Interesting that the paper starts by attacking "quantum mysticism". Seems to me that the argument it's making renders quantum mysticism easier to believe rather than harder. The concept of particles, after all, appeals to our Newtonian "billiard ball" intuitions; particles are the essence of locality, and our intuitions suggest that a particle universe should be deterministic.
On the other hand, if particles are epiphenomenal, and everything is really infinite fields which only have a certain probability of interacting in certain ways, it seems like, intuitively, there's a lot more room for consciousness to influence those fields in a nonlocal manner. No?
Not at all. Fields are a precise mathematical model that could, in principle, be simulated on a computer to arbitrary precision. There's no room for mysticism or "consciousness" nonsense.
>in principle, be simulated on a computer to arbitrary precision.
However, for any finite precision, the simulation is valid for only a finite time -- and the precision required to guarantee a certain accuracy for a given time increases exponentially:
That means that finite-memory simulations are limited even in principle (even for a computer whose memory is as large as the Universe, there is a rather short limit on prediction!)
I don't understand the implicit relationship you see between the regularity observed in our reality and consciousness. Why can't one go with the other?
That consciousness nonsense has you reading a post and reacting to it.
The simulation argument is silly, because all it does is "postpone the explanation" as Alan Watts joked in "Time and the more it changes". If our universe can be simulated, then so what? It is the same puzzle with the Matrix as Jed Mac Kenna explained in his famous trilogy: in Matrix 2 or 3 (don't remember), Neo escapes from his "simulated" reality, only to find himself in another. What if the other one is simulated? The movie just stops there, and Neo isn't actually free. He just switched one reality for another.
Parent comment was talking about "quantum mysticism". Which is a set of quasi-religious beliefs that have no justification whatsoever in scientific theories and often misunderstand distort real science a great deal.
That's a convenient way of dismissing the problem, but since you didn't make any coherent arguments, we can safely ignore you. The hard problem simply asks how, for example, our subjective experience of color comes about, and why we should have that experience at all rather than nothing. If that's disconnected from reality and nonscientific, then you don't understand the meaning of those words.
I don't need to make an argument, because there is nothing to argue against. I don't accept that "the hard problem" is a real problem, or even a coherent thought.
It seems quite obvious to me that "consciousness" is caused by complex algorithms being run by the human brain. But even if science shows that is false, there will always be another scientific explanation. Even if souls exist, they would have to interact with physical matter to work, and so, in principle, could be studied scientifically. Observed and experimented with. And in principle, we could deduce the logical rules that explains their behavior, and build artificial souls, or simulate souls on a computer. I think "souls" are an insanely unscientific belief, on the verge of flat Earthism, but at least it's possible in principle.
The hard problem asserts the possibility of something much, much weirder than the existence of souls or physical laws we don't understand yet. It asserts the existence of a universe which is causally disconnected from our own. Meaning the things that happen in that universe, can never influence anything that happens in our universe in any way. And that our "consciousness" exists in that universe, and not in our own. More on the absurdity of that proposition here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nqv/zombies_redacted/
>It seems quite obvious to me that "consciousness" is caused by complex algorithms being run by the human brain.
Why "consciousness" in quotes? You don't have it? Are you a bot? And where is the obviousness from? Just this is how problems usually go down, so you assume this one will go the same way?
>But even if science shows that is false, there will always be another scientific explanation.
I mean, science is pretty cool, and having some faith in it is fine, but why this much? Why say always when it doesn't have one now?
> Even if souls exist, they would have to interact with physical matter to work, and so, in principle, could be studied scientifically. Observed and experimented with. And in principle, we could deduce the logical rules that explains their behavior, and build artificial souls, or simulate souls on a computer.
Yes, if they do interact with the outside world, they can be studied by science as much as they do interact. But how do you study them where they don't, where they just provide qualia and the outside world doesn't look any different? Isn't science about reproducible empirical evidence, which qualia don't provide?
>hard problem is weird
Well, you using consciousness in quotes as a, hopefully, conscious person is also weird. I don't see how you avoid the disconnectedness when you see that no science can even know whether you're conscious or not.
Because I'm not convinced "consciousness" is a meaningful concept that actually exists. No one has the slightest idea how to define it or what it really means, so it's a very vague non-precise term at best. But I accepted it for the purpose of this discussion.
>where is the obviousness from? Just this is how problems usually go down, so you assume this one will go the same way?
Because there is abundant evidence that the brain is the mind. Brain damage causes mental impairment, and we can observe it through fMRIs and interact with it through various experiments. We can reproduce some behavior from computer algorithms somewhat similar to biological neural networks, and I don't see why we won't eventually be able to reproduce all of it. Modelling the brain computationally is a huge field of research that has made a huge amount of progress in recent years. Not to mention neuroscience in general, which has produced a huge amount of knowledge.
But beyond that, it would be really strange if the physical laws that govern are universe are magically invalid in this one specific place. We know from evolutionary theory that humans aren't special. We are just the product of random mutation and natural selection, from the first accidental self replicators. There is nothing special at all about humans, we are just regular animals made of physical matter, that have been selected for intelligence.
Of course it's possible this is all wrong. It's also possible that the Earth is really flat, and evil gods are manipulating all our observations and distorting photos taken from space, etc. But anyone who believes that is crazy.
>Yes, if they do interact with the outside world, they can be studied by science as much as they do interact. But how do you study them where they don't, where they just provide qualia and the outside world doesn't look any different?
"Qualia" is also a vague imprecise term. If this "consciousness" stuff actually interacted with the physical world, then we would, in principle, be able to observe it. But if it doesn't, then it's irrelevant to us. Totally disconnected from anything you can ever observe or experience.
If you say "I am conscious", then some chain of events caused that event. Perhaps a thought formed in the neurons of your brain. In principle we could study your brain and see why it believes it is conscious, and what things are causing that behavior. If it's caused by "souls", then, at least in principle, we could study the behavior of the souls, and observe them interacting with physical matter to make you say words or think thoughts.
Seriously read the link I posted, it goes into that in great detail.
Evolution shows that there is something to consciousness that is beyond current physics, especially if we accept the world is not massively anthropocentric (biocentric?).
Evolution doesn't show that at all. I think it shows that we weren't created by some kind of god, but more of an accident. If that's the case, it makes it much less likely that there are souls or other supernatural-ish explanations for consciousness, and so we are much more likely to be simply physical matter.
Rocks and unicellular life are simply physical physical matter, and they are not conscious. We would not have evolved to be conscious, in a coherent manner too, if there was no benefit to it.
>Because I'm not convinced "consciousness" is a meaningful concept that actually exists. No one has the slightest idea how to define it or what it really means, so it's a very vague non-precise term at best. But I accepted it for the purpose of this discussion.
If you deny that you experience qualia, well then the core proof for it is gone. At which point we might as well put the whole discussion in quotes.
Still, what makes the definition different from the definition of matter? Do you deny the existence of matter also?
>Because there is abundant evidence that the brain is the mind. Brain damage causes mental impairment, and we can observe it through fMRIs and interact with it through various experiments. We can reproduce some behavior from computer algorithms somewhat similar to biological neural networks, and I don't see why we won't eventually be able to reproduce all of it. Modelling the brain computationally is a huge field of research that has made a huge amount of progress in recent years. Not to mention neuroscience in general, which has produced a huge amount of knowledge.
You mean, abundant evidence than the brain seems to interact with the mind. I think it's inherently tied with the brain too, but I don't think there's anything that bridges the gap and makes the brain = the mind.
>But beyond that, it would be really strange if the physical laws that govern are universe are magically invalid in this one specific place.
Sure, and yet we experience the mind and it's nothing like the things we measure with science. Shouldn't that shake your faith in the universal intelligibility of all things under science?
>Of course it's possible this is all wrong. It's also possible that the Earth is really flat, and evil gods are manipulating all our observations and distorting photos taken from space, etc. But anyone who believes that is crazy.
We experience consciousness. Again, if you don't, then perhaps I'm talking to a bot, at which point I don't deny that I won't be able to show to you what consciousness is. It does have to be experienced.
Your comparisons with flat earth and manipulative evil gods are wholly uncharitable. Science supports the proposition of a round-ish earth; it doesn't of a flat earth. Science doesn't say anything about the existence or lack of existence of consciousness, your intuitions about the future progress of science do. Don't you see the difference?
If this invokes craziness for you, then perhaps you should think longer about what science is and what it says, and compare that with your intuitions about what you think it will be.
>"Qualia" is also a vague imprecise term. If this "consciousness" stuff actually interacted with the physical world, then we would, in principle, be able to observe it. But if it doesn't, then it's irrelevant to us. Totally disconnected from anything you can ever observe or experience.
Funny. It actually is just about the only thing we experience of the outside world. There are people working on the best definitions we have for qualia - if they're not satisfactory to you, do you propose we stop discussing them even though we experience them?
I mean, maybe we should stop discussing unexplored problems in science too.
>If you say "I am conscious", then some chain of events caused that event. Perhaps a thought formed in the neurons of your brain. In principle we could study your brain and see why it believes it is conscious, and what things are causing that behavior. If it's caused by "souls", then, at least in principle, we could study the behavior of the souls, and observe them interacting with physical matter to make you say words or think thoughts.
I mean, I get it, you think it's linked with the brain. It probably is, but we only get reports from people saying it is, that's one thing. The other thing is that even if it is linked with the brain, it doesn't mean that the brain = the mind.
Do you have a different source for the argument? No offense. Yudkowsky isn't an expert on philosophy of mind or philosophy at all, and I don't know of any philosophers who take him seriously. I skimmed it and I'd read it if it was not so long, but I'd prefer a SEP article or something else trustworthy in this case as it's such a long read.
> Science doesn't say anything about the existence or lack of existence of consciousness, your intuitions about the future progress of science do. Don't you see the difference?
I didn't say science said anything about conscious. I said that there is zero scientific support for dualism, or anything like it. Those theories are incredibly unscientific. You are making very strong claims that have zero evidence.
But even if dualism is true, my larger point is correct, that we could study the "souls" if they interact with physical matter. We could learn exactly how they work, and perhaps build artificial ones from physical matter. And if they don't interact with our universe, then they are irrelevant to us.
This discussion started about quantum mysticism and whether science could ever explain consciousness. To assert something is "beyond science", even in principle, is ridiculous.
>I didn't say science said anything about conscious.
Well you did say:
>If this "consciousness" stuff actually interacted with the physical world, then we would, in principle, be able to observe it. But if it doesn't, then it's irrelevant to us. Totally disconnected from anything you can ever observe or experience.
I mean, how am I to read it. It reads like you're denying what you yourself experience if it isn't registered with scientific techniques.
We are yet to receive an actual datapoint from someone's mind, and it doesn't even seem like we know how we could do that. So all of your talk about scientific and not scientific theories seems to me a category mistake.
There's no scientific support for dualism. There's no scientific support for physicalism. Science can inform them, but we don't have scientific datapoints supporting either one. We merely have rational, or, if you will, philosophical arguments for them. I think I have made arguments against physicalism, namely, that we have no scientific method of accessing the contents of a mind, and we have no idea how to go about doing it.
What I'm hearing from your arguments is just your intuition telling you that all things are or will be intelligible under science, and having faith is fine, but at this point you have to know that this is the most grandiose claim of all in this discussion.
And to be specific, if dualism is true then we can't study minds with science. Science is about corporeal bodies, minds under dualism aren't corporeal. We can study what they do to the physical world, and guess how and when they appear to be linked with it, but we can't pry into the actual contents of the mind, not with science at least. Because under dualism, they aren't physical.
People like you are part of the reason it takes science so long to move forward in areas that contain mysteries. You say there's nothing to argue against, yet you are making an argument anyway, proving that there is, in fact, something to argue about. You are arguing against a very strange and specific version of what is called "the hard problem". At the heart of the hard problem is a simple question: how can we causally explain conscious experience? It's very convenient to say "oh it's just complexity. Done." But that doesn't solve anything and it's not particularly helpful. It leaves many questions unanswered. Why does consciousness seem to be unitary? Why does only a small portion of the information reach conscious awareness? Whence the feeling of free will? You should feel free to ignore these and many more questions, but to dismiss the inquiry entirely is, bluntly, stupid.
I've never argued for souls or anything immaterial, I simply think we haven't fully understood or explained the nature of consciousness.
Ok my terminology may have been wrong, fine. But this thread started off about quantum mysticism and whether or not physics or science could ever explain consciousness. I strongly object to that. And the people that promote views like that are the kinds of people that talk about "the hard problem of consciousness". Materialists generally don't talk about it or find it that interesting.
You're right that I don't have a complete explanation of consciousness, and of course no one does. But if we stop talking about the really crazy theories like epiphenomenalism, the answer must be that it's some kind of algorithm. A lot of people reject that idea completely with really bizarre arguments, hence my hostility.
I understand where your hostility comes from, but dismissing consciousness on the terms that there are so many people who use that term to make stupid claims and crazy theories is just taking the easy way out.
Has any materialist seriously considered what exactly is this material they so take for granted? When you really scrutinise it, you see that it can't be found. All you can find are models - mental representations of what it is. Does that mean that nothing exists? Of course not - you know that's not the case. This knowing is the hard problem, and you are right that it will never be solved by science, but not because it doesn't exist, but because the ability to do any science at all requires an "observer" and an "observed", and consciousness precedes both these concepts. It is the knowing in which all models can be experienced - how could something that includes all ever be explained by anything within it?
I find it quite ironic that materialists are so opposed to dualism, while at the same time being so entrenched in it. Not in the sense of "mind vs. matter" or "soul vs. body" (they managed to outgrow that naive philosophy), but in a sense of "knowing" that everything is matter while overlooking the fact that a distinct and separate knower has to exist in order to see this matter. That's as dualist as it gets...
What do you mean it's outside the bounds of science? Surely there can be a physical explanation that we simply haven't been clever enough to discover yet? That's all I'm saying.
I mean that there is no known empirical method for receiving a datapoint about the mind. We can know things about the brain, we can ask people to talk about their experiences, but we can't receive the actual contents of the experiences.
Maybe we'll figure it out someday. That is probably a long way away though, and for now, the problem is for philosophy of mind, only to be informed, but not solved by relevant sciences.
Presumably you're not familiar with the term the 'Hard Problem' of conciousness [0]. It's a specific supposition that there's something special about 'qualia' of experience that can't be explained by a physical model (or scientific explanation as you term it) of conciousness. There is considerable dispute as to whether the idea makes any sense or not and therefore if the 'Hard Problem' is even a thing. Which IMHO it isn't.
It is a thing. We know how to study correlations between brain activity and conscious experience. The hard problem involves figuring out how brain activity causes conscious experience. Once we explain it (or, as in physics, have a convincing theory) it won't be a problem at all anymore. Saying that something that everyone experiences all the time "doesn't exist" is not a convincing theory.
> It is a thing. We know how to study correlations between brain activity and conscious experience. The hard problem involves figuring out how brain activity causes conscious experience.
Actually the hard problem is figuring out how anything can cause conscious experience/qualia. The insurmountable difficulty is explaining how first-hand knowledge can be explained with only third-hand knowledge. The only resolution for something like scientific materialism is to deny that first-hand knowledge actually exists, and consciousness is a fully third-hand knowledge system giving the illusion of first-hand knowledge [1]
Sure...brain activity is included within "anything". Since brains are the only thing we know of that do this successfully, it's where people start.
Graziano has thought about this a lot, but his view is one of many that all have about equal explanatory power. Why would materialism/physicalism require that first hand knowledge not exist? If consciousness is explainable in terms of physical processes, then first hand knowledge would exist and be part of that process. Can first and third hand knowledge not coexist?
> Why would materialism/physicalism require that first hand knowledge not exist? If consciousness is explainable in terms of physical processes, then first hand knowledge would exist and be part of that process.
You cannot describe first-hand facts using only third-hand facts. This is the core philosophical dilemma in the hard problem of consciousness. Consider something like Mary's Room. What sort of third-hand description of "what it is like to see red" would describe the first-hand experience of seeing red? How can you actually capture data describing "what it is like"?
The only solution seems to be to deny that "what it is like" is first-hand knowledge at all, and that it is actually a set of third-hand facts that merely yields the illusion of first-hand knowledge, and so the hard problem reduces to explaining how this illusion comes about.
My question was, why is "denying first hand knowledge" the only solution? As you might know, there are several lines of thinking. Nagle, for example, might say that first hand knowledge absolutely exists, but it is "off limits" to anyone but the organism experiencing it. In that sense it exists and does not require us to say that it is only "illusions of third hand knowledge". On the other hand Dennett might say that once we have a full scientific understanding (as Mary would), we could in theory understand how to extract the first hand knowledge in an organism's brain and either modify our own brains to experience it or describe it so fully that Mary would know exactly what to expect when seeing red for the first time. I'm not sympathetic to Dennet, but there are other options than first hand knowledge simply not existing within materialism.
> Nagle, for example, might say that first hand knowledge absolutely exists, but it is "off limits" to anyone but the organism experiencing it.
If physicalism is true, then all facts must be reducible to the physical.
If everything is reducible to the physical, then the experiences of the organism are also so reducible and must have a third-hand description.
If experiences are not so reducible, then physicalism is false and no amount of third-hand knowledge can produce first-hand knowledge.
These are exhaustive and mutually exclusive options.
> I'm not sympathetic to Dennet, but there are other options than first hand knowledge simply not existing within materialism.
The meaning of first-hand knowledge in physicalism is different from the meaning of first-hand knowledge in other metaphysics. In physicalism, first-hand knowledge must be reducible to third-hand knowledge, and so it doesn't have a privileged ontological status, just like we don't ontologically commit to the existence of cars in quantum physics.
So first-hand knowledge cannot really exist in physicalism except as a useful label describing a specific kind of third-hand knowledge.
You are implicitly drawing a distinction between brain activity and conciousness. But if the brain activity is the conciousness, then there is no distinction. I'm not saying that our experience of things isn't a thing. I'm saying that it's not a distinct thing that's separable from the brain activity.
You said that you don't think the hard problem is a thing. The "hard problem" is simply a general question: how can we explain our subjective conscious experiences in terms of physical processes? That's a question which is well formed, interesting, and probably has an answer which we simply haven't been clever enough to find yet.
There's more to it than that though. David Chalmers who formulated the Hard Problem does not believe that subjective experience can arise from physical processes. Really. He calls it the Hard Problem because he thinks it's distinct from the Easy Problem of explaining how physical processes can constitute a thinking being. We haven't solved either problem yet, but Chalmers is distinguishing between them before we know what the answer even looks like. It his position that you can solve one (the Easy Problem) but that won't and can't lead to a solution to the Hard Problem. I think it will.
You are the first one in this thread to say "doesn't exist", yet you put it in quotes.
No one is trying to tell you that consciousness doesn't exist. The question is whether the "hard problem of consciousness" is a thing: that is, a well-formed topic of scientific inquiry.
"Isn't a thing" is synonymous with "doesn't exist". Pedantry aside, the existence of the hard problem and the existence of consciousness entail the same questions. The general question is simply this: how can we explain our subjective conscious experiences in terms of physical processes?
We're getting off topic, but it is at least worth considering just why it's described as a "hard problem", which is that science involves the observation (via human consciousness) of things in relation to other things.
But because consciousness is the medium of observation, it can't be independently observed relative to other things, thus the ultimate nature of consciousness can only ever be postulated, not objectively proven.
> Consciousness exists. Science either can explain it, or it cannot.
More specifically, people claim the existence of consciousness. It can't be held as an absolute irrefutable by investigation. To do otherwise would be violating several basic concepts of epistemology, science and thinking.
> I mean, this sort of scepticism is applicable if you don't have consciousness yourself. Do you not see, hear, smell, think or otherwise perceive?
The OP is suggesting that experience isn't first-hand knowledge the way it appears to be. Certainly he agrees that we appear to have first-hand knowledge, but this appearance is only a cosmetic illusion, a trick that lends some adaptive advantage. Something like: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
The pythagorean theorem could easily be tested empirically. In fact it was probably discovered through empirical observation as many ancient mathematical facts were.
The pythagorean theorem predicts how long the hypotenuse of a right triangle will be, based on it's sides. That's quite easy to test empirically. You take a ruler out and draw a right triangle. It's nice that we have a solid mathematical proof for it. But if the axioms of geometry were somehow thrown into question, no one would question pythagoreans theorem because we know it works and have tested it countless times. It has more evidence than entirely scientific matters like the law of gravity.
And all that empirical stuff doesn't matter when it comes to the actual theorem. The proof does. As is the case with tons of math that don't have empirical evidence.
That's why it's math and not science.
My original point was that calling a philosophical problem unscientific is like saying this ice cream is nonelectronic. It wasn't meant to be, it doesn't mean it's not good. Or in the case of mathematical theorems or philosophical problems, insightful.
On the other hand, if particles are epiphenomenal, and everything is really infinite fields which only have a certain probability of interacting in certain ways, it seems like, intuitively, there's a lot more room for consciousness to influence those fields in a nonlocal manner. No?
Just playing devil's advocate here :-)