Author Topic: The "hard problem of consciousness"  (Read 48133 times)

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Offline Mars

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"

The brain is as mysterious as a billiard table with a little quantum fuzz.

The brain, while incredibly complex, is not what's being discussed. It does appear to be correlated with consciousness.

This is absurd, and has already been addressed.

This consciousness is mutable; it can be changed by experience, it can be surgically altered (however barbaric some of those surgeries are), it is wholly rationally explainable as a result of a biological process.

How do you explain the changes to consciousness that result from a lobotomy?

 
Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
The brain, while incredibly complex, is not what's being discussed. It does appear to be correlated with consciousness.
This is absurd, and has already been addressed.

Addressed where? What has already been addressed?

You can't possibly be objecting to my statement that the brain is correlated with consciousness. Are you claiming that this entire thread has been about the brain? The brain doesn't match any definition of consciousness that I've given; for example, I can't know for sure that I have a brain.

 

Offline Scotty

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
The existence of consciousness, yes.  But the mechanism for consciousness is most certainly not as abstract as you're trying to say it is.  Human brains generate consciousness in the patterns of atoms and molecules that make them up.  This consciousness is mutable; it can be changed by experience, it can be surgically altered (however barbaric some of those surgeries are), it is wholly rationally explainable as a result of a biological process.

Addressed here.

How do you explain the changes to consciousness that result from a lobotomy?

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Take all that **** out of the absurd GenDisc quote stacks I thought we'd left behind years ago and make it something readable.

All I can get out of it is that you've retreated to an argument that we have some trait which does nothing, is nothing, has no effect, and is unrelated to what we're discussing (the brain, which is our selves, which is consciousness).

Qualia are physical processes in the brain. There are only physical properties. Dualism offers no predictive power: it postulates a ghostly presence with no causal consequences, no connection to anything observable, no effects, and...no reason to exist.

Respond to arguments with something beyond 'you can't mean this, I don't understand it, you must have meant something different'.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Have we at least established that teleporters are safer than day to day life, i.e. the reason we started all this?

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Quote
There's an issue that hasn't yet been raised though: practical experience.  I fall asleep every night, and I wake up the next morning with a high degree of confidence that I'm the same me who went to sleep the night before.  One can argue that I don't have objective evidence of such, and that's probably true, but I do remember what I did the day before, and the day before that, and so on, and for general purposes that's good enough for me to get out of bed and on with my day.  Sure, I know that something can biologically break and throw the whole process off, but so far (knock on wood) it hasn't, and I feel pretty good about that track record.

Read my short story on page 6.  It is a true story!

You can decide if my waking self died and was replaced by a new self.  You can decide if this implies all of us die every night and are replaced with people who only have the memories of our previous selves.  If you are not disquieted by sleep, then you have no reason to fear the teleporter.
I did read your story, and honestly what I mostly took away from it is that one should be careful about eating spicy foods before falling asleep.  But in all seriousness, the brain is a complex and often self-contradicting thing, and **** happens.  I can't count how many times I've walked into a room to get something and then stood there dumbfounded, because I have no ****ing idea what I initially walked in there to get.  But that single memory is no more all of "me" than the strangely-aborted dream you had was all of "you."  Overall, my me-ness seems to do a decent enough job of perpetuating itself, and I have no reason to believe that a process that involves taking a snapshot of the brain's physicality plus quantum state plus what have you and then recreating it ex-situ would do any better.  In fact, re: the aforementioned Trek episodes, I have several reasons to believe that it could quite easily do a demonstrably worse job.  Better the devil you know, right?

I guess a more succinct way to put it is, despite how confident one may be of the teleporter's safety, when it comes down to it, are you willing to be the first one to take that leap?  Or the tenth, or the hundredth?

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
I guess I don't see a way to get around this fundamental disconnect right now:

As far as I am concerned, there's no sense talking about anything that doesn't contribute to a single, coherent, unified explanation of everything. 'The only thing we can be sure of is that we're conscious' is something I can agree with — but what do we do with that?

We look around, observe the universe, search out causal logic, and if we eventually arrive at a causal model that begins with nothing and ends up explaining us, including our consciousness, we say 'this model is useful and predictive, and unlike any other, it seems to provide an account that explains everything we see. We thus consider it to be a model of the universe, of which we are a subsystem.'

You seem to say, 'we can do that, but when we're done we shrug and say, well, we might also have ghostly dualist voodoo which has no detectable effect, is unnecessary to explain anything, and is not suggested by anything except our own cultural traditions and desire to believe we're special...but we can't disprove that consciousness is special somehow...'

Those of you who would argue that physicalism will never explain qualia must contend with the fact that it already has. Physicalism says that we each have our own subjectivity for the same reason cameras take pictures from their own perspectives: that's what the machine does. It monitors itself, models itself and others, manipulates symbols in a workspace, applies global states like 'emotion' to modify function in response to adaptive challenges, and generally does a lot of stuff which requires it to have a 'this is me' concept. The brain needs to be able to model itself from someone else's perspective, and to integrate conflicting motor responses, and to do all kinds of **** which, it turns out, we experience as subjectivity. How else would we experience those things? Like the man inside the Chinese Room, blindly manipulating symbols? We're not the man. We're the room.

A brain is a meat machine. You build the machine, you build everything in the brain. We are in our brains. We are meat.


The devil you know isn't better when you can compare how the two processes actually work and see that, wow, the devil I don't know really alters a lot less in my brain! Which is me, as I know because there is nothing in the universe except physics.

Conversely, you can get whacked on the head, black-out drunk, you can develop amnesia that rolls you back a month, and you still accept that you're you.

Would you use a machine that rolled your brain back one second, on a dare?

(Remember that me-ness is only ever retrospective. We have absolutely no ability to look forward and say, ah, yes, that is me tomorrow. We don't know who we will be. Causality hasn't arrived yet. Me-ness is a credential that you claim looking back.)
« Last Edit: October 18, 2015, 10:27:17 pm by General Battuta »

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
I think the fundamental disconnect in this whole conversation is that you can make the statement "We are meat" with 100% certainty, and confident in that certainty, any anxiety over a teleporter seems absolutely nonsensical.  And again, from that standpoint, you're absolutely right.

But if you're even a shade under 100% certain...well, that's where things get interesting.  And even as someone who studied physics, I'm not willing to put good money down there.  So no, I wouldn't roll myself back a second, or jump myself from one room to the next, and even with its inherent risks and flaws and foibles, I'll stick to my own meat machine to handle its meat-ness (giggity).

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
But rolling yourself back one second with perfect fidelity is far less hazardous than (say) drinking until blacked out. Are you concerned that those who get blackout drunk are exterminating their subjectivity and replacing themselves with a copy?

 
Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
The existence of consciousness, yes.  But the mechanism for consciousness is most certainly not as abstract as you're trying to say it is.  Human brains generate consciousness in the patterns of atoms and molecules that make them up.  This consciousness is mutable; it can be changed by experience, it can be surgically altered (however barbaric some of those surgeries are), it is wholly rationally explainable as a result of a biological process.

Addressed here.

I can't see how Mars' quote is relevant. In any case, the physical mechanism isn't the hard problem. It's the gulf between the mechanism and consciousness, as illustrated by the analogy.

Take all that **** out of the absurd GenDisc quote stacks I thought we'd left behind years ago and make it something readable.

Each segment is readable. You could respond to any one of the segments. But very well, I'll summarize it for you:

1. In the button/light analogy, there is no physical candidate for the circuitry.
2. "Consciousness", "metacognition", and "self-awareness" have different definitions. I've already defined consciousness.
3. You claim that there are no levels of concepts, then contradict yourself by distinguishing consciousness from every other concept.
4. Dualism is just as consistent, powerful, and useful as monism. It's also parsimonious, because monism ignores the manifest.
5. I don't know how you're defining consciousness, especially since you say that philosophy is irrelevant.
6. Consciousness appears to have no causal effect, but it exists. To deny this is to stick your head in the sand.
7. Consciousness is much more mysterious than the brain.
8. Experiential properties supervene on physical properties.
9. Cosmology and the hard problem are closely related.

All I can get out of it is that you've retreated to an argument that we have some trait which does nothing, is nothing, has no effect, and is unrelated to what we're discussing (the brain, which is our selves, which is consciousness).

Qualia are physical processes in the brain. There are only physical properties. Dualism offers no predictive power: it postulates a ghostly presence with no causal consequences, no connection to anything observable, no effects, and...no reason to exist.

Respond to arguments with something beyond 'you can't mean this, I don't understand it, you must have meant something different'.

Consciousness has no causal effect, but its existence is a brute fact. The brain is not consciousness, because it fails the definition (I can't know for certain that I have a brain). Dualism offers precisely as much predictive power as monism. To be clear, do you agree with my definition of consciousness?

It seems that your arguments always boil down to "it's not practical".

 

Offline Scotty

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
I can't see how Mars' quote is relevant. In any case, the physical mechanism isn't the hard problem. It's the gulf between the mechanism and consciousness, as illustrated by the analogy.

What we're getting at is that this gulf is a gulf of your own manufacture: you have created it so that there is something to describe that which is nothing but what you believe to be something.  There is no gulf between the mechanism and consciousness except the one you stubbornly insist is there despite the lack of any and all reason to believe that it is there.

 

Offline watsisname

Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
It seems that your arguments always boil down to "it's not practical".

Well, if it has no predictive power then it is completely uninteresting.  I might as well suppose that the stars are lights shone through a black cosmic tarp by clever demons who know precisely how to mimic what a distant sun would look like.  This idea is not falsifiable, it does not help improve our understanding, and it does not serve as a pathway to new discoveries.  Why should I entertain it?

Quote
Dualism offers precisely as much predictive power as monism.

Can you give an example?  What observation could we hope to make that would distinguish between the two?
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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
@Scotty: The button is the physical processes underpinning consciousness; the light is consciousness. (Experiential properties supervene on physical properties.) What could the circuitry possibly be? Putting it another way, physicalism can only explain third-level phenomena. Consciousness is not a third-level phenomenon.

@watsisname: Dualism makes exactly the same predictions as physicalism, because it subsumes physicalism. Any prediction that physicalism makes, dualism also makes.

 

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Offline The E

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
@watsisname: Dualism makes exactly the same predictions as physicalism, because it subsumes physicalism. Any prediction that physicalism makes, dualism also makes.

But that was watsisname's objection: If Theory A makes the exact same predictions as Theory B, and Theory A is more complicated (in this case, dualism being the more complicated one by introducing things that are immeasurable), why keep Theory A around?
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Offline watsisname

Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Any prediction that the concordance model of cosmology makes, 'sufficiently clever tarp demons' also makes.
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Offline Bobboau

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
But that was watsisname's objection: If Theory A makes the exact same predictions as Theory B, and Theory A is more complicated (in this case, dualism being the more complicated one by introducing things that are immeasurable), why keep Theory A around?

well, that's not quite true, it makes all sorts of predictions.... that you cannot possibly test :|
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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Again, you're arguing from a practical/utilitarian/predictive standpoint, which ignores virtually every branch of philosophy and hence has no bearing on philosophical issues.
This is false to an extreme extent; just as an example, let's take what wikipedia lists as branches of philosophy, as peculiar as it may be:

Aesthetics, Epistemology, Ethics, Legal philosophy, Logic, Metaphysics, Political philosophy, Social philosophy.

That physicalism, as a form of metaphysics, does irreparable damage to the most of it is clear, but that's one branch (and good riddance tbh). There's no reason to lump the rest of philosophy with the cruft.

I am indeed examining all of this very rigorously, "from all the yous involved", but I'm about to go out so I will develop the idea later. I'll just leave this hint if you want to guess where I'm going with it: a crime of murder does not necessitate that you prove your victim was aware it would die, or that it suffered in any way, or that it had "new memories". Killing people while sleeping is still murder, for example. But I'll be more specific, and, as you correctly put it, "very rigorous" later on.

@Meneldil, not in anything I wrote did I say that Consciousness is not copiable. That idea is completely perpendicular to my concerns.

There is a joke on how Consciousness is indeed something different than other "body parts", although it does not clarify the discussion I was having one bit (it's still funny though): we are all perfectly fine with having several organs of ours being transplanted, substituted by new ones. I will guess that you would mind to have a brain transplant.
Hm, then there's definitely something I didn't get in this discussion, sorry.

As for the murder: the question is not is it okay to kill an unconscious person, it's can you get away with it if you say woah my bad and create an identical copy in a timely manner.
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Offline zookeeper

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Physicalism tells us why we have first person experiences, why we a all experience the world in first person as a particular brain: because each brain's physical structure computes qualia. It's the simplest thing in the world. We are all ourselves.

Completely agreed! Physicalism is great that way. But clearly that wasn't what I was talking about.

Ok, last attempt: physicalism explains why we have first person experiences, yet physicalism doesn't explain why the world is perceived and experienced through your brain, and not mine. As far as physicalism goes, the world ought to be perceived and experienced through both, but funnily enough, it's only perceived and experienced through your brain.

There's no dualism or voodoo involved with that, only the fundamental limits and confines of subjectivity which cannot be escaped. Subjective experience is necessarily limited and kind of solipsist, and thus in some corner cases like this, incompatible (but not mutually exclusive) with objective explanations of the world and unable to fully internalize them.

Subjective experience is like a non-Turing-complete language. It has limits and just can't do some things, no matter how straightforward and provable they might be in and of themselves. And the persistence of subjective experience in teleportation might be one of those things that a human mind cannot really grasp in first person, even when that does not prevent it from understanding and agreeing with it on a rational level. If an objection to safety of teleportation is a result of the former, then throwing more of the latter at it isn't going to do anything.

 
Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.
But that was watsisname's objection: If Theory A makes the exact same predictions as Theory B, and Theory A is more complicated (in this case, dualism being the more complicated one by introducing things that are immeasurable), why keep Theory A around?

Here were the claims made about dualism:

Dualism offers no predictive power
it has no predictive power

They are false, because dualism has exactly as much predictive power as physicalism. Occam's Razor is only relevant when talking about parsimony, which I addressed here:

It's important to note that of those four features (consistency, power, parsimony, and utility), the only one that dualism might not have is parsimony. Crudely, dualism is physicalism + 1; it's internally consistent and generates exactly the same predictions as physicalism. In fact, dualism is also parsimonious: physicalism has no handle on first-level concepts, and ignores the manifest.
----------
Again, you're arguing from a practical/utilitarian/predictive standpoint, which ignores virtually every branch of philosophy and hence has no bearing on philosophical issues.
This is false to an extreme extent; just as an example, let's take what wikipedia lists as branches of philosophy, as peculiar as it may be:

Aesthetics, Epistemology, Ethics, Legal philosophy, Logic, Metaphysics, Political philosophy, Social philosophy.

None of those branches of philosophy generate testable predictions.