd have a theory that would predict what qualia a brain experiences based on its structure (or whatever). No, I don't know what the theory is, but I'm pretty confident that there is one.
Can you give me an example of how, even in principle, this would work? Construct a toy universe in which there are experiences causally determined by non-experiences. How would examining anything about the non-experiences tell us that the experiences exist, or what particular way those experiences feel?
Taboo experiences.
It sounds like you're asking me to do what I just asked you to do. I don't know what experiences are, except by listing synonyms or by acts of brute ostension — hey, check out that pain! look at that splotch of redness! — so if I could taboo them away, it would mean I'd already solved the hard problem. This may be an error mode of 'tabooing' itself; that decision procedure, applied to our most primitive and generic categories (try tabooing 'existence' or 'feature'), seems to either yield uninformative lists of examples, implausible eliminativisms (what would a world without experience, without existence, or without features, look like?), or circular definitions.
But what happens when we try to taboo a term is just more introspective data; it doesn't give us any infallible decision procedure, on its own, for what conclusion we should draw from problem cases. To assert 'if you can't taboo it, then it's meaningless!', for example, is itself to commit yourself to a highly speculative philosophical and semantic hypothesis.
In general, I would suggest as much looking at sensory experiences that vary among humans; there's already enough interesting material there without wondering if there are even other differences. Can we explain enough interesting things about the difference between normal hearing and pitch perfect hearing without talking about qualia?
Once we've done that, are we still interested in discussing qualia in color?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/p5/brain_breakthrough_its_made_of_neurons/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/p3/angry_atoms/
So your argument is "Doing arithmetic requires consciousness; and we can tell that something is doing arithmetic by looking at its hardware; so we can tell with certainty by looking at certain hardware states that the hardware is sentient"?
So your argument is "We have explained some things physically before, therefore we can explain consciousness physically"?
So your argument is "Mental states have physical causes, so they must be identical with certain brain-states"?
Set aside whether any of these would satisfy a dualist or agnostic; should they satisfy one?
Well, it's certainly possible to do arithmetic without consciousness; I'm pretty sure an abacus isn't conscious. But there should be a way to look at a clump of matter and tell it is conscious or not (at least as well as we can tell the difference between a clump of matter that is alive and a clump of matter that isn't).
It's a bit stronger than that: we have explained basically everything physically, including every other example of anything that was said to be impossible to explain physically. The only difference between "explaining the difference between conscious matter and non-conscious matter" and "explaining the difference between living and non-living matter" is that we don't yet know how to do the former.
I think we're hitting a "one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens" here. Physicalism implies that the "hard problem of consciousness" is solvable; physicalism is true; therefore the hard problem of consciousness has a solution. That's the simplest form of my argument.
Basically, I think that the evidence in favor of physicalism is a lot stronger than the evidence that the hard problem of consciousness isn't solvable, but if you disagree I don't think I can persuade you otherwise.
No abacus can do arithmetic. An abacus just sits there.
No backhoe can excavate. A backhoe just sits there.
A trained agent can use an abacus to do arithmetic, just as one can use a backhoe to excavate. Can you define "do arithmetic" in such a manner that it is at least as easy to prove that arithmetic has been done as it is to prove that excavation has been done?
Does a calculator do arithmetic?
I've watched mine for several hours, and it hasn't. Have you observed a calculator doing arithmetic? What would it look like?
No, you haven't. (p=0.9)
It could look like an electronic object with a plastic shell that starts with "(23 + 54) / (47 * 12 + 76) + 1093" on the screen and some small amount of time after an apple falls from a tree and hits the "Enter" button some number appears on the screen below the earlier input, beginning with "1093.0", with some other decimal digits following.
If the above doesn't qualify as the calculator doing "arithmetic" then you're just using the word in a way that is not just contrary to common usage but also a terrible way to carve reality.
Upvoted for this alone.
I didn't do that immediately prior to posting, but I have watched my calculator for a cumulative period of time exceeding several hours, and it has never done arithmetic. I have done arithmetic using said calculator, but that is precisely the point I was trying to make.
Does every device which looks like that do arithmetic, or only devices which could in principle be used to calculate a large number of outcomes? What about an electronic device that only alternates between displaying "(23 + 54) / (47 * 12 + 76) + 1093" and "1093.1203125" (or "1093.15d285805de42") and does nothing else?
Does a bucket do arithmetic because the number of pebbles which fall into the bucket, minus the number of pebbles which fall out of the bucket, is equal to the number of pebbles in the bucket? Or does the shepherd do arithmetic using the bucket as a tool?
Well, you do have to press certain buttons for it to happen. ;) And it looks like voltages changing inside an integrated circuit that lead to changes in a display of some kind. Anyway, if you insist on an example of something that "does arithmetic" without any human intervention whatsoever, I can point to the arithmetic logic unit inside a plugged-in arcade machine in attract mode.
And if you don't want to call what an arithmetic logic unit does when it takes a set of inputs and returns a set of outputs "doing arithmetic", I'd have to respond that we're now arguing about whether trees that fall in a forest with no people make a sound and aren't going to get anywhere. :P
Well, yeah. My question:
Is still somewhat important to the discussion. I can't define arithmetic well enough to determine if it has occurred in all cases, but 'changes on a display' is clearly neither necessary nor sufficient.
... which was plugged in and switched on by, well, a human.
I think the OP is using their own idiosyncratic definition of "doing" to require a conscious agent. This is more usual among those confused by free will.
It's impossible to express a sentence like this after having fully appreciated the nature of the Hard Problem. In fact, whether you're a dualist or a physicalist, I think a good litmus test for whether you've grasped just how hard the Hard Problem is is whether you see how categorically different the vitalism case is from the dualism case. See: Chalmers, Consciousness and its Place in Nature.
Physicalism, plus the unsolvability of the Hard Problem (i.e., the impossibility of successful Type-C Materialism), implies that either Type-B Materialism ('mysterianism') or Type-A Materialism ('eliminativism') is correct. Type-B Materialism despairs of a solution while for some reason keeping the physicalist faith; Type-A Materialism dissolves the problem rather than solving it on its own terms.
The probability of physicalism would need to approach 1 in order for that to be the case.
::follows link::
Call me the Type-C Materialist subspecies of eliminativist, then. I think that a sufficient understanding of the brain will make the solution obvious; the reason we don't have a "functional" explanation of subjective experience is not because the solution doesn't exist, but that we don't know how to do it.
This is where I think we'll end up.
It's a lot closer to 1 than a clever-sounding impossibility argument. See: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ph/can_you_prove_two_particles_are_identical/
Can you give me an example of how, even in principle, this would work? Construct a toy universe in which there are computations causally determined by non-computations. How would examining anything about the non-computations tell us that the computations exist, or what particular functions those computations are computing?
My initial response is that any physical interaction in which the state of one thing differentially tracks the states of another can be modeled as a computation. Is your suggestion that an analogous response would solve the Hard Problem, i.e., are you endorsing panpsychism ('everything is literally conscious')?
Sorry, bad example... Let's try again.
Can you give me an example of how, even in principle, this would work? Construct a toy universe in which there are living things causally determined by non-living things? How would examining anything about the non-living things tell us that the living things exist, or what particular way those living things are alive?
"Explain how consciousness arises from non-conscious matter" doesn't seem any more of an impossible problem than "Explain how life arises from non-living matter".
We can define and analyze 'life' without any reference to life: As high-fidelity self-replicating macromolecules that interact with their environments to assemble and direct highly responsive cellular containers around themselves. There doesn't seem to be anything missing from our ordinary notion of life here; or anything that is missing could be easily added by sketching out more physical details.
What might a purely physical definition of consciousness that made no appeal to mental concepts look like? How could we generate a first-person facts from a complex of third-person facts?
What you described as computation could apply to literally any two things in the same causal universe. But you meant two things that track each other much more tightly than usual. It may be that a rock is literally conscious, but if so, then not very much so. So little that it really does not matter at all. Humans are much more conscious because they reflect the world much more, reflect themselves much more, and [insert solution to Hard Problem here].
I dunno. I think if rocks are even a little bit conscious, that's pretty freaky, and I'd like to know about it. I'd certainly like to hear more about what they're conscious of. Are they happy? Can I alter them in some way that will maximize their experiential well-being? Given how many more rocks there are than humans, it could end up being the case that our moral algorithm is dominated by rearranging pebbles on the beach.
Hah. Luckily, true panpsychism dissolves the Hard Problem. You don't need to account for mind in terms of non-mind, because there isn't any non-mind to be found.
I meant, I'm pretty sure that rocks are not conscious. It's just that the best way I'm able to express what I mean by "consciousness" may end up apparently including rocks, without me really claiming that rocks are conscious like humans are - in the same way that your definition of computation literally includes air, but you're not really talking about air.
I don't understand this. How would saying "all is Mind" explain why qualia feel the way they do?
This still doesn't really specify what your view is. Your view may be that strictly speaking nothing is conscious, but in the looser sense in which we are conscious, anything could be modeled as conscious with equal warrant. This view is a polite version of eliminativism.
Or your view may be that strictly speaking everything is conscious, but in the looser sense in which we prefer to single out human-style consciousness, we can bracket the consciousness of rocks. In that case, I'd want to hear about just what kind of consciousness rocks have. If dust specks are themselves moral patients, this could throw an interesting wrench into the 'dust specks vs. torture' debate. This is panpsychism.
Or maybe your view is that rocks are almost conscious, that there's some sort of Consciousness Gap that the world crosses, Leibniz-style. In that case, I'd want an explanation of what it means for something to almost be conscious, and how you could incrementally build up to Consciousness Proper.
The Hard Problem is not "Give a reductive account of Mind!" It's "Explain how Mind could arise from a purely non-mental foundation!" Idealism and panpsychism dissolve the problem by denying that the foundation is non-mental; and eliminativism dissolves the problem by denying that there's such a thing as "Mind" in the first place.