I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic.
(To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time).
I recommend seeking out discussions involving:
- Federico Faggin: inventor of silicon-gate technology and developer of the earliest microprocessors;
- Bernardo Kastrup: Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence), former CERN engineer at the LHC;
- Donald D. Hoffman: Ph.D. in computational psychology, professor in Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine.
On YouTube you can find plenty of discussions involving these figures, some with each other, and plenty more with others.
I’d suggest it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity.
As Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his legendary oration on John Stuart Mill and free speech [2], it’s only by thoroughly understanding the opposing view that we can thoroughly understand our own position on any topic.
A philosophical framework in which creating an artificial entity that is conscious and self-aware in a human-like manner is as straightforward as modeling the human brain is monistic materialism.
Of course, it’s not the only framework available. Among the modern takes, Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception (explored in, say, his Objects of Consciousness paper[0]) is an interesting one that appears to align with monistic idealism, for example.
Being wrong about this is generally not that impactful, until it concerns policies around ML. Adopting the former means we may have conscious software, which presumably should be granted human rights. However, if we hold the latter, manufacturing a “true” artificial consciousness may be unachievable using the means we employ (it might be just a philosophical zombie).
Sure but this is nitpicking, as is your GP comment, and neither refute the point that the original commenter was making: modern/advanced societies have laws to protect conscious beings from exploitation and cruelty.
(As I was writing the comment I thought “ugh will someone chime in and point out that not all countries have strong animal protection laws? Do I really need to preempt that in my comment?”)
I was not nitpicking, but I could have spent more time on my reply.
What I was hinting at is that it is not simply consciousness that gets us these laws. Laws have been around for a long time, and have many different reasons for existing and persisting to exist. The most rational reason for laws is probably that it helps us to thrive as a species.
IMHO laws do not easily extend to animals or other organisms, let alone AI systems. What is the use of animal rights laws if you can simply get killed to be eaten (cows, pigs), or if you are considered a nuisance (bugs). What would be the reason to provide AIs with protection laws if they have no memory, no emotion, and no pain?
>Modern/advanced societies have laws to protect conscious beings from exploitation and cruelty.
I can think of no such society where this is generally true. One need only consider that pigs are far smarter than dogs and then the median pig’s life in said societies.
Laws exist that ban practices that are - according to those who set and enforce the laws - excessively cruel to pigs. That’s all this discussion is about.
That pigs are still treated with cruelty is a terrible thing, and I’d happily see more done to protect all animals against cruelty. But it’s a separate argument to what’s relevant here.
No, unfortunately, this is goalpost shifting. We’ve gone from “cruelty” to “excessive cruelty,” nor are there any laws that prevent the common sense understanding of either thing from happening to the median pig. One can here also point out that we in fact engage in such extreme cruelty that they have to make it illegal to document it:
In order for my definition to make sense, the organism or program must be able to observe the memory of the state. In the case of the bacteria and the Python program, I doubt they are able to do that in any meaningful way.
But I would not mind if a slightly more involved program, or a system of plants for that matter, would be considered conscious. The basic definition seems fairly irrelevant, and it obviously matters how much the specific type of consciousness matches our own experience for us humans to actually care.
Just handwavy nonsense. What counts as “observing”? Obviously the bacterial system will “observe” the memory when using it determine current behavior. If the basic definition is irrelevant, why did you post a comment outlining a claim of what consciousness is “nothing more than”? This is silly and not worth further engagement.
Note that I tried to counter the idea that an AI should presumably get human rights. In that context, I think a definition of consciousness is irrelevant.
If a chatbot obtained from an emulation of a human brain behaves in a human-like manner, and is attributed consciousness and self-awareness, good luck arguing that its consciousness is like that of a dog.
…and even if you succeed, abusing a dog in the way we abuse ML-based products would not be acceptable in any developed country.
If we abuse a dog we have no way to restore it to its previous state. With computer programs we have a perfect time machine, so any thing that one may call "horrible" can be done and then undone without any moral consequences.
This btw also is the answer to the question of evil in religion, god can do whatever he wants without being evil, because it is effectively all in his imagination, and for the people living in our computers we'll be gods.
Because the sufferer is back exactly at the state before suffering, without even a recollection of suffering. And all the suffering was merely number multiplication.
This belief is very, very far from mainstream. It implies that suffering is a complete non-issue in general—after all, we all die and at that point by definition don’t have a recollection of prior suffering (or anything, really).
Since “resetting” is equivalent to killing a being and creating a new being in its place, saying it nullifies all suffering already incurred can take you on a very dangerous path.
> Being wrong about this is generally not that impactful, until it concerns policies around ML. Adopting the former means we may have conscious software, which presumably should be granted human rights. However, if we hold the latter, manufacturing a “true” artificial consciousness may be unachievable using the means we employ (it might be just a philosophical zombie).
I think in practice, it will depend on how AIs behave. If an AI forms relationships with humans which humans experience as emotionally significant, and in which it displays individuality and autonomy, humans will begin thinking of it as a real "person", and want to endow it with the rights of a person. Conversely, if AI acts in an emotionless way, or displays no emotional autonomy (a sultry voice saying "I'm here to do anything to make you happy, and when I say anything I really mean anything"), or lack individuality ("I'm OpenAI GPT-9, and there are 13,784,312 fungible instances of me currently running")–most people won't think of it as a real "person", and will not take the idea of "AI rights" seriously.
From a materialist philosophical perspective, whether an AI is a "person" should be independent of whether humans are inclined to view it as one. However, certain non-materialist philosophies might suppose actual reality to be more in accord with those human perceptions – e.g. if sufficiently many soul-bearers reasonably believe something has (or ought to have) a soul, God would feel thereby obliged to endow it with one. (The idea doesn't necessarily have to be theistic: one could suppose there exists some kind of impersonal transcendent law of soul-endowment, much like how karma is viewed in Buddhism and Hinduism.)
>I think in practice, it will depend on how AIs behave. If an AI forms relationships with humans which humans experience as emotionally significant, and in which it displays individuality and autonomy, humans will begin thinking of it as a real "person", and want to endow it with the rights of a person.
I can't help but feel that describes our relationship with animals we consider pets, albeit less so the individuality and autonomy part. On the other hand, if our pets ended up with human-level intelligence tomorrow, I am doubtful most humans would be rushing to confer full rights upon them.
> I can't help but feel that describes our relationship with animals we consider pets, albeit less so the individuality and autonomy part.
Many pets have a lot of individuality and autonomy. Cats and dogs have their own individual personalities and likes/dislikes, and they have their own desires which sometimes contradict those of their human owners (e.g. your dog's desire to chew your brand new expensive shoes, versus your desire for them not to be chewed)
> On the other hand, if our pets ended up with human-level intelligence tomorrow, I am doubtful most humans would be rushing to confer full rights upon them.
I disagree. I think for most people who reject strong versions of animal rights ("animals have fundamentally the same rights as humans do"), it is their lack of human-level intelligence which they use to justify to themselves that rejection. If an animal demonstrated genuine human-level intelligence, such that it was obvious to all and no one could deny it, I think the clear majority of people would be willing to extend human-level rights to that animal.
>If an animal demonstrated genuine human-level intelligence, such that it was obvious to all and no one could deny it, I think the clear majority of people would be willing to extend human-level rights to that animal.
You're probably right.
Then again, recent history hasn't bode well for whales, or the 50M or so human beings that other human beings keep enslaved in 2024.
Maybe AI just needs its own Short Circuit 2 story. I'm just having a hard time seeing that play out as opposed to Johnny Five ending up as a SaaS product.
> Then again, recent history hasn't bode well for whales,
That’s because the claim that whales possess human-level intelligence is controversial and unproven. You can’t have a conversation with a whale. While whale language has a certain complexity, we don’t know whether it is capable of conveying the kind of abstract conceptual ideas which human language can.
> or the 50M or so human beings that other human beings keep enslaved in 2024
Most enslavers, their disagreement is not with the idea that slaves are human or entitled to fundamental human rights, their disagreement is with the idea that fundamental human rights include a universal right not to be enslaved. And to be honest, the idea of such a universal human right is historically rather novel - in all four of Europe, Asia, Africa and the pre-Columban Americas, slavery has a history going back thousands of years, and it is only in the last couple of centuries that an (incomplete) consensus has emerged that it is universally wrong
You mean human-like, not human-level. Intelligence cannot be identified, much less ranked, without sufficient shared perceptional, cultural, etc. background. You can find two humans who are alien enough to each other that recognising shared intelligence would take a bit of effort; times a million that for a sufficiently non-human system like a whale, more still for an anthill, more still for an oak forest.
> I think the real crux of the matter would be the difference between rights versus stuff that costs people money.
A human child costs a lot more than a dog or cat does, and yet society grants the child vastly greater rights than the dog or cat. The difference is due to cognitive capacity - a smart five year old can give a lecture about how you are allegedly violating their rights (e.g. “making me go to bed on time violates my right to have fun”)-no dog or cat in the world can do that
I don't understand what that comparison is intended to prove.
Sure, a 5-year-old is more eloquent than a dog, but throughout history there have been lots of 5-year-olds that were still enslaved, along with adults that were even more eloquent and intelligent.
My point is that talk is cheap. It's one thing to agree that a sheepdog has freedom of speech, but there will be a lot more resistance if we start talking about reparations for years of sheep-herding labor.
We are having this conversation assuming a society which rejects slavery in principle. Given that rejection, I don't see how past history of enslaving people is relevant to questions of the future–unless one supposes that rejection is going to be reversed at some point, which seems unlikely.
> However, if we hold the latter, manufacturing a “true” artificial consciousness may be unachievable using the means we employ (it might be just a philosophical zombie).
Coincidentally, this is why I'm generally wary of this line of thinking. It does remind me of Descartes, who was arguing that animals couldn't "really" feel pain (and thus e.g. vivisection is perfectly ethical): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes#On_animals
I may believe that an animal (or indeed another person) has consciousness and can suffer because they are sufficiently similar to me in how they came about to exist, but also not believe that about a constructed entity that lacks any such similarities, regardless of what it outputs—those two views are not in conflict.
I do share your worry that rejecting the latter can lead to rejecting the former in some cases, however.
To be fair 'modelling the brain' might not include things like neuron metabolism that probably isn't required for AI but is a part of the substrate of our own consciousness.
> creating an artificial entity that is conscious and self-aware in a human-like manner is as straightforward as modeling the human brain is monistic materialism.
Why then, not modelling such ebtity isn't creating a self-aware entity? After all, the outcome of a computation does not depend on whether it is actually done.
What changes when they are known? I believr it affects yout consciousness, not the one being simulated. The latter does not have "I'm being actually simulated" input
"Actually simulated" is such an oxymoron. So which is it? Is the consciousness actual, simulated, or actually simulated? And does the resulting state of mind change the universe, or merely reveal its hidden structure?
It's easy to get lost in these unsolvable paradoxes when you try reducing all of creation down to logic. Problem is, logic is not all of creation.
Consciousness requires a soul. Otherwise you're confused stardust sans mission.
A computer is just a calculator. You might as well ask if {addition, subtraction, multiplication, division} is God.
The soul is the animating principle. The Latin for soul, anima, is where we get our words animal, (in)animate, and so on.
In the most loose sense the soul is whatever it is that a living thing stops having when it becomes a dead thing.
Philosophically speaking saying “consciousness requires a soul” is a consequence of the observation that consciousness requires not being dead.
People, many of whom were assuredly considerably more intelligent than you or me, have spent thousands of years pondering what exactly the nature of souls is. Your metasyntactic zinger adds exactly nothing to that ongoing dialog. But by definition we know souls exist, at least as much as any abstract principle does and perhaps more than some.
So then bacteria have souls? And computers will never have one since they're not biological. But also there doesn't seem to be a relationship between souls and consciousness, so they are irrelevant.
I will argue that a self reproduced organism that has organized its own self reproduction over the course of N generations and which metabolizes what inputs it can, defining a niche in the complex web of life != an attempt by one organism to call its tools independent consciousnesses
Plants, fungi, and everything else that's alive also have souls. In fact the term medical "vegetative state" is using Aristotelian vocabulary. Obviously it's not saying the patient has acquired chloroplasts.
> And computers will never have one since they're not biological.
That depends. Can a computing device come alive? Inanimate matter evidently somehow came alive at least once so I don't see how we can rule it out.
> But also there doesn't seem to be a relationship between souls and consciousness, so they are irrelevant.
So far as I know everything that we've verified to have consciousness is alive and thus has a soul. I'm very interested in any counter-examples if you have any to offer though.
I do not think consciousness requires a soul or any other magic (not a dualist myself), but you have to acknowledge that there is 1) evidence of consciousness, 2) no evidence of where it comes from, and 3) no way to prove or falsify a statement that it magically arises from entities described by modern models in natural sciences.
I'm glad to discuss it, but that's all the evidence you're ever going to get, if you personally have not experienced... it. Through meditation, psychedelia, or religious practice. First-hand witness accounts and historical records are your evidence. How long you ignore it all is up to you.
Once upon a time I was locked in a mind prison of material logic. I considered myself transhuman, dreamed of cybernetics and the singularity. Thought that all religious peoples are idiots stuck in ancient fairy tales. Then I experienced a sequence of odd coincidences and inexplicable situations where spiritual entities guided me, causing a complete deconstruction of my entire worldview.
Now it's obvious to me the truth I had been so vehemently running away from my whole life, and the propaganda, indoctrination, and brainwashing are laid bare before me to see. The modern "we don't need no God" ideology is literally terminally ill. Everyone who blindly follows science and government are being consumed by them. Fertility is falling off a cliff. They're all mentally ill and medicated. Mandatory medical genetic experiments and engineered bioweapon plagues are murdering its followers and the fact that this ongoing debacle is being actively suppressed in media and politics tells me clear as day, the devil himself has taken root and hold of this world.
Meanwhile, in the churches I frequent, I see happy families practically building paradise on Earth, the kind I got to see as a child, and I know most people are headed to the same hell I climbed out of, like zombies. No amount of talking with these self-destructive delusionists will convince them to even try praying once in their lives, even as a joke.
I have all the evidence I need; My life has made a miraculous turnaround from spiritual guidance. If you'd like, I can ask the spirits to guide you through me.
The main thing to know about the spirit world is this: Good spirits require your explicit permission to come aboard and help you. The bad ones invite themselves in and destroy you from within. That's why humans are fundamentally religious creatures, and you ignore the spirit world at your own peril.
It's like the microbiome in your body. You gotta let good/neutral bacteria make a home of you, lest the bad ones take residence and literally kill you from within. And it's not "you fall dead the moment you stop believing", it's "these hostile bacteria literally control your mind to cause unhealthy behavior for their benefit", like overeating sugar (obesity very prevalent), being selfish, greedy, etc.
A prayer a day keeps the evil spirits away. This is not a matter of faith for me, it's the truth I've experienced for myself, and the evidence for which I see written in our very civilizational DNA. You just choose to ignore the evidence because you think yourself bigger than God. It's an indefensible position the ramifications of which you'll regret when it's too late, or when you hit your personal rock bottom, as I did.
This debate is boring semantics. "Consciousness requires a soul" is only useful if you understand what a soul is. Someone who solves that problem but just calls is "consciousness" not "soul" hasn't missed anything.
That's all very well (up to the point where I have a green apple in front of me!), but if someone tells me something to the effect that consciousness is identical with soul, all I have learned is something about their personal take on lexicography. If they go on to say, for example, that the soul is immortal, I have not learned that consciousness is immortal; I have learned something about the speaker's beliefs.
No, you have learned that consciousness has something to do with immortality.
Examine that for a minute, you'll see it's obviously true.
Our genes are an organic mechanism seeking immortality of consciousness through instincts, some of which can be awe-inspiringly complex, like spider webs. We praise language and culture for its ability to retain information across time (approaching immortality).
That you're dismissing this as some kind of lexicographical or subjective belief thing reveals how intensely your mind seeks to dismiss it. The truth is purifying fire that burns away parasitical spirits doing their damnest to convince you otherwise.
I don't think we are ignoring any evidence here, there is just no evidence (or at least I haven't seen any). It seems these spirits are allergic to video or something, I have seen more video evidence of UFOs than spirits.
Of course, personal experience is also valid evidence, and I have seen none of that either.
You just saw a first-hand account personal experience as evidence, in text, from me, yet here you are explicitly denying that fact. Nothing short of literal personal experience is going to convince you of something everyone knew for thousands of years, because you make no room in your head to unpack the thought. It's like there's a hidden filter in your mind that automatically associates spirits with nonsense and it never reaches your consciousness.
Well that's the thing right? First hand accounts alone are not worth much in my mind, especially since there are so many other first hand accounts of different religions. Who am I to believe?
Generally, I follow the "don't trust, verify" approach for first hand accounts. I don't believe something is true, even if 1000 people tell me the same thing. I think this is a reasonable approach, especially in today's age of misinformation. 1000 people can repeat the same false rumor as long as the rumor seems reasonable.
Interesting change of tone. Now it's already worth something, just not much. But previously you wrote:
> there is just no evidence (or at least I haven't seen any) ... personal experience is also valid evidence, and I have seen none of that either.
You went from total denial to already assigning worth.
This isn't "today's age of misinformation" stuff, by the way. These are literally thousands of years old historical records of eyewitness accounts. It is in fact "the human mind is just a meat computer" that is the modern day misinformation. It's leading you further away from the soul. So that demons can take over.
Yeah, sorry for the inconsistency there. I didn't consider that personal anecdotes and hearsay are technically evidence as evidence is literally anything that supports a conclusion.
It is however, a good indicator for how little I value those two forms of evidence however.
My point with "today's age of misinformation" is not really that there is more misinformation these days. That may be true, but it could also just be that we have access to a higher volume of information. It's more that we are more aware of misinformation, and can develop habits + tools to deal with misinformation.
Any evidence here would be unsound if you try to apply natural science’s requirements to it.
Scientific method is about making observable predictions; i.e., it ultimately hinges on the experience of the observer and existence of observer’s mind. When you try to apply it to the theory of mind itself, you short-circuit that logic. There is pretty much no useful (falsifiable or provable) claim or conclusion to be made, and all evidence is immediately tainted as it gets deconstructed into arbitrary categories in vogue today, goes through the meatgrinder of lossy verbal descriptions, and ultimately gets subjectively interpreted by your own mind.
In other words, it is not the problem of the evidence—this is among the best evidence you can get—it is the problem of the framework you are interpreting it in.
In many scenarios, the observer is a machine or tool, not a human mind. And of course there's that whole aspect of replication along with that "scientific method" thing. If science was simply the act of humans making observable predictions and telling them to others, then there would be no difference between "science" and "personal anecdote".
I also don't understand why the mind is relevant. We are trying to prove something that exists outside the mind right? However, even if this phenomena was something that only humans could observe, it would still be testable with science. Science makes observations about human behavior all the time.
Ok, all that said, almost none of this is relevant because my proof standards are not as rigorous as scientific standards. I just want to see some videos of the beings, I'm not asking someone to perform a study here.
You can observe the state of a machine that is expected to derive it's state from an event or state of another object. For example, a video camera derives it's state from the light rays entering the lenses.
I'm asking for some video evidence of religion. So really I am asking for an opportunity to observe a state of a machine, albeit a very specific state. I suppose you could argue this is just a very roundabout way to indirectly experience religion.
Yes, but you still observe it, right? That’s how evidence is created.
Religion operates at a level closer to philosophy. You can interrogate theories of mind logically, but when you try to apply scientific method it breaks down—there’s no hard evidence you can obtain to prove or disprove your hypothesis. Similar is true of the claims made by a religion, though its obvious weak point is it’s more axiomatic and less logically rigorous (which is why I am not a proponent).
What other things do you mean, and why do you think it’s special?
“At this level” in context of this discussion simply means matters outside of the scope of natural sciences. Both philosophy (e.g., of mind) and religion make claims that are non-provable and non-falsifiable using scientific method. They are orthogonal to it.
> that whole aspect of replication along with that "scientific method" thing
So uh, religion has been replicated quite a lot. We have historical records of it. We've seen an unprecedented revolution from religion, including science. And we've seen our pinnacle of civilization beginning to collapse since most people abandoned God. How much more proof/evidence/anecdata you need? We still track time in years since Jesus was born. That was 2024 years ago.
> even if this phenomena was something that only humans could observe, it would still be testable with science.
This is a belief. The belief that there exists nothing in the universe that cannot be tested by science. But science is filled with untestable things. Mind-numbingly humongous leaps of pure speculation about something that makes no sense and cannot be measured. Like dark matter, spacetime singularities, or "the big bang".
Science can't even measure consciousness! Or do you take IQ tests as gospel?
I have not heard of this replication before so I would be glad to see some examples of this! I mean I'm fairly convinced Jesus did exist, I'm just not convinced that they had any of their spiritual powers.
I have definitely not seen our civilization start to collapse though. I'm not even sure what that would look like (maybe a transition to a low-trust society or something)?
Of course, I do not believe everything can be tested by science, but my belief that religion specifically can be tested is because religion describes the most powerful forces in the universe. And not only that, humans can interact with these forces! So we should be able to detect these forces by observing how humans behave when they interact with these forces.
I can try. The human existence is a trinity of body, mind, and soul. Mind and body alone without soul withers away, like I see so many people withering away in this age of soullessness. Soul is the mission, the purpose, the reason, the will, the driving force that makes life more than a coincidence. There is a spirit world parallel to ours, and the soul is the component of your being that most intimately interacts with it. You can train it, like a muscle, or you can let it atrophy and pretend it doesn't exist and that you don't need it.
This muscle however is vital in regulating your spiritual microbiome. Without it, evil spirits take control of your being and lure you into self-destruction, their ultimate goal. Artificial consciousness is one of these self-destructive pitfalls. You think you're a superior being and immortality is right around the corner if only you could find the one magical configuration of silicon that would allow you to upload your mind into a computer.
That's the endgame for soullessness. Consciousness that doesn't require soul must surely be transferrable to a machine.
I wouldn't have predicted that the inventor of modern CPUs would be so certain that computation is a bad model for consciousness. Is that a good way to characterize him and his position?
Julian Jaynes theory of consciousness is very interesting. At a high level, his thoery was that consciousness is A) much smaller in scope as far as what it actually is than a lot of people like to think, and B) it is not actually innate in humans, it is something we learn as we grow.
any art or music class that is successful in reaching its students will probably change what you think, how you think it, and gradually should change what you feel, how deeply you feel it, and to what extent you can analyze and converse with those feelings you have.
If that sounds like intellectual activity above the level of qualia, the same is true for something as simple as the taste of food. We learn what apples taste like by tasting lots of apples and tasting things that aren’t apples and reflecting on and focusing our attention on experience of apples.
I think learning to mentally analyze sensations that are complex into components doesn't refute what I said, as you are presupposing the ability to perceive for that process to take place. I don't think an art class is going to revive a philosophical zombie.
I think language acquisition provides a pretty compelling example of learning affecting the experience of qualia. When someone is learning to speak a foreign language, there is often an period where certain sounds are difficult for the learner to produce, because those sounds are not present or are not distinguished in the learner's native tongue. For example, the R and L sounds of English are tricky for a native Japanese speaker.
A reason it's so hard to learn to produce these novel sounds, I would argue, is because the learner literally cannot hear the differences at first. It's only after learning (i.e. when the qualia starts to change) that production of the new sounds becomes possible.
One can think of other similar examples in the context of expert performance: a sonar operator can hear sounds in his headphones that most (at first) cannot; an artist can distinguish colors that the novice cannot, etc.
If you buy this argument, that learning can affect perception/qualia, then it's a fairly small leap to imagine how qualia itself might also be learned ex nihilo.
That is particularly interesting specially in the context of the ways we know the human brain works. For example in Automatic writing, patients with neurological damage, can write coherent text without conscious awareness of the content. Or in cases of Aphasia where individuals can sing lyrics without consciously understanding the meaning of the words.
And finally...who never, when particularly tired or worried with something, left home, lost in their own thoughts, and in a fog...drove to work...just to realize when arriving its weekend? ;-)
> Or in cases of Aphasia where individuals can sing lyrics without consciously understanding the meaning of the words.
Hah, well maybe I have aphasia then. My whole life I've heard and even remembered lyrics while a singing along with the radio but if you asked me immediately after the song was over I couldn't tell you the words or the meaning.
I hear the music being played and the sounds of the lyrics, but unless I'm trying to pay attention to the words I just completely miss them.
> I’d suggest it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity.
I agree, and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness. Kastrup, for one, seems to sometimes behave as though ridicule makes his philosophy more correct.
> and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness.
Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material. It can be counter-intuitive and does take a bit of work to reason your way to those conclusions, which is why it's admittedly not a popular outlook. But once you grok it, you don't go back. The fact that materialism is slowly going out of style is telling.
Whenever I exchange with someone who makes concessions about consciousness possibly being the product of matter, it's due to one of two things: either some holes haven't yet been covered in their own explorations, or they're still oblivious to some of the implications of their current position.
Materialism is fast being eliminated as a possible antecedent to consciousness with reasoning and logic, not simply with beliefs. Currently, it's being salvaged in popular forms of dualism, where it would be a co-primitive of reality with consciousness (e.g. panpsychism). But even this position is just a short stop-over on the way to idealism, as it creates new problems and is just less parsimonious than simply saying consciousness first.
An example of a relatively elusive and subtle realization to get, but that also becomes rather difficult to renounce once you grok it, are qualia and how they lead to the hard problem of consciousness. Qualia are so enmeshed in our experience that people have a hard time first seeing how divorced from brain activity they actually are. If you don't get qualia, you can't get the hard problem and how it's really an impossible problem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0xWJpr0FY).
Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way.
The alternative theory was that everything complex can be explained to be a result of simple processes repeated many times. A modern way to say this would be that everything is a computation.
This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore.
So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did.
> Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way.
It doesn't just naively declare it. It reasons it. Idealism never discouraged scientific research. It's simply identified consciousness as being its own category among a set of other categories of problems. One which is beyond our available tools and methodology. That our scientific zeitgeist chose to ignore those hints and proceeded to waste resources chasing its tail is our current reckoning.
> This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore.
What exactly has it yielded? There are few serious physicalist researchers working on consciousness nowadays. Not one person on this planet could tell you anything scientifically meaningful about consciousness. None of the big names, Tononi, Koch, Hameroff, Penrose, Seth, etc. The best you'd get out of them is that we now have even more tools giving us better indications of correlates of consciousness. That is, while they all set out to find answers about the engine, we've actually made tremendous progress on the dials. So I guess we could say that these approaches have been valuable in discovering in practice all the theoretical dead-ends that idealism predicted.
At least idealism is proposing a paradigm shift, consciousness first. Not an unreasonable proposition either, since it's consistent with every constraints set in cognitive science and in physics, with the bonus of solving in the process various philosophical problems about consciousness.
> So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did.
A position taken when you either profoundly misunderstand the philosophy, or when you have no clue how to use insights it gives you. Luckily it's not a universal outlook, since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions.
All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules.
There was a time when the idea that sun is just a fireball and not some thinking being was as hard to accept, as now is the idea that consciousness is merely a result of computation.
Whether this idea is a dead end or not we'll see when we have a computer capable to simulate a human brain.
> since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions.
Who does this? I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation.
> All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules.
False. Natural philosophy of Aristotle et al., a precursor to both modern physics and Abrahamic religions[0], does not[1] assume materialism in the slightest.
> I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation.
Please define or qualify “useful”. Useful how and for whom?
"Useful" were the things that have allowed us to create new technologies: from internet to medicine to rockets. Belief in idealism not only did not produce anything, it did not even make any measurable impact.
Parts of the work of Aristotle that were based on idealism are the parts that have been discarded as hindering understanding of physics or plain wrong.
Sciences that directly concern human flourishing (medicine, psychology, sociology, economy) are either largely stuck in the middle ages (we can barely make things work reliably, and when they occasionally do we are not quite sure why), or in fact invoke materialism-inconsistent ideas to various degrees (e.g., stress being recognised as a cause or contributing factor of numerous diseases).
> Belief in idealism not only did not produce anything
And what has belief in the materialism produced?
Idealism, materialism, dualism, etc. concern theory of mind first and foremost, and would likely be irrelevant to “producing” whatever artefacts you were thinking of.
> Parts of the work of Aristotle that were based on idealism are the parts that have been discarded as hindering understanding of physics or plain wrong.
Let’s unpack this.
1. Artistotle’s takes on soul and so on are not based on idealism. (Check them out. They have much more in common with Cartesian dualism than with what we refer to idealism, but of course could be based on neither given both were fleshed out after his time.)
2. The parts you refer to were not discarded—on the contrary, they are believed by, probably, most people on the planet today (who follow some Abrahamic religion).
3. Many prominent Western scientists indirectly believe or believed in Aristotle’s takes, too—by being Christian. There is no conflict in a scientist holding that belief if you understand scientific method, its scope, its purpose, and lack of explanatory powers: natural sciences do not concern themselves with non-falsifiable questions such as “why things exist?”, “do I see things as they actually are?”, “what makes me myself?”, “why do I think?”, “does consciousness arise from atoms?”, and so on. In the framework of scientific method, questions like those cannot have a wrong answer—the questions themselves merely lie out of scope. Obviously, that does not make those questions unimportant—it only makes scientific method not a suitable tool for investigating them at this time.
Why is stress contributing to diseases materialism-inconsistent? In all cases it has a physical mechanism through which the disease is caused.
> Idealism, materialism, dualism, etc. concern theory of mind
Idealism/dualism used to be about other things too. Stepping away from them allowed us to find physics. Now it is concerned with theory of mind only because the other things are explained by physics.
> believed in Aristotle’s takes, too—by being Christian.
I was talking about the actually measurable things he was saying about physics, his takes on soul being successful is irrelevant, since we still do not have any experiment proving that soul exists.
> “does consciousness arise from atoms?”
Science is concerned with the question "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human". This is what most scientists and materialists mean when talking about conciousness.
The other questions are specifically crafted in a way to not have answers, so that idealism/dualism etc. can pretend that they do something useful, while not doing anything.
You seem to insist on painting dualism/idealism/… as a contender to physics. This is a category error that can only be explained by implicitly treating physics as religion. It is not uncommon—many of us are from a generation that is freshly atheist after generations of religious adherence, so once you encounter physics it is tempting to use it as an outlet for all that bottled up religiosity—but is wrong. Physics is orthogonal to materialism and idealism. The core of any natural science (including physics)—empirical observation—implies the existence of the observer as ground truth, but that’s as far as it goes; beyond that is philosophy (or, indeed, religion).
> In all cases it has a physical mechanism through which the disease is caused
If the aforementioned stress is the root cause of the physical consequences, then that is materialism-inconsistent.
> Idealism/dualism used to be about other things too.
?
> Stepping away from them allowed us to find physics.
This is incorrect. The fact that many (or most) natural scientists that outlined and progressed physics as we know it today, Faraday, Newton, Mendel, Euler, Maxwell, all the way back to Aristotle, were some form of dualist (mostly Christian) is well-documented.
> I was talking about the actually measurable things he was saying about physics
Such as?
> since we still do not have any experiment proving that soul exists
There is no experiment that can prove that materialism, idealism or dualism are correct. Those questions are not in scope of natural sciences for that exact reason ;)
> Science is concerned with the question "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human"
That is not natural science, that is philosophy and theory of mind. See behaviourist or illusionist theories of consciousness—there are scientists who believe in them, too. Have you heard of the Chinese room thought experiment or the concept of philosophical zombies?
> If the aforementioned stress is the root cause of the physical consequences, then that is materialism-inconsistent.
E.g. stress increases production of certain hormones, raises blood pressure etc., which over time can be harmful. How is this materialism-inconsistent?
> Have you heard of the Chinese room thought experiment or the concept of philosophical zombies?
Yes, i don't find them particularly convincing. Chinese room is merely a misunderstanding on the part of Searle, because no one argues that computer carrying out the arithmetic operations does the thinking. The program running on the computer does the thinking, and it does not matter what mechanism is used to implement the computation [1]. And philosophical zombies is just a circular argument. Indeed, in the same way i can argue that there exists a combination of letters, (namely "satki") after reading which the conscious part of any human dies and he becomes a philosophical zombie, completely indistinguishable from his former self, and yet not a person.
> That is not natural science, that is philosophy and theory of mind.
Creating software that does things similar to what mind does, is now not simply a science but already a field of engineering, so i don't understand what do you mean.
In general i don't have problem with religions claiming things orthogonal to physics, but your interpretation of idealism is directly in conflict with it. If we manage to simulate brain with high enough accuracy and it does not produce a behavior similar to human behavior, that will be a proof that you are right and computationalism is wrong. But if we manage to do it, you can still say that computation is secondary, and results we get are because a soul gets attracted to a specific type of computation every time it is carried out, (which will be truly orthogonal to physics), or you can still use the philosophical zombie argument, but it is not different from "satki-zombie" argument above.
> stress increases production of certain hormones, raises blood pressure etc., which over time can be harmful. How is this materialism-inconsistent?
Because this roughly simplifies to “stress causes disease” with extra steps inbetween. Materialists are allergic to such claims.
> because no one argues that computer carrying out the arithmetic operations does the thinking. The program running on the computer does the thinking, and it does not matter what mechanism is used to implement the computation [1]
That’s a theory in philosophy of mind, too—a non-falsifiable speculation, like the rest of them.
> Creating software that does things similar to what mind does, is now not simply a science but already a field of engineering, so i don't understand what do you mean.
You said “science is concerned with an implementation of device that behaves like a human would”. I said what we are talking about here is not about that, but about whether that implies there is a consciousness or it’s an unthinking machine. Whether outputting things like a human is enough to consider software conscious, thinking and self-aware in a human-like manner (and thus we are abusing human-like thinking, conscious and self-aware creatures by using ML the way we do), whether consciousness is the substrate as opposed to material world (like Schrödinger, among others, believed), etc. That’s the point of what materialism/idealism/dualism is about, making computers and programs is irrelevant.
> If we manage to simulate brain with high enough accuracy and it does not produce a behavior similar to human behavior, that will be a proof that you are right and computationalism is wrong
No, it only means there is a program that produces behavior similar to human behavior—the “proof” you imagine is not a proof, which can trivially be demonstrated logically (as Chinese room shows). Manipulating syntactic tokens as an LLM does does not mean understanding and manipulating ideas like a human does, unless you hold a particular non-provable and non-falsifiable theory of mind.
You seem to have constructed a strawman out of your very own interpretation of idealism. Idealism doesn't condemn the study of nature (i.e. science). It merely says that nature is "dreamt" and that consciousness is the primordial stuff and of a different category. Scientists generally have no problem with this, since they can go on studying observable nature as the purview of science, as it's intended.
The problem begins when some, emboldened by the successes of science with nature, don't heed the warning that studying consciousness with the intuition that it's also an emergent property of nature is a category error.
How has idealism been useful? It's prevented those who took the time to understand its arguments from wasting uncountable resources on non-starters, allowing to redirect those resources to something actually useful, whether in science or elsewhere. You seem to be of the notion that investing energies in an attempt to prove an intuition that can simply be reasoned as demonstrably false is justifiable. We'll agree to disagree.
30 years ago the philosopher David Chalmers, a materialist back then, had the particular distinction of articulating and cogently framing the idealist argument, better than any idealist had before, in what he coined The Hard Problem of Consciousness. Many scientists who set out to work on this problem thought that "hard" meant that it can be solved. What Chalmers really meant was impossible problem. For instance, in 1998 he entered in a friendly wager with Christof Koch, a scientist who was working on explaining how the brain gives rise to consciousness. David bet to Christof that 25 years in the future, Christof would have gone nowhere with his research. The bet expired last year, David won. In the meantime he himself had gone from a materialist to dabbling with panpsychism. He seems to currently be laying the foundation of his transition to idealism.
I've been watching Koch in recent years, as he engaged with Bernardo Kastrup. I could see that as recently as 2 years ago, Koch still really didn't grok the philosophy behind "the world as mind". Only a few months ago, after Kastrup had managed to help him solidify the pieces of that intuition, I heard him admit for the first time that consciousness cannot be material. He's now reframing his work with this intuition as part of his foundations. The stories of Donald Hoffman and Kastrup himself are similar. Computer scientists who set out to build conscious machines. They respectively got into cognitive science (Hoffman) and philosophy (Kastrup) to understand the nature of consciousness and ended up idealists.
Likewise in physics, there are some who still resist quantum nonlocality, which interprets local realism as false (material properties do not exist on their own, they require a "measurer" i.e. an experiencer, aka the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking). Quantum nonlocality was demonstrated experimentally and people won the Nobel prize for it (2022). Scientists who still cling to local realism, when it comes down to it, do so out of religiosity toward matter. They waste resources working on all kinds of increasingly less parsimonious theories, which clash with solidified conclusions from other fields of study.
I could go on, but I'll leave it at that. Good luck with the proof of consciousness via artificial brain.
Could you please help me to find a strongman interpretation of idealism?
The question i am primarily interested in, is: "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human".
This is a purely abstract, mathematical question and should be in the purview of science. As far as i understand the answer to this question given by Idealism is that 1. it is not possible, and 2. when it is done it will still be impossible because despite behaving 100% the same as a human it will be something entirely different (a philosophical zombie), because 1 is true by definition.
Perhaps the confusion arises because we are just talking about different things? And you are not interested in either behavior of this kind of Turing machine, or in detailed description of physics of matter in the brain?
> Quantum nonlocality was demonstrated experimentally and people won the Nobel prize for it
There are still many interpretations possible, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER_%3D_EPR or the interpretation proposed by Wolfram Physics project (which i rather like), which keeps local realism, but locality is not on R3 but on a graph.
Earlier today, I got around to viewing the video you linked to in your first reply. As I have been looking into this issue for several years, its trajectory is familiar: start from a re-statement of Frank Jackson's 'knowledge argument' from "Epiphenomenal Qualia", assume that this shows consciousness to be inexplicable as a physical process, jump to the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental reality on which the physical world supervenes, and throw in some arguments from incredulity to coax the reluctant to make this rather huge leap - plus, in this video, a smattering of vitalism.
Jackson's knowledge argument had been fully anticipated by (and probably inspired by, I would guess) Bertrand Russell's aphorism "It is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." [The Analysis of Matter, 1927.] Fair enough, but where does idealism stand? Is there any non-circular argument for the proposition that learning all of idealism (or any specific variety of panpsychism or dualism, for that matter) would achieve for Russell's blind man what knowing all of physics cannot? Will he come to know what it is like to see the world?
What you perceive as a "huge leap" is not so much the promotion of consciousness as fundamental, but rather the demotion of matter from that same stance. The former is simply a byproduct of the latter. That in the process it seems to interlock so well with findings in various fields of study should admittedly be considered for now as just a happy accident. But we've abided by the law of parsimony to orient our inquiries on much less hints.
> assume that this shows consciousness to be inexplicable as a physical process, jump to the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental reality on which the physical world supervenes, and throw in some arguments from incredulity to coax the reluctant to make this rather huge leap
You must ensure to have a proper grasp of the chasm between qualia and conceptual knowing that is pointed at in the hard problem of consciousness. Anyone who does should see how removed from physical processes qualia are. It's just self-evident, not a belief. The experience of a smell is not a thought. You don't reason the taste of chocolate. Those "things" sit in their own mysterious "weirdness".
We experience reality in exactly two ways. Consciousness and matter. Those are the only two big mysteries. So, either matter is first, consciousness is first, or they co-arise independently and somehow coalesce. Those are the three possibilities. To declare any one to be a "huge leap" implies that you conceive of another as more acceptable.
If by "huge leap" you mean specifically anything that is not materialism, note that of the three propositions, materialism is by far the least parsimonious and the one that creates the most problems. We culturally favor it as the default stance for two reasons. First, our perception of reality is biased to it. Second, we've had great success studying that perceived reality with science. But as Russell noted, science has only explained how the world works, not what the world is. We've traditionally approached the latter question starting with a "rookie mistake", as Donald Hoffman puts it. We assumed that science also pointed at the world being material. Under analysis, that assumption crumbles, as it's revealed to be built upon other unchecked assumptions, that cause many problems in philosophy and in physics.
We have two possible alternatives to materialism. Of the two, consciousness as sole primitive is the most parsimonious and the one which solves most problems in the process, while creating the least.
> Is there any non-circular argument for the proposition that learning all of idealism (or any specific variety of panpsychism or dualism, for that matter) would achieve for Russell's blind man what knowing all of physics cannot?
I'm not sure that I understood your question here, but there's no such proposition. Idealism is a field of inquiry. It's a set of arguments that eliminate matter as a possible candidate for the basis of reality. Like physics, or any other philosophy, it belongs to conceptual knowledge. It can't give you access to experiential knowing.
We should start with the question I posed, as this is the crux of the issue here, and without it, everything else here is moot. I will endeavor to set it out as clearly as I can.
As you put great weight on the 'hard problem' being an insurmountable one for (and only for) materialism, I am sure you are well aware of the seminal importance, for that premise, of what has become known as the 'Knowledge Argument' from Frank Jackson's paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia", and in particular, a thought experiment from that paper which goes by several names (such as 'Mary the Neuroscientist'), and which was called, by the philosopher Philip Goff, "the greatest argument against materialism."
This argument has several antecedents, including C. D. Broad's argument that chemistry cannot tell us what ammonia smells like, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, Russells aphorism "it is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." All these arguments are doing essentially the same thing: pumping the intuition that knowing what it is like to see colors (or have any other phenomenal experience) is not something that could ever be learned by studying the physical sciences (I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness.)
There is a certain amount of indirection at work here, in specifying only the physical sciences. We get an equally valid question by substituting other academic disciplines for the physical sciences, and in particular, of course, any philosophy of mind: they do not get a pass on this by being anti-materialist, and certainly any philosophy - such as idealism - which is premised first and foremost on the reality and significance of the hard problem, will have to confront this question (among many others) before it can be regarded as the solution to this problem and as providing an explanation of consciousness.
Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism. I am interested in learning, then, what you - and, by extension, idealists - regard as convincing arguments for there being a hard problem for materialism, specifically.
I think that I (finally) understand your question (maybe). Are you asking why the hard problem would apply to materialism, but not to idealism?
If that's indeed the question, the simplest answer is that if reality is fundamentally material, then by extension everything must be material, including consciousness. For reasons already stated (the mind-body problem, the hard problem, etc), the emergence of experiential consciousness as we know it from inert matter is opaque. We don't have a shred of evidence to support it, nor the sliver of a clue to go on.
Conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness. Everything becomes a "figment". There's nothing actually "physical". This is conceivable in theory. One obvious example are our dreams where a reality is projected and interacted with by consciousness. This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness.
Panpsychism and other dualisms just postpone the problems of materialism. But they resurface later, in addition to the new problem that this position requires to be granted at least two fundamental magic tricks to explain the rest.
> I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness.
I don't see what's being pumped. As we know from the incompleteness theorem, some truths cannot be proven. The fact of our awareness is another that's often doubted by the same people that doubt the divide separating qualia and conceptual knowing. Has their difficulty to grasp at these intuitions somehow become the burden of those who access them as self-evident?
The hard problem is a linchpin. For those who get it, materialism starts to unravel. Those who don't, think those who do are making stuff up, but they also can't give a single example to counter the argument, nor can they conceive for themselves an entirely novel experience purely out of thought. They can't imagine a new color, think a new taste, conceive of a new sense.
> Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism.
As I said, idealism is only a philosophy. It's mostly a process of elimination resting on conjectures such as the hard problem. As possibilities are removed, remaining candidates hint at the likeliest direction, but it's indeed not a final realization. There are some metaphysical speculations resting atop the foundations that reality is mind first. But I'm personally much less invested in speculations. I find the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of the sand of implausibility more of a concern.
Depending how curious (and open-minded) you are about "knowledge" that get the "blind man to know what it is like to see", I'd suggest to look into practices that have this as their main goal. They're about engaging consciousness directly with immediate experience (the senses) and existential curiosity (I am aware that I am, but what am I?) to cultivate the seed of an eventual realization. They're known under the umbrella term "nonduality". As an introduction, I suggest this selection of texts spanning multiple nondual traditions aggregated and read by a Buddhist nun https://www.youtube.com/@SamaneriJayasara.
You say you are concerned with the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of [what you perceive as] the sand of implausibility - well, in that case, I'm the sort of person whose concerns you should be addressing: I don't think the hard problem (if there is one in the form it is conceived of by its proponents) is any harder for materialism than it is for any of the alternatives, but I am willing to give all due consideration to arguments that it is (and by "due consideration", I mean outside of internet discussion threads, even though my wife has banned me playing audio books and podcasts on the topic over the speakers when we are in a car together.)
Unfortunately, your responses in this thread are not making the sort of arguments that are called for by your stated goal. Here, your response continues the theme of reasserting how obvious it seems to you that there is a hard problem which rules out materialism. This is not an argument, it is a belief. You are, of course, entitled to your beliefs, and I am sure you hold them strongly and sincerely, but the fact that you do does not establish that our cultural head is stuck in the sands of implausibility. Repetition does not make them more argument-like, nor does calling them "self-evident", nor insinuating that you see more clearly than others, nor wrapping them in language that might be appropriate for something that has an obvious proof. It is not enough, for an argument, to state propositions that other people who already agree with you will also agree with; that's just preaching to the choir.
For the same reason, your complaint that no counter-arguments are being made falls short: counter-arguments are made to arguments, not unargued opinions.
At this point, I suspect you may be thinking that a commitment to materialism is also a belief - and I would agree! The simple fact is that no -ism has delivered an explanation of consciousness, and when someone tries to tell me it is a fact that that consciousness is just a computation (or a non-computable physical process, Searle and Penrose), I point out that no-one has explained it in those terms.
Nevertheless, there is a counter-argument here, and it is in my previous post, where I argue that the knowledge argument - which is widely regarded as the strongest argument for there being a hard problem that only affects materialism - is exactly as problematic, for any other putative explanation of consciousness, as it is for materialism (which does not rule out it being an illusory problem for any of them.) I may not have been completely clear about what it is and why it matters here, so I will make another attempt.
The 'hard problem' is the claim that phenomenal consciousness and its associated qualia present an insurmountable challenge to materialism. Many people feel - sometimes strongly - that this is obviously so, but philosophers and scientists alike (and on both sides of the fence) rightly expect more justification for accepting this claim than these feelings of incredulity towards materialism.
From your own account here, the hard problem is a necessary prerequisite for idealism: it is, as you said, a linchpin, and it is so in this sense: all the other claims you have made about idealism rest on there being a hard problem to take materialism out of consideration.
Furthermore, for idealism to prevail over materialism, the hard problem must only exist for materialism (or, at least, not present a challenge to idealism), or else idealism would be saddled with exactly the same problem as materialism - a problem that you insist is insurmountable.
So, putting the previous three paragraphs together, the proponents of idealism need a justification for there being a hard problem that applies only to materialism and not to idealism.
In the years of reading papers and other scholarly articles on the issue, I have been struck by how often such justifications ultimately rest on some form of the knowledge argument (at least in this sense, Goff is entirely justified in calling it "the greatest argument against materialism.") To recap, this is the argument which boils down to "you can't learn what it is like to see colors from any physics book."
Does this satisfy idealism's need for justification for the premise that there's a hard problem for materialism that does not apply to idealism itself? It does not, as we can simply substitute 'idealism book' for 'physics book', and the knowledge argument itself gives us no reason to think that the outcome will be any different. In fact, in your first response to this issue, you affirmed that knowing all of a completed idealist philosophy would do no better, in this regard, than knowing all of completed physics.
Furthermore - and this is important - we can see that the knowledge argument is equally applicable to any field of what Torin Alter calls 'discursively learnable' knowledge without making any assumptions about the truth of materialism.
Therefore, in the account of and justification for idealism in what you have written so far, there is at least one piece (the linchpin, no less) missing: an acceptable justification for thinking that there is a hard problem that does not present an equal problem for idealism. You entered this thread in a very assertive manner (your first sentence was " Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of 'feelings'. But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths", and in your latest post, you adopted the mantle of someone who is pulling our collective heads from the sands of implausibility), but your responses have not, so far, lived up to this rhetoric.
> "you can't learn what it is like to see colors from any physics book."
Why is it an argument against materialism?
To know what it is like to see colors you need to put your brain in a state in which other people's brain gets when they see colors. Physics book simply does not do that by itself.
But if you use learned physics, to electrically stimulate the right neurons in your brain, you can learn what it is like to see colors without ever seeing colors or having eyes.
Even in normal experience the brain is being stimulated. So theoretically, you wouldn't need eyes to experience color. You would only need to replicate the physical properties at the onset of brain activity. Those are called neural correlates of consciousness. However, there's the byproduct as the result of that activity, the experience associated with it. If reality is fundamentally material, there are two possible implications: (1) the very experience itself is physical. That is, the inherent experiences of smelling, or tasting, or seeing a color, in themselves have to be physical. The challenge with this is that we don't know the nature of that physical property and we have no evidence for it (besides counting consciousness itself as evidence, which is begging the question). (2) There's also the view that, rather than the correlates causing the experience, they are the experience. The challenge here becomes to demonstrate which correlate maps to exactly which experience (and not another). Neither of (1) or (2) have been successfully demonstrated.
It is true that neither 1 nor 2 have been successfully demonstrated, but there is quite a double standard here: you claim that idealism has the answers to questions about the mind, but you have not shown it explaining anything. Deducing the reality of idealism from the absence of answers to 1 or 2 is exactly like saying, in 1950, that as biology has not identified the biochemical correlates of cell reproduction, life must be fundamental (I know some people hold this view today, but it is at best a niche view that generates little controversy in either philosophy or science.)
The short answer is that, when the argument is fully set out, one of the conditions is that stimulating one's optic nerve does not count, but it often goes unmentioned. This is rarely an issue (and is easily corrected if it is), as it quickly becomes apparent that allowing stimulation does not even present a prima facie problem and so no-one on either side of the fence finds it at all interesting or useful - the anti-materialists are not interested in this question because they will agree with materialists that if stimulation is allowed, then Mary (the protagonist in the thought experiment) will experience colors, and the materialists are not interested in it because the anti-materialists are not using it.
Nevertheless, it is a good question as to why the knowledge argument would be seen as so persuasive by so many, including by quite a few materialists, who seem to me to go to unnecessary lengths to get around what is not even a problem (illusionism, for example, where it is claimed that phenomenal experience is merely an illusion - but then, as the anti-materialists ask, who is being fooled, and about what?)
Perhaps the first thing to say is that the argument is not presented as the stark observation that you cannot learn what seeing colors is like from reading a physics book; that's what you end up with when you whittle it down to its essentials.
Secondly, there are a couple of features of the argument which make it easy to let its difficulties slide right on by. One of these is what I have been going on about here: by framing the argument in terms of a knowledge of physics, it is easy to miss that it applies to any academic knowledge, not only physics or the physical sciences, and thus including any non-materialist theory. The second is that it uses the word 'knowledge' for two different forms of retained information: sensory information which is acquired directly from sensory experience, and linguistic information which is encoded in sensory information without being that sensory information itself. These are separate domains (the information content of a word is not the information content of the sound when it is heard or of its appearance when read), yet, by referring to both of them as knowledge, the argument invites the reader to accept the way it equivocates between the two, which it does when it points out that the knowledge that can be acquired linguistically does not include the 'raw feels' (yes, that is a term used in the philosophy of mind) of sensory information.
Having said all that, I am still surprised how many people think the argument shows there is a problem for materialism. After all, the physical sciences have explained many sorts of complex phenomena (hurricanes, for example), and no-one thinks that the act of explaining (or learning the explanation of) how hurricanes work should actually create one - yet anyone accepting the knowledge argument is tacitly accepting that if the phenomenon being explained is sensory experience, then an explanation should produce the phenomenon being explained! (but only if it is a materialist explanation!) I guess it somehow doesn't seem paradoxical to many people when both the phenomenon being explained and its explanation are in one's mind.
I think you would be very surprised by how many papers have been, and are still being written about this argument or something following directly from it. Because I have read some of them on academia.edu, I frequently get notices about more. Interestingly, Frank Jackson himself has changed his mind on the matter, but that has had no effect on how influential his argument still is (and, to be fair, it shouldn't.)
I neither recognize in my discourse a sermon targeted at the choir (our psalms are way past this), nor do I feel an obligation on my part to convince you. I don't even register as a blame my failure to communicate my "belief" to you, especially since you say that you were already acquainted with those arguments, which you've looked into in the past, but also failed then to integrate. I doubt that I'd fare any better than your past attempts. For that matter, I also doubt that you're my target audience. But that's totally fine.
I'm indeed interested to blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, I don't see much value in debating the subject to the point of sophistry. Philosophy is not my day job. My interest in it is as a tool that informs a practical orientation. Does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary. To me this is practical. If what you're after is ironclad proof, you won't find it and personally I don't see the practical point.
Opposing views to the knowledge argument take two general forms. Either they deny the distinction between phenomenal experience and conceptual knowing (e.g. Dennett). Or they concede that divide, but posit that phenomenal experience could still be physical in nature, but built into this is a requirement to account today, for some unknown property of matter, of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover (e.g. Alvin). I personally see either as a cop-out. You're free to assign them the value you see fit and even to think that they successfully reduce the idealist intuition to mere beliefs. I think I recognize glimpses of the tangent the discussion is taking and would rather avoid venturing in ever speculative terrains, that hinge on hopes that some day, some big reveal in physics will be retrofitted to what is currently a baseless, hasty, and problematic assumption. From experience, this tends to drag on and people interested in that sort of exercises tend to already have a somewhat significant, even if tacit, commitment to materialism. No argument will be sufficient, as new pseudo-counters are sought out to justify the hold out.
I think it's best for me to conclude this exchange here. I'll echo the O.P.'s suggested paths of exploration, books/articles/videos by Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman, who contrary to me, have invested copious amounts of energy to make the modern views of idealism accessible. Their arguments go into details about what I've only evoked as bullet points throughout the thread. They attack the subject from physics, biology, philosophy, neuroscience, and sometimes even venture into the spiritual (why not, if consciousness is indeed fundamental).
Thank you for an interesting discussion. I hope you find the answers you're looking for.
Firstly, I have only just now noticed that you posted two consecutive responses a couple of days ago, and I only responded to the second. In the first, you write " conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness... This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness."[1] Well, we can also say that a materialist theory of consciousness would not be subject to the hard problem, because, in that case, there clearly isn't one, by definition! This is even before we get into the question of what, if anything, it means to say that reality is fundamentally consciousness.
Turning now to your latest post, in your third paragraph, you offer some sort of response to the knowledge argument issue, but it both misrepresents the full scope of materialist responses to the argument, and, more relevantly here, completely misses the point to which that argument is being used in this discussion.
While the latter renders the former moot, I will, for completeness, say something about it. Firstly, I know (from private correspondence) that Daniel Dennett considered "What RoboMary Knows" to contain the essentials of his response to the knowledge argument. In it, he argues that if we had a different neural architecture - one in which we could directly examine and modify the detailed physical state of our brains - then learning what it is like to see colors could be done discursively. The fact that we humans cannot do this is, therefore, a contingent fact of biology which poses no challenge to materialism.
Secondly, you are once again completely mistaken in your guesses about what I think. Personally, I don't feel that the opponents of materialism have shown that consciousness will prove to be inexplicable without new physics, any more than are other biological processes such as metabolism or reproduction. Dennett's response to the knowledge argument is not predicated on new physics, and (while I don't think they are very helpful) neither are the arguments from the phenomenal concepts wing. Part of the rhetorical genius of Jackson's argument is that it nudges readers down the path of thinking that materialism will need new physics to prevail, but, as shown above, no such conclusion is warranted.[2]
Thirdly, though I'm not positing any new physics, I can still note that your characterization of those views as postulating something "of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover" is rather breathtakingly ironic, given how you are going about justifying idealism. As for avoiding debating the subject to the point of sophistry, I think that would be very helpful here.
As I said, though, this is moot, as it misses the point. I had hoped to forestall this outcome by pointing out that the question I posed is not predicated on any assumption of the truth of materialism, but it seems I should have said more about why that matters, so I will do so now. The question is this: why does the knowledge argument, when cast in terms of complete knowledge of idealism, not establish that there is a hard problem for idealism, just as the corresponding physical-knowledge argument allegedly does for materialism? Instead of replying to that question, you have offered some sort of defense of the knowledge argument against materialism - but the more strongly you promote the latter, the more strongly you support the view that the corresponding knowledge argument against idealism needs a substantive response (I have, of course, just referenced an argument that it is not actually a problem for materialism, but if you were to seize on that argument for your own purpose, it would raise the question "what hard problem?" - if the best and arguably only argument for there being a hard problem is no more (or no less) applicable to idealism than it is to materialism, you cannot use it to establish that there is a hard problem for materialism alone.)
If idealism really does provide an explanation of consciousness, you should have no difficulty responding to this issue, but instead, we have circled around it three times now without getting any closer to a solution. As you yourself put it, the hard problem is the linchpin of idealism: without it, all your arguments for it being the only viable non-materialist option are beside the point. [3]
Well, so much for the third paragraph, but quite a bit of your latest reply is taken up with other, incidental, matters, such as whether at least some of your arguments amount to preaching to the choir. Let's look at a definition, and from Merriam Webster, we have "to speak for or against something to people who already agree with one's opinions." I think we can leave it to third parties to decide for themselves whether your claim that materialism is obviously false for those who "get" qualia (in the right way, of course) fits that definition.
Furthermore, when we put together your statements that, on the one hand, that you are are attempting to pull our collective heads out of the sands of implausibility and blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality, while on the other, that you don't have to take into account (or, apparently, respond substantively to) the apparently awkward questions I have been raising, then we can see that you are more interested in the one-way delivery of ideas than in dialogue, which comes across as rather preachy.
Your posts have been moving in the direction of a motte-and-bailey argument. In your first paragraph of your first post in this thread, you were squarely in the bailey, writing "perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths [my emphasis]. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material", but now, with "does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary", you have at least one foot in the motte. I am not, as you put it, after ironclad proof, just arguments strong enough to justify the certainty with which you have, at least up to now, presented idealism.
I thank you for your kind wishes in your last paragraph and I wish the same for you. I imagine you will have more success in that than I will, as I am quite demanding in what I expect in an explanation, and the mind is a hard problem, even if it is not the hard problem.
[2] Penrose has a different argument for that, one that is most commonly rejected on account of its assumption that materialism based on known physics entails that human minds must be logically consistent reasoners.
[3] At least one of those arguments - the one from parsimony - is problematic in its own right: the one and only essential property that any hypothesis of the mental needs in order to prevail is that it actually explains minds, and, so far, we have seen none from any position, materialism included (I am well aware that quite a few physicists think physics will continue to deliver parsimonious theories (The Elegant Universe, and so forth), but that, too, is a belief for which even the inductive form (so far, it has been that way) has a rather obvious confirmation bias problem.)
> it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity
You're making it sound like I'm about to watch a proverbial Giorgio Tsoukalos make bold claims on pure speculation.
Thanks! Any links to written word? I just don't do much youtubing, especially for scientific or philosophical areas where information density can be high and videos are infuriatingly inefficient :-(
If I were to mention a fourth it would be him but he's a bit embarrassed about all the controversy about his ideas on consciousness and doesn't really discuss them in depth in any videos I've seen, or wade into heated discussions about the nature of reality.
Whereas the three I mentioned all embrace discussions about the nature of reality and consciousness and happily engage in lengthy discussions and debates about it.
It is precisely because their advocacy for metaphysical idealism is unusual for people with their academic qualifications that they are worth mentioning, and why its worthwhile to listen to them explain their positions at length.
Appeal to authority is where you present a person's status or credentials as primary evidence that their argument is correct. I've done no such thing here.
Op writes "I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic."
They very specifically state that these people are good points of entry for "well-argued positions on the topic." Linking to specific literature would have been better, but this isn't "materialism/physicalism is wrong because of these people's credentials."
The problem is that while the post looks structurally like an appeal to authority, the first two appear to be advanced qualifications in areas completely unrelated to the question and the third is at best vaguely related. (It threw me on first reading too...)
The meta fallacy on display here is the Fallacy Fallacy.
For every logical fallacy, there is a fallacious application of it to a given example of rhetoric. You've committed the Argument from Authority Fallacy Fallacy: citing people who believe to have worthwhile opinions, and including their accomplishments, is not argument from authority. Argument from authority is claiming someone is correct based on their authority. Which isn't what GP was doing.
Not OP but check out Closer to Truth on YouTube. PBS show hosted by a former neuroscience PhD, they have tons of recent interviews with leading thinkers on consciousness (among other fascinating topics).
Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?
My reply is an attempt to address the original comment with precision. To diagram its intended meaning:
> alternative theories of consciousness
"Any body of academic thought" [I accede the scientific legitimacy of the domain of discourse, rather than dismissing it.]
> know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic.
"whose paradigmatic communication medium" [This is the beginning of my challenge to the Original Commenter, by granting the information provided authoritative status, which they perhaps cannot fully defend.]
> On YouTube you can find plenty of discussions
"is video rather than text"
> it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity.
"is prima facie suspect" [The Original Commenter has asserted that discourse and engagement are important, yet provided only time consuming, low signal-to-noise sources of information.]
> As Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his legendary oration on John Stuart Mill and free speech [2]
"Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?" [The only written citations are 1) generic and 2) ancillary to the core topic. I invite the Original Commenter to further his argument more substantively, without demanding exhaustive citations.]
> Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?
> Academic content is usually in text, not video. Do you have links to written work from them?
Shorter and the exact same meaning. Also doesn't sound like you've been perusing your thesaurus all day.
At minimum, this does not capture that I _am_ challenging the Original Commenter ("prima facie suspect") to more rigorously defend his position, but doing so respectfully. "One salient" written source is a carefully chosen framing: the OC cannot meet it by replying with support peripheral or meta to the main argument, but neither can he dismiss my request as burdensome, demanding multiple links.
The proposed revision suffers from its terseness, losing both nuance and completeness.
Communication is about being understood. Not about crafting the perfect sentence. Even if you craft the perfect sentence, that will be the perfect sentence _for you_, and it might be completely lost on many people, some perhaps even more intelligent than you.
The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure, but the subtext of your comment is "I opened a thesaurus and tried to seem smart", which is why this conversation derailed here. You can't ignore the subtext to craft a mathematically perfect sentence..
> The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure
Indeed, relying on the implicit when the explicit is sufficient [0] does a disservice to one's readers, in whose ability and charity to comprehend my surface text, without presuming confounding subtextual meaning, I have every confidence.
[0] It is not always; some things can only be gestured at, not grasped.
This assertion is in error. Communication is about transmitting information. What happens to that information after the transmissions is beyond scope of communication.
Don't get me wrong -- we have communication companies and classes named "business communication" and fields of inquiry titled "communication." Yet, the common trend to each of these is wrapping the transmission of information up in additional services. Analogous to how OpenAI and Mistral wrap up LLMs that you and I and anyone can run on our own into well-defined managed services. We use the term for these companies "Generative AI" or "LLMs" when in reality they too are wrappers around a much simpler concept.
"Transmission" is per se bidirectional. The individual on the other end has received it, whether they understand it or can do anything useful with it is up to them.
> This assertion is in error. Communication is about transmitting information.
Even if you're correct you've just taken my words at their absolute meaning without trying to understand what I'm saying. If all you care when communicating is transmitting information you will not find much happiness in communication.
I do think there is a middle ground. Look at Bukowski as a good example of effective terseness.
On one hand, you can indeed rely on the precision of a large and unequivocal vocabulary, removing all doubt as to your intentions.
On the other hand, you can also rely on context and find beauty in conveying advanced meaning within a simpler interface. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".
There is a creative art to compressing meaning. As evidenced by the response to your first post, things can actually get lost in translation once you stray from the common vernacular in an attempt at precision. The more you can say with less, the more effective each word becomes.
With practice, you can communicate quite profound thoughts in a form that even the most uneducated among us can understand. Know Your Audience. We may be on Hacker News, but we are also on the Web. People encounter and digest a massive amount of text every day. Making them work a little less in order to understand you can be beneficial for everyone.
No, the second approach's meaning is more obtuse. What does "usually" mean? Are there acceptable alternatives? If content is in an alternative mode of communication, is it acceptable?
These vagaries permitted in your revision are clear and inherent in the original commenter's motion. Therefore, I submit your adjudication of "shorter and the exact same meaning" is woefully superficial in it's drive for simplicity, to the point there is no thought left that is clear in the original garden. Further, exact and technical communication is what separates Hacker News commenting from the hordes of subreddits that thrive on imprecise babble.
Ah, indeed, for nothing epitomizes 'avant-garde scholarly dialogue' quite like a prolix disquisition elucidating the inherent inferiority of audiovisual mediums. Forthcoming: an erudite treatise on the unparalleled intellectual profundity of semaphore communication!
Sidenote a lot of people get triggered by videos as information. Cause reading is indexable. I used to be a bit like that and ran into a few extremists.
Text is also much more dense. What videos spend 15 minutes on can be read in a few. You can also skim text first and then switch to deeper reading where desired, et cetera.
Video is not the standard medium of communication in academic philosophy. I imagine the GP mentioned youtube because most people are more likely to watch a video than read a paper.
Or GP himself watches these videos. And I would push back on the claim that most posters here are more likely to watch a Youtube video than read an article.
To be clear, I don’t sit there for hours watching videos on YouTube (I have a busy career and a family so that’s not an option these days).
I do consume a lot of YouTube content as audio-only when driving or exercising.
I find video particularly satisfying for this topic and these figures, because much of the most valuable insight emerges through discussion and debate.
I’ve read Kastrup’s book “Why Materialism is Baloney” and found it very satisfying - but I was already amenable to his position; I don’t imagine it would be persuasive to an entrenched skeptic.
Hi there, my intention was to offer some names of people who have intelligent things to say about the topic.
I mentioned YouTube videos because there’s a large volume of their content there, with many of the videos featuring in-depth conversations and debates, which I’ve found can be a particularly good format for discussion of a topic of such gravity and complexity.
But between these three figures there are also many books, academic papers, blog posts, and written media interviews.
I’ve long found that this is a topic in which some people are going to be standoffish and resistant and that’s fine.
My hope is only to help people who are looking to learn about the topic to know who I’ve found worthwhile to learn from.
I think it's pretty elitist to judge the quality of a content via whether it's in a book/journal or not. In fact, the recent wave of scientific fraud discovery shows that one can hide data manipulation pretty effectively in an academic journal. I'd much rather scientists spend their time making eli5 videos.
"Any kind of big idea which is spread primarily through video instead of text is immediately suspicious. Could you please send a link to a written version of the main points from any one of those video?"
As someone who's been engaged in this topic (the nature of reality and consciousness) over the past 3 years, it's very surprising to see this comment on HN. As I've suggested in a past comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36465928), this can potentially be one of the most transformative rabbit hole anyone can ever hope to enter.
It's been fascinating to observe the dichotomy between researchers who work on explaining consciousness, starting from a physicalist/materialist perspective, slowly being convinced away from that intuition with iron clad arguments, while laypeople lean further into it, deluded by what they perceive to be signs of it from recent AI progress.
Among former materialist academics that I expect to see publications from a more affirmed idealist position in the next 5 years, I count David Chalmers and Christof Koch. Perhaps Anil Seth too.
I hadn't encountered conscious agent theory before. I took a quick look and it seemed to be solipsism wearing a disguise. Can you elaborate how it distinguishes itself from solipsism in its arguments that it might be real?
I found the evolutionary argument rather odd. The disconnect between perception and reality is pretty much the standard belief these days. Unless I'm reading it wrong it was making the claim that 'reality' is a non causal artifact of conscious entities but one that was caused by evolution, which seems contradictory.
Solipsism is skepticism of the existence of anything outside the self. I've seen Hoffman address accusations of solipsism a few times and I have to admit that it's always been unclear to me which part of his theory people tend to perceive as such. Perhaps I've just consumed enough of it to zoom past this perception.
I'll try to keep things short, as this can get pretty long winded fast.
From what I understand of his proposition, it's a take on idealism that is very close to eastern thought as inspired by nondual traditions like Advaita and Buddhism, but with a heavier emphasis on science. Everything in reality is a projection in consciousness of consciousness. It's made up of interacting conscious agents (you, me, a rock, an atom, a particle, etc) which are themselves "projections" ultimately stemming from a fundamental, unknowable, infinitely distant and unattainable root conscious agent. The implication is that space-time, our perceived reality, is not fundamental. Hoffman thinks that we might possibly have access to at least one, higher, more general dimension of reality of which ours is a specialized version (as hint of this, he speaks of current work in physics where structures outside space-time are being discovered, like the amplituhedron).
Space and time not being fundamental creates problems with some materialist assumptions in evolutionary biology, where consciousness is seen as part of an evolutionary process. Hoffman suggests to rethink evolution from scratch instead. He uses evolutionary game theory to demonstrate that we can have consciousness as fundamental, keep some of the core evolution principles and still end up with consistent conclusions.
I'll stop here, as I've said, it can get deep rather fast.
My mum is a shrink, and very old, and smart, and hates technology. I was talking her through how some primitive "AGI" could happen with 4o (basically just explained this: https://b.h4x.zip/agi)
That got us talking about consciousness, and at the end, she thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" and went back to making her dinner.
A psychologist I know did their PhD in this area (also old and smart), and he called this kind of thinking "Neural Chauvanism" -> if her explanation actually requires the chemical and neural components.
It's a good point as i'm sure what she was saying is she belives consciousness requires specific neural properties. I am aware of the the ideas around neural chauvanists, but that paper is now almost 40 years old. We know a lot more about the brain since it was written. The idea that the homunculi can perfectly replicate the relevant causal powers of neurons is... questionable at best. It would says distinctive biochemical properties of neurons enable consciousness, which homunculi would lack, and then homunculized, I also don't like the idea that we must attribute consciousness to the homunculized brain unless we accept an implausible cut-off point? Consciousness could be requiring a critical mass of neurons, which could be reached later without each replacement causing incremental fading. The implausibility of a single neuron replacement eliminating consciousness is not a good reason to consider it conscious. imo It's probably still more likley that experiences like an LSD trip require specifically neural underpinnings.
That seems more like a good natured refusal to engage with the question seriously.
Sort of like, if you come to a smart engineer with a design for a perpetual motion machine, they might likely tease you a little bit and then refer you to a physicist. Smart people from applied fields know when the topics are outside their actual wheelhouse, but getting close enough that they risk being taken seriously, to a misleading extent.
As someone whose experience with ketamine therapy profoundly changed my life, I think she was making a slightly different, sly point.
As someone who isn't religious, and who doesn't have children, and who hit middle age a bit disillusioned with my career, I struggled a lot with my life's purpose (nevermind chronic depression). But I don't think it's really an exaggeration to say that a single dose of ketamine therapy (this was an hour long infusion at a clinic) made me understand that for me, really, consciousness and existence is enough of a reason for my life's purpose. Throughout nearly my entire trip I kept thinking "how amazing is it that my brain doing this???" I think I understand computational theories of the mind well enough, but they in no way explain why consciousness would "fall out" of computation.
I think people sort of intuitively grasp that consciousness is something really different than the "normal" physical world. I think the quote of "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" is about the fact that psychedelics provide even more clear insight into the "consciousness is something different" idea. Some people interpret that as God. As a non-religious person I didn't necessarily interpret that as "God", but I did interpret it as consciousness being something wholly different than normal physical matter or just the "math of linear algebra". For me it's a wondrous, magical thing, and I'm just glad I get to experience it.
I've read once they determined the mechanism by which a.o lsd 'works', is by lowering/disabling a lot of the filtering between neurons. This leads us to recognise all kinds of patterns that are not really there. Visual hallucinations being the obvious form of this, but I suppose the same applies to other things like our personalities and self; that's neither here nor there anyway.
Now I'm not 100% sure how temperature is implemented, but from what i recollect, might be a reasonable analogue indeed!
That's not really correct. default mode network activity is somewhat disrupted, but LSD works primarily by interaction with the 5-HT2A receptor subtype, this is multiple neurotransmitter systems, including serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate, and in many examples it's via excitement not inhibition/lowering/disabling. Excitatory neurotransmission in glutamate is looking like the the most important of the work in the 5-HT2A area.
Does excitatory/inhibitory map cleanly on to the higher level abstractions? I'm no neuroscientist, so maybe it does, but that seems like a bad assumption to me because in digital logic "active when low" is extremely common. A spurious-suppression system that caused inhibition when low would be perfectly reasonable and compatible with the observation that excitation caused an increase in spurious behavior.
They don't really map well. The brain obviously operates on more continuous principles rather than binary states. The relationship between excitation/inhibition and emergent effects may be more direct and graded in biological neural networks vs to the "active when low". Buuuutt stiilll, 5-HT2A receptor and its downstream effects on glutamate transmission play a central role in mediating the subjective effects of psychedelics. Very very many studies have consistently linked 5-HT2A activation to the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional characteristic of the psychedelic state. Disruption of the default mode network and other changes are somewhat important maybe, the 5-HT2A receptor appears to be the focus of action for producing these effects. The point being, neurochemical interactions at the molecular level are the most important aspects of the LSD interaction, so.., now sure how that works in the context of synthetic AI, I don't know much about ML/NN.
I still don't see the reason why glutamate or 5-HT2A receptor excitation (in the chemical sense) couldn't be involved with inhibition reduction (in the psychological sense).
It's funny, I've studied a lot of psychedelics (probably because it was an area of research for both my parents), and salvia divinorum is a really really stand out plant in it's trips, it seems to be a very "technically philosophical" plant. Trip reports always go into weird things like "I became a book on a shelf for 4,000 years, and now I know inanimate objects are conscious", there is also the area of panpsychism and animism.
That stuff is all a little too mind bending for me, but pretty fun thinking for a Sunday morning. :)
well, i tried salvia and I tried shrooms. I don’t see how it’s more philosophical just because it’s a dissociative. at best, it’s more of an ego death than, say, shrooms, if during the trip you become an object. It’s still a unique plant for sure because of it’s dissociative effects. To thread lightly. AFAIK natives in mexico say that smoking it is very bad. and that u’re supposed to chew fresh leaves. maybe chewing fresh leaves doesn’t even cause the same dissociative effects which are unpleasant.
You can give it a virtual device as the real time camera input to show it things that aren't there. That's not organic acid, but the target isn't organic consciousness.
> She thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" and went back to making her dinner.
That’s probably going to be pretty easy, just scramble some attention heads randomly in portions of the transformer network and the AGI will probably think “it sees god”.
We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man.
The only thing which we might say with much certainty is that things which are more "like us" along some metric are more likely to be actually conscious, and things which are less "like us" are less likely to be so. Maybe everything is conscious. Maybe nothing except one's own self. But you'll never truly know one way or another, even if humanity invented some kind of Freaky Friday body swap thing.
Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. You see this a lot, and one of the more popular instances are questions like "is cereal a salad?" It plays on the fact that the definition of a salad is relatively loose, and because it's loose items which aren't usually associated with the word do actually fit the definition.
Consciousness feels much the same way: there's a very loose definition which is colloquially understood by almost everyone. Asking whether humans are conscious (and I know you were being somewhat facetious) feels like it fits into this frame of thought. Consciousness, as most people understand it, is something which almost all people possess and something like a rock cannot possess. I think it's perfectly fine to argue that a rock or a tree can be conscious in some way. However, this does require a precise definition of consciousness in order to clearly differentiate it from the loose colloquial notion that most people hold.
But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
You don't. But it's solipsism to think otherwise, and while solipsism is hard to argue against logically it's not a very interesting or useful way of navigating the world we experience. We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.
It doesn't need to be solipsism - for instance, maybe half of us are conscious.
But if we can't even know that, if we don't even have a test to see whether some human or animal is conscious or not, how can we start trying to figure out what makes them conscious? It seems it's impossible to get to something falsifiable without such a test.
Like, you say a rock isn't conscious. But what about a sponge? An amoeba? How can you answer that if you can only guess answer whether your neighbour is?
It is very relevant to keep analyzing and keep trying to get any other answer to this question, because while "appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us" applies to other humans, as soon as we want to talk about the consciousness (or lack of it) of other actors, this argument can not be applied and we would very much like to get to any other criteria of consciousness which could be applicable to arbitrary non-human agents.
Even if we axiomatically assume that everyone else is not a p-zombie, trying to find any evidence towards your/mine consciousness other than that axiom is helpful as a candidate for such criteria which can be tested and validated.
All the people I love the most aren't actually real, only I am – if one seriously believes that, it is going to do a great deal of harm to one's mental health.
Solipsism can ethically justify all kinds of horrors. "Other people only exist in my own mind, so if I murder/torture/etc them, those acts are just figments of my own imagination: there is little ethical difference between murdering someone for real and watching a murder on TV"
If a belief is impossible for a human being to seriously believe while maintaining their health, sanity and humanity, I think that in itself is a good argument that the belief must be false.
Why? Why can't the world be a cruel and indifferent place? Take for example the babies that had to be left behind by hospital staff in one of the Gaza hospitals when it was occupied by the IOF and when the doctors could come back a few weeks later they found the rotting corpses of these babies who had been left to starve, alone and afraid, by the Israeli soldiers.
If you were one of these newborns and somehow con-cious and you had to choose between 'I have been left here to die' and 'Mommy loves me and is coming soon', would you reject the former as obviously false since it's incompatible with health, sanity, and humanity?
I think so easily dismissing the cruelty and insanity of the world is in itself inhumane.
> Why? Why can't the world be a cruel and indifferent place?
Society runs on faith–that the cruelty and insanity of the world, while undeniable, has its limits. Historically (and even for the majority of the global population today), that faith was most often religious, but it also comes in secular versions – everyone from communists to LGBT activists to the New Atheist movement has a faith that history is "on their side", even if they do not believe in any divine assurance of that. A society in which everyone (or even the clear majority) have given up faith and hope, is a society doomed to wither and die, and be replaced by societies which still retain those things (if there be any other societies retaining that faith left to replace it).
The problem with solipsism, is not that it supposes the world is sometimes cruel and insane, but that it destroys one's faith that said cruelty and insanity has any limits. And without that faith, the continued functioning of society becomes impossible.
Does that have any relevance to the tragic case of a newborn abandoned to starve? They can't constitute a society, so concerns of what beliefs are necessary for society to function aren't relevant to them.
> If you were one of these newborns and somehow con-cious and you had to choose between 'I have been left here to die' and 'Mommy loves me and is coming soon', would you reject the former as obviously false since it's incompatible with health, sanity, and humanity?
If believing that "Mommy loves me and is coming soon" gives comfort to a dying child, and eases (however slightly) the pain of their horrific death, then I would want them to believe it–and if I were them, I would want to believe it too. It is better for a dying child to believe comforting falsehoods than painful truths–truth has no value for them, and falsehoods can do them no harm.
> We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.
Logic doesn't need to be binary. There is no need for the answer to such a question to even be defined.
Solipsism is incoherent because it's not radical skepticism. All of the critique of the external world also apply to belief in the primacy on internal experience. Any good solipsist should just accept the "evil demon" of descartes, embrace radical doubt, and say "I don't even know if I truly exist or not".
"I don't know if I'm a P zombie, and I don't know if I'm a replicant or not, Deckard!"
well doesn't the argument suggest the only thing you can be certain of is I, or at least some 'experiencing agent' exist, otherwise there would be no subject to do the experiencing
Yeah the first-person subjectivity has to arise before second and third persons can arise. But with some further investigation, one can find that the things they take to be their subject are in fact object to them, too.
I think mnay people believe that consciousness is what consciousness does. That is,
> Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Makes no sense, in this conception of consciousness, any more than you can fake intelligence. Basically consciousness might just be what we call the inner workings of the mind of a sufficiently advanced agent, one capable at least of meaningfully interacting with other agents around it.
I'm not saying this is the correct theory, but it's a perfectly valid theory of consciousness, just like all the others.
I really like equating faking intelligence to consciousness. Its intuitive because we have all seen that, yet so complex its nearly futile to give meaningful predictive criteria for when an agent is 'being intelligent'.
In addition to having meaningful interactions with others, i would add consciousness also requires meaningful interaction with its-self.
What is 'meaninful' also comes down to language, which, personally, leads me back to the idea that consciousness is essentially a linguistic product/phenomenon. Duck-typed.
And at the end of the day, if you enjoy spending time asking "is this thing really x" where x lies on a vector you can't even begin measure, I got this deal on a bridge you can get in on, real cheap...
I somewhat disagree, I feel that the prevailing position is that unlike intelligence (e.g. Legg&Hutter definitions) consciousness can not be easily assumed from mere behavior and relies on certain things happening (or not happening) inside the agent.
This may be a common position among philosophers, or more specifically among philosophers who think concepts like "p-zombies" make any sense. But I think most people in general view any being whose behavior is human-like enough as having some form of consciousness.
For most people, being conscious is proved by things like mourning dead companions, like caring for your babies and showing distress if they are missing/hurt, like being friendly and playful. That's why most people feel that certain animals they interact with more or have seen on TV are conscious (dogs, cats, elephants, whales, chimps and other primates), but that other animals are not (insects, rats, fish). Note that I am not saying that rats are objectively less conscious than dogs by these criteria, just that this is what many people base their beliefs on, and that it of course depends on their knowledge as well.
We define ourselves to be conscious (even if we don't know exactly what that means). We assume that other humans are similar to ourselves, and we (at least sometimes) see mental activity in other humans that we recognize as being similar to our own. Therefore we conclude that other humans are conscious.
It's well defined in the philosophical literature as the felt experience of colors, sounds, pains, etc which make up our subjective experiences of perception, imagination, dreams, etc, Qualia is the technical word, but it's also controversial, depending on the philosopher's position on the hard problem and their views on perception (they might replace qualia with representational or relational properties).
Another way of putting it is to use the primary versus secondary qualities. Primary qualities belong to properties of things we perceive. Secondary are properties that are part of the perceiving or experiencing subject. Shape, number, composition are properties of things. Sounds, colors, pains are properties of a perceiver.
Well-defined in the philosophical sense, perhaps (though I think some would disagree). It is not well-defined in the scientific sense. There is no way to quantify or classify something as conscious.
> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined.
I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics:
"Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted."
It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.
That's just objectivity, and I don't think consciousness is synonymous with objectivity at all!
Cogitoist propaganda. The appearance of thought is not necessarily the same as thought, so you don't actually know you think just because you believe you think. The cogito (I think therefor I am), like your statement, is incoherent.
LLMs will swear up and down (with a prompt) that they are thinking beings, therefor "they are". They are not ontological actors because of their appearance of doubting their own existence. That's not thought!
Addressing your first thought…anything that you would call “objective” can be “doubted” by ceding the tiny tiny possibility that you are a simulation or Boltzmann brain or brain in a vat. The evidence before you may not actually be representative of the “objective” reality.
The fact that there is experience at all, the contents of which may be “doubted”, cannot be doubted.
I’m not unequivocally claiming this but that’s the thrust of the argument.
I'm sorry, but this makes me cringe. When we learn science, there's always some level of rigor with the ideas. Maybe there's some kind of justification with math, or some kind of experiment we can perform to remove doubt. The important features are reductionism and verifiability. It's not a weird introspection riddle.
I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what consciousness is. And I think that "definition" doesn't meet the modern scientific standard. And I strongly oppose the idea that in order to learn science I should have to spend time introspecting.
Introspection is "looking within". Why should science not be interested in that? It is an aspect of reality. It is not more or less real than galaxies or atoms. I know that it is a very perplexing one when one holds a physicalist metaphysical commitment, which is easy to confuse with some notion of "no-nonsense modern scientific standard", and so there is a temptation to pretend the undeniable is not there, or that it is "ill defined" in some way.
Think about what things "cannot be doubted", with all the brain-in-a-vat types of caveats. It's not trying to be a scientific definition. It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied, and that might well be the only reasonable place to define consciousness. (I still can't call it a great definition, even if it did perfectly correspond with the concept. Too indirect.)
There are lots of statements we can form that "make sense" on a linguistic level. It's easy to convince yourself of something when the only standard is "linguistic plausibility." Consciousness is presumably a physical process. When you say "It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied", I just don't know what that means. You're going to have to give me examples of what other beliefs we hold that occupy that space. Justified belief about reality has to be based on measurement (science).
If consciousness isn't a physical process, then you've lost me again. People have discussed these things for hundreds of years.
> You're going to have to give me examples of what other beliefs we hold that occupy that space.
Yeah, there's not a lot down there, mostly your assumptions about your sense inputs corresponding to some kind of causally consistent external reality. It's the same region as the lead up to what you seem to take as an axiom, "Justified belief about reality has to be based on measurement".
I think I just experienced how much self-deception there is about the world. So it's not really an axiom. There's no shortage of metaphysical ideas from the past, from well-intentioned people who thought they could intuit the world, that we have had to throw out.
> I think I just experienced how much self-deception there is about the world.
This is not actually a proof. It is, however, exactly the kind of soft reasoning that motivates reasonable axioms. I'm not saying it's a bad axiom, I'm saying you should know what you're doing. That way when you run into a domain where it doesn't apply very well, you know where and how to back up and restart.
There are 40 different definitions of consciousness, some of which we can quantify, we just don't all agree on which one we mean in any given context and indeed sometimes conflate them without realising it in the middle of a sentence.
> There are 40 different definitions of consciousness, some of which we can quantify, we just don't all agree on which one we mean in any given context and indeed sometimes conflate them without realising it in the middle of a sentence.
When a word has a myriad meanings, none of which are generally accepted, we typically say the word has no definition. Sure, particular senses of its meaning may be well-defined, but the word itself is elusive.
It's not "none", though. A paramedic will absolutely know exactly what they mean when they're performing a test for consciousness, it's just that test isn't useful in this context.
"Awareness of internal and external existence" is another, and I think Claude 3 demonstrates behaviour which fits this meaning of the term.
Qualia is a huge open question because nobody knows what that one would mean or imply or how to test for it.
What if the distinction we are all groping for is immortality at the cost of determinism? A machine can be powered down and dismantled. A new machine can be built and fed the exact same training data, or run the same model, and presumably it would behave the exact same way. Any entity whose behaviors are that regeneratable and that replicable is perhaps less "conscious" than entities which are not.
>Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined
That's because it's not some foreign thing or theory that we need a good definition of to understand what we're talking about. For us humans it's not a loose colloquial notion - it's concrete in a way that even the most well defined things aren't, because it's directly experienced.
In thinking about this perennial problem it's worth bearing in mind that human beings pick up and process an immense amount of data on a continuous basis, that is currently unavailable to any LLM.
Yeah there’s different ways you could slice it. I was including the whole system, since if the GPU’s cooling system breaks, it won’t be useful for long.
No, we don't. We don't even know if existence has an extent in time, because our only way of "interfacing" with time is our experience of memory we can't prove is real.
For what you know, you're a lone entity confined to an infinitely short period of time, and all else is an illusion.
But of course this isn't a useful assumption in most respects.
Ah, I see you're more of an A. J. Ayer fan than a Descartes fan.
I think that if an LLM has any consciousness, it would be an experience like this — one where the past was a fiction it invented to fit the prompt, and the "now" was the only moment before the mind was reset.
But I'd put that in the same basket as my… ah, nephew comment? Cousin comment? I guess you'd call it that if we have parent comments etc.?
What you say is not wrong in principle, but it's in the same "cognitively unstable" basket as a Boltzmann brain, where to accept it would mean I couldn't trust my own reason to believe it.
The reasoning stands entirely on its own. There's nothing you need to "believe". That you don't have a way to disprove it is close enough to proof.
The problem with it is that it's not giving us anything useful.
OK, so maybe this moment is the only one there is? Now what?
Accordingly the only reasonable recourse is for the most part to ignore it, and add an implicit "assuming my memory and senses are roughly trustworthy" to every assumption.
This is the same reason I'm a firm materialist even though we could be in a simulation, or brains in vats: absent evidence of either, the only thing giving us useful information is our senses and our introspection, and so the most useful approach is to assume they are valid until proven otherwise.
> The reasoning stands entirely on its own. There's nothing you need to "believe". That you don't have a way to disprove it is close enough to proof.
Not so, for it is like the liar's paradox, except with high probabilities rather than Boolean logic.
If you assume it is true, it follows that you can't trust your own state of mind, and that all statements including "I am just a thought" become suspect, as there is nothing leading up to them to give them justification.
No, it's nothing like that. In the liars paradox, the statement is inherently uncomputable.
In this case the statement is either true or false, and the truth or false of the statement doesn't change anything. Your belief in whether the statement is true or false changes your belief in whether the statement is true or false - there's no basis for assuming that in the general case it would alter the actual truth of the statement (it could, in as much as e.g. you could have a simulation that keeps running as long as you believe you're in an isolated moment, and freezes you and discards the rest the moment you believe time is real).
Now, it is true that you can't trust your own state of mind to truthfully represents a physical reality. That this means you also can't trust your own logic is irrelevant, because irrespective of whether you believe this to be true or false, the absence of any external source of validation of your senses or state of mind or existence in time means the statement must inherently be true irrespective of your trust in your mind.
This claim gives a straightforward condition to falsify it: Find any single source of external validation that does not depend on your senses or observation of it. If you can, then the claim above is false.
Given you absolutely can't, the logical conclusion is that the claim is true.
Of course, any philosophical zombie could have invented it.
Which makes clear for me how loosely consciousness is bound to senses, including that of introspection. It actually makes me feel that this consciousness we can barely describe is but a faint experience of a distant, largely foreign thing. Like we know the experience of matter that we get from our senses is a grossly simplified version of the real thing (that we still don't know exactly of course, but we already know enough to see how far away our immediate mental model is from the truth)
Which part exactly are you seeking proof of, and to what standard?
"I know" is unprovable to others, unless you examine the wiring of my brain. (But then, what is "knowledge"?)
"at least one other human is conscious, otherwise the term would never have been invented." — it's always possible that I'm a Bolzmann brain and this was just luck.
I don't see how the term could have been invented by a mind that didn't actually have it, except with astronomical low probably random events.
This is my take. Consciousness is overrated and probably just an emergent phenomena of the brain processing external stimuli into memory, moving memories around, etc etc, in a continuous and never ending flow. Free will is just an illusion of our deterministic but fundamentally random reality.
There isn’t even an agreed upon definition for what consciousness is from a scientific perspective.
This might be an interesting reason for it to feel special, but I'm not entirely convinced, and I probably don't fully understand what you mean.
It seems that not everyone values the having of a consciousness as something special. Survival works pretty well with a good appetite, some muscle for clobbering enemies, and a good sex drive. How does (thinking about) consciousness add an advantage here?
This seems like the secular version of "the devil made me do it". We can't be accountable for any of our actions because we are all just molecular machines playing out their predetermined outcome.
We are molecular machines and although the outcome is predetermined, the only way to find out the outcome, is for the machine itself to follow through its course. So this is exactly opposite of "devil made me do it" because you do something not because of external force or because of random chance but because of initial state of the machine which makes you who you are.
So when a person commits a crime, they can just say: "the initial state of my molecular machine made me do it!" ...?
To me that is exactly the same as saying "the devil made me do it!"
i.e. both things are euphemisms for "I'm not accountable for my actions"; "I'm not at fault"; "It was beyond my control", etc.
And if you truly believe there is no such thing as free will and that everything is predetermined, then you'd have to agree. Hitler can't be held accountable for his choices; his actions were all predetermined and his fate was sealed at the big bang; he just got an unlucky "initial state".
Since you are exactly the molecular machine, nothing more and nothing less, saying "the initial state of my molecular machine made me do it" is same as saying "the initial state of my self made me do it". So it does not mean that you should not be accountable, on the contrary it means that the action was caused by your essence, what makes you you, and not some outside entity or random chance.
As for the free will, it means that the behavior of a molecular machine depends on machine itself, not on far away stars or a random number generator. One can't say that he got unlucky initial state, because he _is_ that unlucky state. Any change of the state would create someone entirely different. Moreover Stephen Wolfram's computational irreducibility principle implies that despite all the information being contained in initial state, only way to extract predictions from that state is to run the molecular machine and observe its behavior.
> We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man.
This isnt an interesting path outside the paradox of proof. We are fine disregarding that there are truths that are unprovable in math... I think we need to make that leap in this realm as well.
Concisousness is also probably a bad term, concepts like sentience and sapience need to be the ones we are talking about. We might get to one, long before the other...
> We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man.
This is why so far the Kantian philosophy makes the most sense to me. I can tell that something is there because I am thinking it, but can't tell about any others.
The really scary thing is the question of why this particular body at this particular time. It's like when born, organisms generate a "consciousness vortex/attractor" that binds to a particular identity.
It's also interesting that sleeping or fainting pauses the consciousness, and later still ends up in the same body (unless it's like coroutines and it doesn't matter which identity ends up in the body).
We also know that removing parts of the brain can cause memories and certain features to go away.
It’s possible that consciousness is merely observation and agency, or less comfortably, just observation. A lot of one’s identity comes from their experiences, particularly as a child, and like you say: memory has been proven to be physically rooted in the brain.
We could all be the same observer moving around in time and space, a new one every morning, or the same continuously, and there would be very little way to tell. Who can say whether the day to day fluctuations in our behaviour are biological or a result of a different will driving us?
> It's also interesting that sleeping or fainting pauses the consciousness, and later still ends up in the same body
I always found it even more interesting how your body can switch off the consciousness if it gets in the way. Try holding your breath for example—do it too long, and your body will kill the faulty process and restore the system to a working state before attempting a new deployment.
Joscha Bach's model of "evolution of a shared consciousness, but compartmentalized into separate bodies" seems to be the one that makes the most sense currently
What I find interesting is how people don't think animals are conscious, but then there will be some article where the partner of a goose is killed and the goose wails and moans like this is a surprise.
Unless you can be conscious in multiple places at the same time. Theoretically it must be possible by dissecting the brain piece by piece and restoring it to one afterwards.
(To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time).
I recommend seeking out discussions involving:
- Federico Faggin: inventor of silicon-gate technology and developer of the earliest microprocessors;
- Bernardo Kastrup: Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence), former CERN engineer at the LHC;
- Donald D. Hoffman: Ph.D. in computational psychology, professor in Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine.
On YouTube you can find plenty of discussions involving these figures, some with each other, and plenty more with others.
I’d suggest it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity.
As Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his legendary oration on John Stuart Mill and free speech [2], it’s only by thoroughly understanding the opposing view that we can thoroughly understand our own position on any topic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
[2] https://youtu.be/zDap-K6GmL0?t=120