I suspect my own comments on this site will probably age just as goatily.
There was something that happened in the late 80s and 90s where difficult philosophy and just riffing on the logic of an idea got conflated. My 90's alternative high school english class taught by a cultural studies PhD assigned us BBS t-files and we got a lot of stuff like this. It was like philosophy, but without rigor or competence, and when you suggested it was just dissolving reason and meaning into gibberish, they would say "YES!" with a weird, manic triumphalism. Everyone was just talking past each other and reveling in the satisfaction of hearing their words echoed in someone elses nonsense. I probably spoke like that back then as well. It's hypnotic, it exploits the listeners basic agreeableness, elevates lunatics and demagogues, and emboldens the incoherent.
By the end of the article, you are left trying to untangle a set of interleaved similes and metaphors the writer has unhooked and completely decoupled from reason.
This is his conclusion:
> The qualia dial validates zagnets while still letting the universe exist independently. Zagnets frequently end up having to deny the existence of the objective universe in order to exist themselves. Sometimes, to get around this problem, zagnets propose that consciousness is a part of the natural world, just not the part that zombies are competent at observing. Taking this approach, zagnets can run but they can't hide. Eventually, some grandson of Dennett might be insulting Penrose-style zagnets with quantum measurement devices and Searle-style zagnets with group-mind detectors even though today we believe such devices to be impossible. The qualia dial gives both subjectivity and objectivity their due.
If you ever wonder how we got here, stuff like this was the prelude.
There was a strong sense that AI was around the corner. Marvin Minsky gave our commencement address and expressed anger at us that we hadn't solved the problem of copying his consciousness onto a computer yet, and expressed the urgency that this problem be solved before he died (it was 2016 when he died, and we failed).
Goatishness was in the air, but it smelled like techno-optimism. Remember also that this was a brief, bright period between the fall of the Berlin wall but before 9/11 and well before climate change seemed all that serious, so we felt free to speak like this because it helped us convince ourselves and each other we were tackling big challenges so fearlessly we couldn't help but speak gibberish.
The initial gambit is to make the reader part of a clever in-group by out-grouping “zombies”, then the writer proceeds to quickly gish-gosh a bunch of concepts that would require lots of further thought, but instead expects the reader to just go with it. You can get anywhere if you just go with it
Edit: But I do like JL on other subjects. I think it just proves the point that Plato made in the Defence of Socrates
I don't think the author is totally lost in the woods, but I agree that his writing is unnecessarily unclear. I think that most of the "goatiness" comes from his choice in writing to mockingly call physicalist/reductionist types that disregard the experience of qualia or think of it as a non-problem, as "zombies", and people that think that the problem of qualia must be taken seriously as "zagnets", which unnecessarily muddies the waters, as those words are also used in different meanings by other authors. He also assumes that you are familiar with what various other authors think about the problem of qualia/consciousness.
If I understand correctly what the author is trying to say, I think that theoretical physicist Sean Carrol communicates similar kinds of ideas with a much greater eloquence. A recommended watching, "Poetic Naturalism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv0mKsO2goA But then again, maybe I'm just "riffing on" with them.
Also, his portrayal of the "zombies" is kind of a strawman/weak man argument; I started off reading this as someone that he might have thought of a zombie, but then he proceeds to attribute some arguments to zombies that are hard to agree with, to the point that it becomes apparent that his underlying goal is not to communicate his ideas, but to just mock some people that he doesn't agree with.
I don't think there's any less rigour or competence here than in "respectable" philosophy; quite the opposite. There is no excess of metaphor, just an exploration of a technical subject in the terminology that it requires. It's using plenty of jargon and references, sure, but programmers are in no position to throw stones about such things; the jargon is meaningful and clearly defined (indeed, defined clearly at the start, in the case of "zagnets").
This is an interesting point, as there is a cognitive style among some programmers (but both STEM and critical people) who don't seem to have internal distinctions between a heuristic, a metonym, a functional synecdoche, a coherent abstraction, a generalization, a codeword, a black box, and a joke reference.
Few people are really dumb, but when we're designing, writing and teaching, it's important to keep track of what logical level of abstraction we are speaking at.
My reading was that Lanier in this piece seemed to take a joke reference and a codeword (zombie/zagnet) and treat them both as black boxes, where there was no logical coherence in what the relationship or effect of one was on the other, and it just produced a wandering narrative.
If there's no relevant distinction then why make one? (Indeed, the ability to abstract over irrelevant details is the essence of intelligence). As far as I can see the piece uses "zombie" and "zagnet" entirely legitimately. It does wander, but that's not a crime.
If a box of gas (or a bar of iron, or a meteor shower) is capable to doing arbitrary computations, then go ahead and use a box of gas to factor some big numbers. The gas has 10^23 atoms that are all colliding with other atoms extremely often, so the amount of computing power available should be vastly greater than our current capabilities and it should be possible to factor correspondingly larger numbers.
Of course, any real-life attempts to use a box of gas to do such computations will fail. What's missing is the enormously complicated mapping between the starting and ending states of the gas, and the inputs and outputs of the factoring problem. This mapping is not just a matter of mapping bits in a local way into positions of gas atoms, but requires incredibly non-local dependencies between components. Interpreting the position of just a single atom in the gas requires knowing what pretty much all the other atoms in the gas are doing as well. If you had to actually compute that mapping, it would be about as difficult as both both simulating the gas's dynamics, and factoring the number.
At this point, a reasonable person would probably start to suspect that the actual factoring calculation is being shoved into the interpretation of the inputs/outputs of the system, and that the box of gas itself is not doing any calculations at all. Indeed, suppose that rather than letting the gas sit for a time t equalling perhaps a few seconds in order to do its computation, we instead let t=0. In this case, that atoms don't move at all during the "computation", but by clever mapping of inputs and outputs, we can still interpret this as "factorizing the number". Clearly the actual computation is happening in the "mappings" not in the gas.
So I take it you agree with TFA, or at least the relevant part? "The cleverness is in the interpretation" is essentially the same argument as "the computer and its information are in the eye of the beholder".
Sometimes I wonder if the core problem of this disagreement depends on the certainty of our understanding of information - how it works and scales.
This isn’t a strong rebuttal to this paper, though I read it closely, enjoy both sides of the mind-body problem, and do my best to seek some sort of external truth in the matter…
But I’m inclined to disagree with Jaron on the following point: What if the contents of the mind (consciousness notwithstanding for a moment), which surely must include information or data, doesn’t represent the complete anatomy of the systems involved in the mind-body problem. What if subjective experience is an objective realization of some sort of a information-vitality singularity.
Then we could not be confident that the argumentation (mainly the metaphors) in this paper accurately model reality - at least as far as I can tell.
And that’s really it: What if the mind-body problem, with its dual objective/subjective complexities, cannot be modeled until we first understand consciousness. Put differently:
What if we can’t model the M-B problem until we first solve it.
Perhaps objective experiment? Some sort of truly demonstrable proof by induction? Whatever gets us away from abstracting the problem itself. In the meantime, I’m fond of some of the various theological approaches. And if I was put to the question, my bet is that this answer is unknowable.
I’m not sure if I’m a zombie? I’d rather be a cynical zagnet; I certainly don’t think that subjective experience does not exist.
I ought to buy anyone who reads through this comment a drink. Here lies my knee jerk reaction. Thanks for posting, and thank you to Jason for giving me a bit to chew on.
I don't think we can scientifically solve the mind-body problem either. Scientifically, we've been able to pile up some evidence against the brain being remote-controlled through an extremely simple, uni-faceted direct channel of instructions. We're also able to demonstrate that the physical has a profound effect on the mental, which anyone with a source of drugs could have told us millennia ago.
Speaking of, I'll take you up on the offer for a drink.
I tend to think something like a combination of the 3rd substance and panpsychism model accounts for our experience in context of discoveries that make descartes pineal gland theory seem dubious.
Thanks for the reply! And yes - if you end up within 100 miles of Charleston, SC, I quite seriously will oblige.
Thank you for your comment. I haven't engaged much with "3rd substance and panpsychism" much, so that'll be on my procrastinating reading list this week. I'm writing a book about Why We Play certain games, and I'm always tempted by the rabbit hole that is M-B problem.
Maybe thinking about the M-B is one of the things that distinguishes Man?
Thanks for wading through, I'd have bet dollars to donuts I wouldn't get a response. Cheers :)
I explored this argument independently around 2000 and my conclusion was that anything of sufficient complexity can be a representation of anything, given the correct interpretation of the data (a similar argument to the author in this regard).
This seems to imply that every rock (complex body of information) contains infinite consciousnesses, variable by interpretation.
This seems to imply that the interpretation of data is the key element of computation, but that view is confounded by a scenario where a huge flip book contains all of the possible screen presentations of a simulation, and the following page is determined by the choices of the observer. In this case, the computation and the data is arguably both contained within the data, with the act of representation carried out by the act of observation.
This suggests that the act of observation is in fact the critical second component, data and observation with computation being an integral part of one, or the other, rather than a distinct entity at all.
This indeed suggests that computation is not real- ultimately there is only data and observation.
Where that leads us is squarely into the quantum realm, with “wave collapse” due to measurement of information. I’m not sure where we go from there but I thought that was an interesting intersection.
From footnote 19, a definition of an unbounded problem: "This gives us an unbounded problem instead of a large finite one. It is just like hoping for an algorithm that you could feed a bunch of data into and then be rewarded with the best possible scientific theory to explain the data."
Twenty years later, we have fed data into a machine learning algorithm that does indeed, spit out scientific theories to explain the data. Maybe not "best possible", but perhaps even more interestingly, solutions the almighty human mind hasn't already thought of.
[Sarcasm] Hmm, weird. You see, my obviously unimpeachable internal subjective experience says that anyone who doesn't believe computers (or for that matter, meteor showers or CDs) could have internal subjective experience is, in fact, a zombie.
TL;DR Boltzmann's Brain is weird and you can generate a computer to interprete anything the way you want. Therefore consciousness exists and biological brains are magic and if you disagree you're a Zombie.
The author desperately needs to read or cite Greg Egan's Permutation City and the "Dust Theory" contained therein. We went over all this 28 years ago. It's old hat now.
By the end of the article, you are left trying to untangle a set of interleaved similes and metaphors the writer has unhooked and completely decoupled from reason.
This is his conclusion:
> The qualia dial validates zagnets while still letting the universe exist independently. Zagnets frequently end up having to deny the existence of the objective universe in order to exist themselves. Sometimes, to get around this problem, zagnets propose that consciousness is a part of the natural world, just not the part that zombies are competent at observing. Taking this approach, zagnets can run but they can't hide. Eventually, some grandson of Dennett might be insulting Penrose-style zagnets with quantum measurement devices and Searle-style zagnets with group-mind detectors even though today we believe such devices to be impossible. The qualia dial gives both subjectivity and objectivity their due.
If you ever wonder how we got here, stuff like this was the prelude.