[General Battuta]

I don't remotely deny the experience of qualia, I just think they're trivially explicable and clearly identified with physical processes - we turn them off every night!

[Mars]

Well, it's also easy to pretend to be a P-zombie and claim to not understand what the other person is referring to, simply because it cannot be defined or demonstrated. Which sure seems like what's been going on here (among other things) for a few pages. It's one thing to argue about qualia, but what some people here seem to do is deny its existence (in the "why is the world perceived through this brain and not some other" sense) just because they can.

I am not being purposefully obtuse. I just don't know why one would take their own existence as being ultimately more provable than anything else, it doesn't make sense to hold the feeling of consciousness above any number of other observable things and putting it in a realm of mystical whimsy. Yes, the sense of being "me" exists, and I believe it to be real, I just don't think its any amount more real than say, a car.

 I could develop schizophrenia, and I would still have a sense of being "me" and I would imagine other people - but the sense of being "me" would be incorrect, because, at least in late stages of the disease, I would act like a completely different person.   

[zookeeper]

I don't remotely deny the experience of qualia, I just think they're trivially explicable and clearly identified with physical processes - we turn them off every night!

Yes, but you are ignoring the clarification I gave. Objections to persistence of consciousness (or whatever you want to call it) in teleportation seem to ultimately be about that, which is something that no amount of physicalism can dispel. Trying to dispel it with physicalism can only mean that you're either missing what's being referred to, or that you're doing so to make a point. The first is kind of hard to believe, and the second would clearly be counterproductive.

[General Battuta]

Qualia are physical. That seems to me to be pretty straight to the point.

[GhylTarvoke]

Dualism is fantasy. There are no grounds for conversation if you're a dualist.

We've been over this already.

Chalmers also denies that there is anything mystical about positing consciousness as fundamental. He compares it to positing gravity as fundamental.

My entire argument has been an attack on physicalism. Strict adherence to physicalism seems to ignore the obvious.

I confessed to being a dualist in the OP, and others in the thread are either dualists or open to the possibility of dualism. We've still been able to have a discussion.

I could develop schizophrenia, and I would still have a sense of being "me" and I would imagine other people - but the sense of being "me" would be incorrect, because, at least in late stages of the disease, I would act like a completely different person.

You may not be who you think you are, but if you believe that you exist in some form, then you are correct.

@zookeeper: I like your presentation. I feel like I've been punching a wall, and Battuta probably does, as well.

[Scotty]

Dualism is fantasy. There are no grounds for conversation if you're a dualist.

We've been over this already.

The part where we "went over this" consisted of neither the General nor myself being particularly impressed with your interpretation, which seems to rely on its own ignorance to function.

Please note, that's not a reflection on you, nor intended to be a negative reflection on your personal interpretation of the situation.  On one hand we have physicalism, which we can discuss and make predictions about.  On the other, we have dualism, which has no room for predictive or experimental processes.  One of these things is useful to this discussion.

[General Battuta]

Right. Dualism seems as unnecessary as positing that consciousness is piped out to another dimension, illustrated on paper, and piped back. What does that add? What reason do we have to begin to believe it? Nothing whatsoever points to it. It's an idea for the sake of having an idea. It is based on nothing and explains nothing.

It's cruft. In a complete account of physics, gravity is a mathematically inevitable result of super symmetry - necessary and sufficient. No dualist account of consciousness is necessary for anything.

Dualism is a rear-guard action trying to rationalize phlogistons that could protect the mind from being included in the laws that run everything else.

[GhylTarvoke]

The part where we "went over this" consisted of neither the General nor myself being particularly impressed with your interpretation, which seems to rely on its own ignorance to function.

My objection is to the labeling of dualism as fantasy. Chalmers doesn't believe in spirits or wizards, and neither do I. If by "fantasy" Battuta means "not physicalism", then he is stating a tautology.

Please note, that's not a reflection on you, nor intended to be a negative reflection on your personal interpretation of the situation.  On one hand we have physicalism, which we can discuss and make predictions about.  On the other, we have dualism, which has no room for predictive or experimental processes.  One of these things is useful to this discussion.

Right. Dualism seems as unnecessary as positing that consciousness is piped out to another dimension, illustrated on paper, and piped back. What does that add?

We're back to the "it's not practical" argument.

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.

That said, one benefit of accepting dualism is that we won't be waiting endlessly for neuroscience to give us an answer.

What reason do we have to begin to believe it? Nothing whatsoever points to it. It's an idea for the sake of having an idea. It is based on nothing and explains nothing.

See the levels of knowledge. The statement "nothing whatsoever points to it" is amusing, because everything you've ever experienced points to it. You're sticking your head in the sand.

[zookeeper]

Qualia are physical. That seems to me to be pretty straight to the point.

I don't see what your point is. That's not what I was talking about, which is subjective experience. There's an unbridgeable (?) gap between subjective experience and understanding of the mechanics of subjective experience, and you seem to try to bridge that gap by just throwing lots and lots of the latter at it.

My point is only that physicalism cannot explain why the world is perceived through one particular brain instead of some other. And everyone here knows that everyone else knows that the world is perceived through one particular brain. No matter how perfectly one understands the physical processes of how consciousness, qualia and whatnot work (which I have no reason to assume are not physical processes), it doesn't dispel that fundamental "problem" with subjective experience.

Maybe you're just insisting on being silent on what can't be spoken of, or maybe you're actually a P-zombie; I can't tell, because you seem to specifically avoid even acknowledging that you recognize what's being referred to.


EDIT: I'm not a dualist, although in this context I don't think I'm talking about anything for which such distinctions matter anyway.

[General Battuta]

I don't even begin to see the problem you think is unspoken. 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.

Ghyl, you protest that we ignore philosophy and yet philosophy has nothing to offer. You cannot explain why physicalism is incomplete or why dualism would even begin to be necessary. Philosophy seems as tangential as the history of flags to this conversation.

[GhylTarvoke]

Physicalism is complete in the sense that it is all we need to make predictions. Physicalism is incomplete in the sense that it cannot address the first-level issues of existence and consciousness.

If you think this discussion is completely unrelated to philosophy, I must conclude that by "consciousness" you have always meant a third-level concept like "metacognition" - which explains a lot.

[Scotty]

That said, one benefit of accepting dualism is that we won't be waiting endlessly for neuroscience to give us an answer.

Well, you're technically correct, because dualism is never going to give you an answer anyway and you'll have simply given up waiting.

You're arguing for the existence of a speck of dust a million miles away.  You may be correct that it exists.  You may even be correct to its location and velocity (even though all signs point to no).  But that doesn't mean anything at all because it is a speck of dust a million miles away in a conversation that's about us, right here, and right now.

[GhylTarvoke]

Dualist models of consciousness have already given us partial answers, e.g. Russell's/Chalmers' node model.

The existence of consciousness is a brute fact, and requires no argument. Saying that it's a million miles away is very strange - it's the closest, most intimate phenomenon imaginable.

[Scotty]

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.

[Mongoose]

This is certainly a fascinating discussion on all sides, although I have to to confess that my mind (however it's defined) tends to switch into an immensely-practical mode when confronted with such highfalutin concepts.  (As the joke goes, the best response to an existential crisis is usually someone unloading a squirt gun at you.)  In light of that, something about the original teleporter example is still bugging me.  Battuta has made the claim that this hypothetical device would be demonstrably safer than the basic act of falling asleep and waking up every day, and from a purely-mechanical standpoint he's probably right (though I've seen waaaay too many Star Trek transporter accident episodes to give it an automatic pass).  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.

But being the first person to stand on that transporter pad and put our model of consciousness to its first practical test?  Knowing that if our physical understanding of qualia turns out to be flawed, it'll literally be the last thing that I (as myself) ever do?  There's not enough money on the planet to make me sign up.  I'm sticking to shuttlecraft.

[GhylTarvoke]

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.

Exactly! We have a handle on the mechanisms for consciousness. We're fairly certain that experiential properties supervene on physical properties. What we don't have is an explanation of why they supervene on physical properties.

Maybe this analogy will help. There's a button and a light. Every time you press the button, the light turns on. Now, you could say: "pressing this button causes this light to turn on", and you'd probably be right, but that's barely even an explanation. The connection between the button and the light may as well be magic. What we really want is an explanation of why the button controls the light.

[General Battuta]

Again, you're inventing a question so that you can propose an answer. We have not only the button and the light, but all the tracery of circuits in between; we have the power grid and the transformers; we have all the physics of electrons and resistors; we cannot yet build ourselves a button-light circuit, but we see nothing intrinsically unachievable about it.

There is no distinction between 'consciousness', 'metacognition', 'self-awareness', or anything else. These are all one and the same. Qualia are the first-person experience of these processes, nothing more. The mechanism is the why: we experience awareness in the first person because we are brains with mechanisms for generating first-person experience.

There are no levels of concepts. We can propose any system of truth we like, beginning with our own self-awareness. All of them compete in the same arena: can they use our perceptions to explain who we are, where we come from, and what we do?

Only one system is internally consistent, powerful, parsimonious, and useful. All others inevitably undercut themselves or spiral around into needlessness. Models like 'I am a Boltzmann brain' or 'I exist in a simulation' either produce the same results without that complication, or fizzle out into solipsism. Physicalism explains qualia. Qualia are not the first level, they are the last.

We can think up all kinds of models to explain why we might be. Maybe we're being systematically deceived by a god. Maybe we're in an alien experiment. We can apply these models to predict the universe, and see if we end up with a universe that contains ourselves, the information reaching us, and a reasonable set of systems that can explain ourselves and that information.

We know we have a good model when the model contains everything necessary and sufficient to lead to us. The god model and the alien model and all the others trip over the fact that they do not seem to do anything. If they are true, it apparently doesn't matter.

Consciousness is not a fundamental feature of the universe. Chalmers' notions of 'panpsychophysics' are, mildly put, masturbatory. They make no predictions, offer no solutions, explain nothing: they are as relevant and useful to the problem of consciousness as the Tooth Fairy. The idea of the ontologically autonomous consciousness is fatally testable: if we can account for everything happening in the brain, and if the brain is causing mental states, the ontologically autonomous 'consciousness' has no effect, it is causally decoupled from the universe, it is nothing, it does nothing, it does not exist.

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

An organism with a human brain cannot be a p-zombie. It must have qualia. Qualia are created by the brain.

The deflationary solution is the solution.

What we should all REALLY be afraid of, in terms of hard problems, is cosmology!

[watsisname]

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.

What we should all REALLY be afraid of, in terms of hard problems, is cosmology!

Quoted for ****ing truth!

[General Battuta]

This thread made me think about Searle, who is so bad at understanding how brains work that it makes me angry to know his work was every taken as any kind of interesting or useful philosophy.

[GhylTarvoke]

Again, you're inventing a question so that you can propose an answer. We have not only the button and the light, but all the tracery of circuits in between; we have the power grid and the transformers; we have all the physics of electrons and resistors; we cannot yet build ourselves a button-light circuit, but we see nothing intrinsically unachievable about it.

The button is the physical processes underpinning consciousness, and the light is consciousness. What could the circuitry possibly be? If it's the physical processes, then you're identifying the button with the circuitry, which effectively means that there is no circuitry. If you're identifying the light with the button (saying that consciousness "is" the physical processes underpinning it), then you're either making a category mistake or not talking about consciousness.

There is no distinction between 'consciousness', 'metacognition', 'self-awareness', or anything else. These are all one and the same. Qualia are the first-person experience of these processes, nothing more.

You clearly don't mean this literally, because those words have different definitions. I'm defining consciousness as "what-it-is-like-to-be", or more precisely, "one of the two things you can be sure of, where existence is the other". (The two concepts are distinguishable, because existence is binary.)

The mechanism is the why: we experience awareness in the first person because we are brains with mechanisms for generating first-person experience.

Analogously, "the button turns on the light because the button has mechanisms for turning on the light". Or perhaps, "the button is the light", which is a category mistake as explained above.

There are no levels of concepts. We can propose any system of truth we like, beginning with our own self-awareness. All of them compete in the same arena: can they use our perceptions to explain who we are, where we come from, and what we do?

You immediately contradict yourself by saying that we begin with our own self-awareness (I prefer "consciousness"). This distinguishes consciousness from everything else, and is precisely what I mean by the first level.

Only one system is internally consistent, powerful, parsimonious, and useful. All others inevitably undercut themselves or spiral around into needlessness. Models like 'I am a Boltzmann brain' or 'I exist in a simulation' either produce the same results without that complication, or fizzle out into solipsism.

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.

Physicalism explains qualia. Qualia are not the first level, they are the last.

Based on this and your earlier claim that philosophy is irrelevant, I can only assume that we're not talking about the same thing.

Consciousness is not a fundamental feature of the universe. Chalmers' notions of 'panpsychophysics' are, mildly put, masturbatory. They make no predictions, offer no solutions, explain nothing: they are as relevant and useful to the problem of consciousness as the Tooth Fairy. The idea of the ontologically autonomous consciousness is fatally testable: if we can account for everything happening in the brain, and if the brain is causing mental states, the ontologically autonomous 'consciousness' has no effect, it is causally decoupled from the universe, it is nothing, it does nothing, it does not exist.

We're back to the practicality argument. Consciousness appears to have no causal effect, but the statement "consciousness does not exist" is as absurd as the statement "I do not exist".

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.

An organism with a human brain cannot be a p-zombie. It must have qualia. Qualia are created by the brain.

We're in agreement. Experiential properties supervene on physical properties.

The deflationary solution is the solution.

What we should all REALLY be afraid of, in terms of hard problems, is cosmology!

The ultimate cosmological question ("Why is there something rather than nothing?") is closely related to the hard problem, but from a different perspective.