This will be a lengthy post (and possibly too weighty for GenDisc). Please feel free to engage with any part of it; I
want it to be torn apart. Furthermore, I think that discussions on philosophy forums usually descend into gibberish and tiresome terminology, whereas discussions on this forum rarely do.
You've probably seen many of the ideas here, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject. I've been obsessed with it during the past few days.
I won't pretend to be unbiased. I'm a fan of David Chalmers (who thinks consciousness is something fundamental, like mass and gravity), I'm a dualist (I believe in the magic essence of me-ness), and I believe that a teleporter would kill "me" (even though day-to-day cell replacement seemingly doesn't).
I. Some Online Discussions
------------------------------First, previous HLP discussions:
Let me............... Tel-e-port you! Starts in the middle of page 6. This one is particularly good.
Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull**** Entire thread.
On religion, atheism and changing thread titles.... Also starts in the middle of page 6.
Supernatural Elements? (spoilers unmarked) Starts at the top of page 3.
Well it looks like vegans will just have to starve Entire thread.
Second, two discussions on philosophy forums that I thought were productive, though quite long:
Is there a Hard Problem of Consciousness?The 'Explanatory Gap'Third, some writings on consciousness:
Consciousness Defined An extract from Colin McGinn's "The Mysterious Flame".
What is it like to be a bat? Thomas Nagel's "what it is like" description of qualia.
Epiphenomenal Qualia Frank Jackson's knowledge argument.
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness David Chalmers coins the phrase "hard problem of consciousness".
Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness David Chalmers responds to criticism of the previous paper.
Blindsight The novel under discussion in one of the above HLP threads.
Fourth, an enjoyable comic regarding teleportation:
The MachineII. Consciousness Defined?
-----------------------------"Consciousness" is an overloaded word. Its philosophical meaning is not wakefulness, nor is it awareness in the pedestrian sense; some (sort of) synonyms are "the hard problem of consciousness", "p-consciousness", "qualia" (taken as a whole), and "subjective experience". It's also different from self-awareness, which may take place in the absence of consciousness, or vice versa. With that out of the way, what is it?
I think most people intuitively know what is meant by "consciousness". The idea is arguably present in popular culture (see "The Matrix", "Inception", some episodes of "The Twilight Zone", and the upcoming game "SOMA"). Nevertheless, it's notoriously difficult to define, due to its very nature. Consciousness is so elusive, in fact, that one can deny its existence - for which there may be no objective evidence - or label that particular use of the word as "not even wrong", and end the conversation immediately.
Long story short: we can only approach the concept indirectly.
Consciousness Defined (a misnomer) is a good place to start, but here are some "intuition pumps". Needless to say, none of them are mine.
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The closest thing to a concise definition is probably by Thomas Nagel: "what it is like to be something". "Subjective experience" also seems to have the right flavor. (The word "soul" is sometimes used, but that's tangled with religion.) Because what we see influences us so powerfully, consciousness is sometimes intuitively described as a movie playing in your head, or a "homunculus" looking out through your eyes. But vision - not the mechanical process of light entering your eyes and so forth, but the experience of vision - is only one part of consciousness. Other parts are hearing, bodily awareness, and everything else that goes on "in your head".
Consciousness is claimed to be a completely private, subjective phenomenon, and inaccessible from the outside. According to Nagel, we could know everything there is to know about a bat from the outside, and still not know what it's like to
be a bat. (Nagel chose a bat because it has a sense we do not - namely, echolocation.) Jackson's "knowledge argument" is that we could know every physical aspect of the color red (which objects are red, the behavior of light, how it's processed by the eye, etc.), and still not know what red is "like" until we've seen it ourselves. The experience of red is something that can't be communicated.
Many intuition pumps involve hypothetical beings called "p-zombies", or just "zombies". A zombie is something that looks like a human and acts like a human - in fact, is an exact replica of a human - but "lacks an inner life", "is all dark inside", and "has no-one looking out". It does all the same things a human does and processes information in all the same ways, but has no corresponding subjective experience, any more than (say) a rock. If such a being is possible, the argument goes, there must be "something more" to people than their physical makeup.
Another property of consciousness is its incorrigibility. In some sense, you cannot be mistaken in the belief that you are conscious. To deny that you are conscious is absurd, because it's the
only thing you can be certain of (setting aside the possibly related, but distinct fact of your own existence). It is
the brute fact, the only possible starting point; everything else, including the existence of an external world, is speculation. To assert that consciousness arises in the external world is to have things backwards.
(Tiresome note: at this level of abstraction, one could object to my use of the word "you", because "you" is a concept that may only exist as part of "your" consciousness. But objections like this are pedantic and stifle discussion. Similarly, metaphysical solipsism, the very strong assertion that "only I exist", is a dead end in every sense of the phrase.)
Lastly, a pointed but thought-provoking post from "I am Charlie" in
Is there a Hard Problem of Consciousness?:
There is a serious linguistic problem with the discussion you wish to have. There are those that understand what Nagel is alluding to with his description of conscious experience as the "what-it-is-like-to-be-me", and those that are blind to it, and members of these two groups have no common ground that would permit such a debate. Members of the former group have had the experience of being perplexed after a kind of reversal of attention back upon itself, leading them to 'notice' something that has not been noticed by members of the latter group. This perplexity has an analogy with the principal question of metaphysics -- "why is there anything rather than nothing at all?" -- and in this sense: That question normally arises in respect of what we might want to refer to as the "objective world", whereas for those members of the latter group the question arises in respect of what we might want to refer to as the "subjective world". Now, language has evolved in the objective world and has utility therein, but this idea of p-consciousness (of the synchronic entirety of its constituents) has no utility in the objective world, and so language can gain no real traction upon it. Consequently members of the latter group, who are blind to the issue, are also blind to their error in any claims they make about it. There can be no common ground between these two groups, one claiming that the other is seeing something that isn't there, the other claiming that the first is not seeing something that is there.
III. The Hard Problem
------------------------As I mentioned, if you deny the phenomenon entirely (Chalmers calls this the type-A materialist position), there can be no further discussion. If, on the other hand, you think there's something extra that needs explaining, you run into the "hard problem":
why do we have subjective experience?
Chalmers distinguishes this from the "easy problems" of explaining (for example) the ability to react to stimuli, the reportability of mental states, and the difference between wakefulness and sleep. These problems are easy in the sense that we know what kind of solution is required: to explain the performance of a function, we need only specify a lower-level mechanism for the function. This is how we usually answer questions - with reductive arguments that explain complex processes in terms of simpler ones. The hard problem is different because even after we explain the functions, the question still remains: why are they accompanied by subjective experience?
(The above paragraph is compressed from
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.)
Neuroscience, he goes on, is well-suited to explaining the performance of
functions, but seems to have no handle on the hard problem, which requires a different kind of explanation. Something extra is needed.
It is tempting to note that all sorts of puzzling phenomena have eventually turned out to be explainable in physical terms. But each of these were problems about the observable behavior of physical objects, coming down to problems in the explanation of structures and functions. Because of this, these phenomena have always been the kind of thing that a physical account might explain, even if at some points there have been good reasons to suspect that no such explanation would be forthcoming. The tempting induction from these cases fails in the case of consciousness, which is not a problem about physical structures and functions. The problem of consciousness is puzzling in an entirely different way. An analysis of the problem shows us that conscious experience is just not the kind of thing that a wholly reductive account could succeed in explaining.
As "I am Charlie" notes, the hard problem is similar to the question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" It's impossible even to imagine what kind of answer would be satisfactory. In addition, subjective experiences appear to be inaccessible from the outside, so that there is no
objective way to study them or even produce evidence that they exist. Chalmers concludes that consciousness must be taken as fundamental.
IV. A Possible Solution
-------------------------This is the best part. From
Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness:
Here we can exploit an idea that was set out by Bertrand Russell (1926), and which has been developed in recent years by Grover Maxwell (1978) and Michael Lockwood (1989). This is the idea that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their causes and effects, and leaves their intrinsic nature unspecified. For everything that physics tells us about a particle, for example, it might as well just be a bundle of causal dispositions; we know nothing of the entity that carries those dispositions. The same goes for fundamental properties, such as mass and charge: ultimately, these are complex dispositional properties (to have mass is to resist acceleration in a certain way, and so on). But whenever one has a causal disposition, one can ask about the categorical basis of that disposition: that is, what is the entity that is doing the causing?
One might try to resist this question by saying that the world contains only dispositions. But this leads to a very odd view of the world indeed, with a vast amount of causation and no entities for all this causation to relate! It seems to make the fundamental properties and particles into empty placeholders, in the same way as the psychon above, and thus seems to free the world of any substance at all. It is easy to overlook this problem in the way we think about physics from day to day, given all the rich details of the mathematical structure that physical theory provides; but as Stephen Hawking (1988) has noted, physical theory says nothing about what puts the "fire" into the equations and grounds the reality that these structures describe. The idea of a world of "pure structure" or of "pure causation" has a certain attraction, but it is not at all clear that it is coherent.
So we have two questions: (1) what are the intrinsic properties underlying physical reality?; and (2) where do the intrinsic properties of experience fit into the natural order? Russell's insight, developed by Maxwell and Lockwood, is that these two questions fit with each other remarkably well. Perhaps the intrinsic properties underlying physical dispositions are themselves experiential properties, or perhaps they are some sort of proto-experiential properties that together constitute conscious experience. This way, we locate experience inside the causal network that physics describes, rather than outside it as a dangler; and we locate it in a role that one might argue urgently needed to be filled. And importantly, we do this without violating the causal closure of the physical. The causal network itself has the same shape as ever; we have just colored in its nodes.
All I can say is that I find this very compelling.
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As I said, these ideas are not mine, and doubtless many of you are familiar with them. I just wanted to package them and see what you think.
