Let me guess though, the margin is too small to contain said explanation?
(This is a reference to Fermat's Last Theorem in which Fermat confidently proclaimed in a margin of his book that he had a simple elegant proof which the margin was too small to contain)
Consciousness has, as yet, no empirical explanation. Only a variety of theories that, so far, have failed to make any headway in providing an explanation. That's why it's called the "hard problem of consciousness."
If you think there is an easy answer, then you do not yet understand the question.
> Consciousness has, as yet, no empirical explanation.
Because nobody has a definition and when it turns out that computers can fit the definition people will move the goalposts.
The hard problem of consciousness is getting a priest to agree to a definition that a scientist can test. Because everything that touches the real world can probably be modelled with distressing accuracy by matrix multiplications and a little non-linearity.
> If you think there is an easy answer, then you do not yet understand the question.
There is no easy answer that people find satisfactory, but it very well might be that people's intuitive understanding of their own consciousness is incoherent and there are in fact no answers at all that don't violate one or more of the arbitrary axioms that populate the thoughtspace regarding that concept.
The hard problem of consciousness seems almost entirely made up by people who a priori reject physcalism and reductionism. They generally start by assuming that there is something different between knowing what, say, a color is vs the experience of seeing that color, and deduce from this that qualia exist and have definite meaning.
However, if we don't start with such assumptions, it is easy to accept that our attention mechanisms have some way of interpreting the stimuli that they receive, and that similar computational architectures will interpret these stimuli the same way. It is entirely possible that all humans experience pain almost identically, aand that it is even more or less identical to how dogs experience pain; while at the same time, an alien or AGI might experience these things entirely differently.
It is also quite obvious that a being without self-reflection, such as a microprocessor, will not have this experience mechanism, almost by definition.
With enough study of the computational structure of the brain, we will likely come to even understand the precise advantage that experiences (self-reflection) have.
To give just one personal reason why I don't believe in the idea/importance of qualia, I feel very clearly that there are certain mental states that I experience (such as colors and smells etc), but there are also mental states that don't have an associated experience. for example, I don't think there is such a thing as 'the feeling of thinking about the number 277`. This to me suggests strongly that experiences are a specialized part of our computational apparatus, with specific roles that we don't understand precisely now (like so much about our minds), but with limited applicability - not some be-all, end-all of consciousness and thought.
I will also note that my position is entirely in line with philosophers like Daniel Dennett, it is not some dismissal of mainstream philosophical thought.
"knowing" and "experiencing" may or may not be different things. I believe they are aspects of the same thing. But equating them does not solve the problem.
What does it mean "to know" as opposed to contain, or have access to information? A computer program, in one sense, "knows" what the current value of a variable is. But it has no awareness of its own knowing.
There is no doubt that we are creatures of stimuli that is computationally processed in the nervous system. However, there is an ontological difference between the the ability to process stimuli, and the experience of said stimuli. The presumption is that with a sufficiently complex system, the ability to experience stimuli will self-reflective awareness, i.e., consciousness will emerge. But that's a whole lot of hand-waving. What is the mechanism? None is offered. It is only assumed.
As others have noted, we cannot even agree on what the term "consciousness" means, and because of this, some would like to posit that consciousness does not actually exist, i.e., that it is illusory. The irony of this conjecture is that they are trying to convince self-aware beings that they are not self-aware. The intent to convince the other is itself a function of self-awareness. Intent cannot exist without self-awareness, and Persuasion of "the other" also cannot exist without self-awareness.
Denying a phenomenon does not make it go away. I could just as easily respond to the person making this argument that if, indeed, self-awareness is an illusion, then so is their argument. It is mere data, the product of a series of calculations leading to a linguistic expression that intends to communicate nothing. It is merely the output from an extremely complex set of interlocking algorithms.
Despite the difficulty of agreeing to a definition of consciousness, we each, to a person, know what it is because of our own experience. The reason all current attempts to explain consciousness are unsatisfactory is because these attempts contradict our common experience. In fact, every attempt so far denies experience itself. They are unsatisfactory because they are illogical, or because they do not provide any explanation at all, but merely presume that somehow the conclusion is achieved, despite the lack of any mechanism in the proposition that can bring us to that conclusion.
If we can even go so far as to agree: "Consciousness is a property of a being that is aware of its own existence, and is able to contemplate its own existence as an entity distinct from its environment," this does not make it any easier to explain how any computational model will arrive at such a property.
One does not have to be a theist to acknowledge this. Some of the best minds in consciousness research are atheists.
> Consciousness is a property of a being that is aware of its own existence, and is able to contemplate its own existence as an entity distinct from its environment
Unfortunately this definition doesn't help weeding out misconceptions such as philosophical zombies. All you have to do is to say that a system may claim it's conscious without really being "aware" of it's own existence. This definition doesn't help because it doesn't say what being aware of it's own existence mean, offering arguably a circular definition.
Yes, but that just collapses into a solipsism, and would true of all possible definitions. At some point we must agree that there are conscious beings other than ourselves, which necessarily means that a definition such as I proposed is rational. The possibility of philosophical zombies does not imply that every observed entity is such. If we take it as an axiom that there are other conscious entities than ourselves, then one is still left with needing such a definition.
That's not what I said/meant though. I'm not disagreeing there are other conscious being other than ourselves. I'm just saying that it's very hard to craft a definition that is not circular or at least ambiguous enough for people to imagine the existence of non-conscious being that behave as if they were conscious (i.e. the P.zombies).
Quite contrary to solipsism, I'd posit that what matters is behaviour. If a cognitive process is able to communicate with us and convincingly recount its reflections about itself, for all intents and purposes that system is conscious. It doesn't matter if it differs from our consciousness in significant ways.
Let's consider a machine that is able to reflect on itself quote effectively but it's also to turn on and off that module "at will". This is quite different from our experience of consciousness, in that we're not able to turn off our own consciousness, to the extent that we believe we're "there" only while we're conscious of it, and thus we end up equating our existence with those surface experiences. But we're way more than that. Were made of a thousand brains and not all processing reaches what we call our consciousness.
A system that exhibits a different mixture of those mechanism shouldn't be ruled out as not meeting the arbitrarily anthropomorphic bar of consciousness.
We don't know at this point the inner workings of the human mind, conscious or unconscious, so there is much room for speculation.
One key aspect that people that talk about qualia and p-zombies and Chinese rooms assume is that it is possible, in principle, to behave as if you are conscious without really being conscious. The fact that a p-zombie is conceivable does not entail that it can exist in the world.
It is entirely possible, I believe even likely, that as we understand the evolution of consciousness we will discover it is in fact a necessary property of an agent with certain abilities. The reason I believe this is a simplistic evolutionary argument: consciousness would be unlikely to have evolved if it had not been beneficial or even necessary for the beings which possess it.
The tendency to say that people are in fact not conscious beings and that the consciousness itself is an illusion seems to me to come mainly from people who reject free will, and point out that our experience of cosnciously choosing our next action is illusory - our unconscious mind is certainly 'in charge' of many processes, and our consciousness often is only an observer of these processes. For a basic example, I can notice how my heart is beating, and I can sometimes feel like my heart is beating faster because I am scared, but this is jusg an interpretation, which mag be wrong - as anyone who has suffered a panic attack can tell you. More interestingly, when observing people with altered states of consciousness, such as Alzheimer's disease, it is often possible to observe them emitting wildly wrong theories about their own actions, such as claiming that they are dressed up because a relative came to visit, when in fact they were dressed up because they were preparing for an appointment. These examples show at the very least that our consciosuness is to some extent a mechanism that comes up with theories about our own actions, without being directly the cause of those actions, which contradicts our experience of consciousness.
The fact that we can't yet explain these processes and how they come about from computation is not surprising to me, given the youth of the field of computer science and the complexity of the human brain and mind.
I don’t disagree with any of this. There is clearly a deep connection between the brain and the conscious mind. One’s consciousness is in some way limited by one’s perception, and one’s perception is directly a product of one’s neural system. The question is, where do the boundaries lie between the self, and the perception in which the self participates. Obviously, I find this entire area fascinating.
I think the OP meant that no fancy physics is required for neurons to work, and consciousness is in some not yet known way the result of our brain wiring.
Just like you do not need quantum physics to explain how muscles work.
Not saying I believe it but I think it is conceivable that the neural networks in our brain are there for certain things like motor function learning, basically like a fancy control system, while the "mysterious quantum stuff" is there for "consciousness". The fact is we can't really define consciousness so we don't know what it takes to make it...
The view stated in your last sentence is a commonly-held one, but if we needed complete definitions of something before we could have knowledge of it, I doubt we would ever have come up with the idea of a gravitational field or a wave function. The solid definition of consciousness will follow from our future understanding of how minds work, not be a prerequisite for it.
> I doubt we would ever have come up with the idea of a gravitational field or a wave function.
But that is the opposite of the case here. We came up with those ideas after we had an understanding of the system. With consciousness, people casually use the term all the time and think they have a vague idea of what it is, but we have little understanding of the system. It may be that it simply does not exist for example.
you have a point - they are not exact analogies - but, as you say, we came up with those ideas after we had an understanding of the system. If we can discover things without having a prior definition of them, then having a vague prior definition should be no obstacle - even if it leads to some initial confusion, clearing that up through the gathering of evidence should be no harder than coming up with a definition for something we previously did not suspect through the gathering of evidence.
This is so even if it turns out that the phenomenon does not exist, such as in the case of the mythical causal effects of the four humors.
The "Hard Problem" is much more specific - and speculative - than the observation that current theories have made little or no progress (whether they have made any progress remains to be seen, and any claim that they have not is just opinion.) It is the claim that the scientific method cannot, in principle, explain the "what it is like" aspect of experience - that there is some sort of unbridgeable explanatory gap.
(This is a reference to Fermat's Last Theorem in which Fermat confidently proclaimed in a margin of his book that he had a simple elegant proof which the margin was too small to contain)