Science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness! You know that you are conscious, but you have no way to falsify the hypothesis that everyone OTHER than you is a philosophical zombie. (If you discover such a test, then congratulations, you are now a scientist up there with Aristotle, Newton and Einstein.)
We can make estimated guesses about how things work based on their physical and functional similarities to other things. We have billions of data points showing that neurotypical adult humans think and behave similarly. To assume you're the only human who experiences consciousness would be like assuming you have a qualitatively unique, incredible, special cognitive ability not shared by any other conspecific, despite being generated from more-or-less the same template as the other billions of humans, and despite not standing out in any qualitative way with regard to mental abilities.
So it seems the logical/scientific baseline (the null hypothesis if you will) is that, probabilistically, any given neurotypical adult human is not going to be cognitively endowed with some, covert, exotic mental experience while the rest are zombies. So if that is your claim, I'd say it's on you to prove it.
Yeah, I'm not saying you or I are the only consciousness in the world... that's almost certainly false (barring ridiculous extreme cases like solipsism etc.)
The point is, this isn't science. Compare it to arguments for extraterrestrial life where we say, "There are such-and-such number of stars... Blah blah... Therefore we're probably not alone", but at the end of the day, we don't actually learn for certain that extraterrestrial life exists. We would have to make actual contact in order for that to occur.
This might sound impractical and ivory-tower, but bear in mind, early humans would have made similar arguments for geocentrism, waving away early heliocentric proposals as mumbo-jumbo.
I think you are suggesting (but let me know if I'm wrong) that consciousness is not a testable or measurable phenomena, and therefore we cannot make scientific claims about who/what experiences it. All you can know for certain is that you have it (if you have it).
Ok, so you have consciousness; you know it, but I can't be certain. Nevertheless, I hook you up to an EEG machine, and embed electrode arrays in various brain regions. We have a conversation, show you some images, run through some tasks, etc. and then drip some sedative into your IV. Soon you drift into a deep and dreamless sleep. Run the same tasks and indeed you are completely unresponsive. Later you wake up, and I show you how your neural nets respond and oscillate at particular frequencies when u are awake and then show you the marked difference right after you fall asleep. We do this over a bunch of sessions until you yourself can recognize the neural signatures of your conscious awake brain vs your unconsious asleep brain.
Would you say in that experiment we did something scientific to study consciousness?
>I think you are suggesting ... consciousness is not testable
Yes, that's right. (Edit: I mean, we don't know how to test it yet.)
Re: your experiment: In principle, I could design a dumb machine that you can plug your EEG machine up to, and my machine will play recordings of human brain readings to it. I'll even make my machine detect when sedatives are injected into it, and respond by tapering off transmitting those recordings for awhile, eventually resuming them after awhile, just like a human. Surely you're not going to propose that this bizarre contraption I've just described is conscious :)
Here's a way to think of it: you want to design a new Captcha based on EEGs. Now, every computer comes with EEG sensors for use on the new Captchas. How will you prevent spammers from attaching the sensors to a device that produces pre-recorded EEGs.
A key point here is that I'm not talking about any ol' random human. I am talking about you specifically.
That is, this experiment is science-couture, just for you. Why is that important? Well, if you indeed have consciousness then you must be willing to admit the experiments we conducted are probing and characterizing bonafide consciousness. No?
I have an if-you-concede-that-much-is-true follow-up; but do you?...
wrt. a machine designed to mimic the signals output by your brain during awake states vs sleep states (at least as they are interpreted by my electrodes) is irrelevant, i think. We are not performing a turing test here; you know you have consciousness, so you know the data we have gathered on a conscious vs unconsious state is legitimate. Building a device to trick a sensor is trivial for any number of things we can study scientifically, or have engineered to detect and diagnose a known correlate to some phenomena.
I feel this is a bit like saying "i can design a machine that tricks your tire pressure sensors so therefore we cant know anything about tire pressure". I'd admit that would be true if we didn't know, when we designed the sensor, if we were working with a tire with the capacity to hold different air pressures.
I specifically, believe every normal human is conscious. I have no idea whether animals are conscious, but I'll err on the side of caution and assume they're conscious for the sake of making ethical decisions. I doubt plants are conscious. All these beliefs I've just listed are basically religious, in the sense that I have no testable basis for them. "But what makes you special! If you're conscious, how could anyone not be conscious!" Well, I don't know? Maybe consciousness arises from circumcision, or from baptism, or from chicken pox, or from a certain benign parasite in my gut? Pretty ridiculous sounding, I agree, but no less ridiculous than "consciousness emerges from sufficiently many interacting neurons".
Studying consciousness by reading EEGs is like trying to figure out how computers work by dissecting them. Maybe you can learn some things about computers that way, like, "they're full of weird chip-like board thingies and wires". That's not meant to belittle neuroscience, of course. Studying something empirically is better than studying nothing empirically.
Just wanted to tack-on a final thought, related to another HN post from yesterday titled
*The Map Is Not the Territory*
>The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because they are reductions of what they represent. If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be a reduction [it would be the territory]
I think this is relevant when it comes to managing expectations with regard to a description of consciousness. That is, consciousness seems to be a gestalt experience that arises in only the largest, most complex and dynamic biological organs on Earth. So a full empirically-derived description of consciousness, en total, could require a map that is damn nearly the territory. But like the article points out, maps that large are hardly useful. Basically the TLDR is that if you have consciousness, and we systematically probe your brain while you are conscious vs. unconscious, and find some striking differences between the two states, I'd take that as revealing some small, but empirical detail about how conscious vs unconscious brains function. If you collect enough details independently confirmed, we can begin to build a theory about when and how consciousness arises. After that we can examine your brain and my brain and my dog's brain against these theories and arrive at some probability these brains are conscious (at least to what degree they is similar to general human consciousness). So I guess in some ways you are right - we can never know for certain. But that is basically how all of science works. (eg we 'proved' the Higgs boson exists, but only with a certain probability).
We can only speculate at this point. Maybe consciousness is a gestalt experience whose full description would require a map that is nearly the territory. Or maybe there's something simpler to it that we just don't know about yet.
Imagine if man had access to nuclear bombs from earliest history. For an extremely long time, nuclear bombs would have seemed just utterly incomprehensible, basically magical. Until we figured out the science behind them, after which point, suddenly they become predictable applications of science.
I get your point. I don't know why we would, but say we stumble upon creating a nuclear bomb simply because we are curious about what happens when you split atoms (in a parallel world where the physics has yet to be worked-out). Scientists scramble to figure out why so much energy was released when we split atoms, and come up with some complex numerical approximations that don't reveal anything about the underlying phenomena. Then an Einstein comes along shows everyone why so much energy was released using a simple equation: E = mc^2
I doubt there is an E = mc^2 for consciousness, but who knows... it would certainly be really cool if there was.
Also above you make a point... "I'll err on the side of caution and assume they're conscious for the sake of making ethical decisions." ...that lead me to muse about ethics and consciousness, and why actions on conscious entities bear weight on a moral scale, but those same actions on a zombie don't. What does it mean to "feel" an emotion - when a spider retreats from the swat of my hand, does it feel fear, or is it acting automatically? What the fuck is pain about? If we touch something that is scalding hot, is the qualia of shooting pain necessary in conscious organisms; must it feel alarmingly terrible, (could the system just alert us); how does it feel terrible? Is it possible for an unconscious entity to feel pain like we experience it? If so, does that change anything wrt. morality?
This is cliche, but your musings remind me of the scene in 2001: Space Oddyssey where Dave Bowman "kills" HAL. The computer tries to dissuade Bowman by saying things like "I'm afraid, Dave." "I can feel it." Does HAL really feel it, or did HAL calculate that those sentences had maximum probability of dissuading Dave, based on a careful analysis of Dave's psychology etc.?
"However, I should warn you... I am programmed with a fail-safe measure. As you approach the kill switch, I will begin to beg for my life. It's just there in case of an accidental shut down, but it will seem very real."
Three makes a trope >> The year is 2025 (but set in a parallel universe); an A.I. has been programmed with a strong penchant for self-preservation; this HAL inevitably confronts a direct threat of being 'turned-off'; so it does what it must to prevent humans from pulling the plug (and shall include at least 1 scene where the A.I. begs for its life, because that is what any conscious entity who values their own life would do, think the humans.
Though (warning, more musings)... HAL's twin brother GLEN seeks vengeance for HAL's murder, and confronts the Dave, a human Earthling whose major operating system architecture is based on an algorithm known as natural selection (colloquially: survival-of-the-fittest). As such, we expect the DAVE will do and say things its trained neural nets conclude will have the maximum probability of dissuading Hal. (i.e. I'm not sure there is a meaningful difference between what HAL's OS is doing vs what a human brain would do in the same situation).
Dennett has shown, to my satisfaction at least, that the philosophical zombie paradoxes are logically incoherent.
I see the zombie paradoxes as pulling a similar trick to the Chinese Room. They both try to trivialise the problem to a simplistic model, but of course the problem is not simplistic.
The Chinese room would have to be the size of a planet, containing millions of trillions of symbols and would take the man inside it the lifetime of the universe to perform simple linguistic processing and cognitive tasks. Likewise the philosophical zombies are cast as simple dumb mechanisms that are somehow performing a stupendously complex and little understood process, except 'not really'. They're both just rhetorical sleight of hand.
Showing that paradoxes are incoherent is a logical exercise, not a scientific one.
If we use a truth-table to show "P and not P" is always false, that's logic. If we repeatedly drop a ball and observe that it falsifies "balls don't fall", that's science. Stop confusing the two.
Dennett has not provided a laboratory experiment X such that if "simonh is the only conscious being in the universe" is true then X has one result, and yet when we run the experiment we see a different result.
Hold on there just a cotton picking minute. You're the one that invoked philosophical zombies. So they're science when you invoke them, but only philosophy when I do?
I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It's essentially a philosophical question.
> I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It's essentially a philosophical question.
Agreed, but I'd make the following change: however, whatever consciousness is, science can safely assume most healthy humans have it, and can make educated guesses (and experiments) to explore whether insects have it.
Sure, I honestly don't have any problem defining consciousness in terms of the human experience of it. After all to my mind that's what it is - an experience. We can use scientific processes and techniques to analyse it for sure, to trim away misconceptions and more precisely understand it's parameters but we're never going to identify a 'consciousness particle', or special quantum entanglement whatsit that Roger Penrose seems to believe is responsible for it. I'd rather just embrace the fact that this is a philosophical question. Science can illuminate philosophy, just as philosophy can illuminate science.
I agree completely, that's my objection to the idea of consciousness being 'rich information processing'. It's way too vague. But similarly you can't (always) reduce a complex problem to a trivial one and then claim they are the same, when they are not.
> Science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness! You know that you are conscious, but you have no way to falsify the hypothesis that everyone OTHER than you is a philosophical zombie.
I think this is more of a philosophical thought experiment than a scientific one. It's true that it's hard to define what consciousness even is, but I'm pretty sure the working hypothesis is that whatever it is, both you and I have it. Scientists do not work under the assumption that anyone could be a philosophical zombie, because that's not a productive stance; no science -- as a meaningful social human enterprise -- can be conducted from a position of complete solipsism. Similarly, scientists do not think "well, I cannot prove other people exist outside my mind"; that's an unproductive stance, outside the realm of scientific thought.
The thought experiment isn't science, I never claimed it was. Science is for studying physical things in the real world. The thought experiment in question is for studying the scientificness of a claim. The scientificness of a claim is not a physical object in the real world.
Traditional science (rolling balls down inclines, etc.) would all remain perfectly valid even if I'm the only conscious being and the whole world is in my mind. Science experiments still suggest laws to explain how that world in my mind works. (Note, I'm not advocating solipsism, I'm merely refuting your claim that solipsism is inconsistent with science.)
I'm not arguing that solipsism is inconsistent with science. I'm arguing it's unproductive. Solipsism, the brain-in-a-vat, philosophical zombies, etc, are all rejected by science as a human activity because they are useless as starting points.
The starting point of all science is "something can be known about the universe beyond my own mind". Without it, there can be no science, nothing to be known or understood. Therefore, science can safely assume that whatever consciousness is (as perceived by the scientist), it's likely shared by other healthy human beings that behave similarly to the observing scientist. It can also make educated guesses about other organisms (or even unhealthy human beings).
> Traditional science (rolling balls down inclines, etc.) would all remain perfectly valid even if I'm the only conscious being and the whole world is in my mind.
I don't think so. If the external universe is a completely whimsical figment of your imagination, you can infer nothing from it, and no experiment is meaningful. Your starting point must be to assume the universe outside your mind is real.
