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Mark_Friedenbach comments on Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept - LessWrong
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Comments (229)
I guess physics just lets you quantify what features various elementary particles have in combination, and doesn't actually explain anything?
Physics allows you you quantify, and does much more. Quantification is a necessary condition for a good scientific theory, not a sufficient one...a minimum, not a maximum.
IQ is not a theory of intelligence .. it doesn't tell you what intelligence is.or how it works.
Amongst physicists, to call a model empirical, or "curve fitting" is an insult...the point being that it should not be merely empirical.
Ptolemaic cosmology can .be made as accurate as you like, by adding epicycles. It's still a bad model, because epicycles don't exist.
Copernicus and Kepler get the structure right, but can't explain why it us that way.
Newton can explain the structure and behaviour given gravitational force, but can't say what force is..
Einstein can explain that the force of gravity is space time distortion.....
This succession of models gets better and better at saying what and why things are...iit's not just about quantities.
GR doesn't explain why space time exists though. Quantum theory does, although there we have other problems such as explaining where the Born probabilities come from. At some point you simply stop and say "because that's how the universe works." Positing consciousness as the subjective experience of strongly causally interfering systems (my own theory, which I know doesn't exactly match Tengmark's but is closely related) doesn't tell you why information processing things like us have subjective experience at all. Maybe a future theory will. But even then there will be the question of why that model works the way it does.
Wait - quantum theory explains why spacetime exists? You mean that we can formulate QT without assuming the existence of spacetime, and derive it?
No, but it takes us a step closer than GR...
Your theory may not match Tegmarks, but isn't too far from Calmer's ....implicitly dualistic theory.
I am well aware that you are probably not going to be able to explain everything with no arbitrary axioms but.....fallacy of gray.....where you stop is important. If an apparently high level property is stated as ontologocally fundamental, ie irreducible, that is the essence of dualism
I think it's a mistake to consider consciousness a high-level property. Two electrons interacting are conscious, albeit briefly and in a very limited way.
Is that a fact?
If consciousness is a lower level property...is it casually active?
And if it is a lower level property...why can't I introspect a highly detailed brain scan?
This weakens the concept of consciousness so much as to make it no longer meaningful.
I don't think so. It requires you to be much more precise about what it is that you care about when you are asking "is system X conscious?"
Since GR is essentially a description of the behaviour of spacetime, it isn't GR's job to explain why spacetime exists. More generally, it isn't the job of any theory to explain why that theory is true; it is the job of the theory to be true. Nobody expects [theory X] to include a term that describes the probability of the truth of [theory X], so lacking this property does not deduct points.
There may be a deeper theory that will describe the conditions under which spacetime will or will not exist, and give recipes for cooking up spacetimes with various properties. But there isn't necessarily a deeper layer to the onion. At some point, if you keep digging far enough, you'll hit "The Truth Which Describes the Way The Universe Really Is", although it may not be easy to confirm that you've really hit the deepest layer. The only evidence you'll have is that theories that claim to go deeper cease to be falsifiable, and increase in complexity.
If you can find [Theory Y] which explains [Theory X] and generalizes to other results which you can use to confirm it, or which is strictly simpler, now that's a different case. In that case you have the ammunition to say that [Theory X] really is lacking something.
But picking which laws of physics happen to be true is the universe's job, and if the universe uses any logical system of selecting laws of physics, I doubt it will be easy to find out. The only fact we know about the meta-laws governing the laws of universes is that the laws of our universe fit the bill, and it's likely that that is all the evidence we will ever be able to acquire.
Yes, I agree! Along the same lines, it is not the role of any theory of consciousness to explain why the subjective experience of consciousness exists at all.
Well, unlike a fundamental theory of physics, we don't have strong reasons to expect that consciousness is indescribable in any more basic terms. I think there's a confusion of levels here... GR is a description of how a 4-dimensional spacetime can function and precisely reproduces our observations of the universe. It doesn't describe how that spacetime was born into existence because that's an answer to a different question than the one Einstein was asking.
In the case of consciousness, there are many things we don't know, such as:
1: Can we rigorously draw a boundary around this concept of "consciousness" in concept-space in a way that captures all the features we think it should have, and still makes logical sense as a compact description
2: Can we use a compact description like that to distinguish empirically between systems that are and are not "conscious"
3: Can we use a theory of consciousness to design a mechanism that will have a conscious subjective experience
It's quite possible that answering 1 will make 2 obvious, and if the answer to 2 is "yes", then it's likely that it will make 3 a matter of engineering. It seems likely that a theory of consciousness will be built on top of the more well-understood knowledge base of computer science, and so it should be describable in basic terms if it's not a completely incoherent concept. And if it is a completely incoherent concept, then we should expect an answer instead from cognitive science to tell us why humans generally seem to feel strongly that consciousness is a coherent concept, even though it actually is not.
OTOH, if there isn't some other theory that explain consciousness in terms of more fundamentall entities, properties, etc, then reductionism is out of the window...and what is left of physicalism without reductionism?
Are you arguing against me? Because I think I agree with what you just said...
I'm confused about how you can be backing both IIT and something like panpsychism.
Why not? I'm just going based off the wikipedia article on IIT, but the two seem compatible.