[chaboud]

Having not gone deep into this problem, I’m a bit confused. It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter.

Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”?

Is it not possible that our experiences, our recognition of color, our smell of moth balls, our hearing of clarinets are, in fact, just aggregate functions of those parts that make us up?

Am I missing some greater argument here? Is this just humanity’s need to feel special on navel-gazing display, or is there a stronger crux here lost in the haze of the article?

[fsckboy]

>It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter. Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”?

you've definitely hit upon the problem, but you have it exactly backward. The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical. Consciousness affects physical things (you think, plan, and put out your hand and move something). How does this happen? Saying "it's all physical laws" is handwaving away quite a bit of nonphysical phenomena, relying on "the science of the gaps".

it may very well turn out that orgasm feels like it does because that's a property of physics, but you can't just assert these sorts of things, you have to prove them.

my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.

[orwin]

No, planning, thinking, moving your body is not the hard problem, it's the "easy problem" just like processing information is. We see which part of your brain "lit" when you plan, when you order etc.

The "hard problem" is subjective experience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_character_of_experi...), which is different. You can have different way of explaining it, and what GP is saying is a proto-illusionism, probably not as well thought as it could be, but philosophers wrote on this quite recently (the idea is from ~2010): https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journal/the-illusion-of...

[chaboud]

So, in the absence of fully bearing out the complete pathways of experience (effectively, mapping, at the atomic, and possibly quantum level, everything in a person), we’re going to assert that some non-physical phenomena are afoot? That seems like we’re fishing in deeper and darker corners for the soul because we decided to ascribe significance to perception and experience.

It’s still not clear to me why qualia are anything more than the enshrinement of labels. Replace “description” with neuro-interfaced simulation, and the whole argument dissolves.

By asking someone to prove that consciousness is not a product of something outside of physics, you’re demanding that they prove a negative.

Let’s put it more simply: we have no evidence to indicate that human thought or experience require anything beyond the elements and nature of the physical universe.

Otherwise, we’re just trying to explain complexity not yet understood with religious attribution, and we should hang up our science spurs right now.

[fsckboy]

you're mixing two things I'm saying, that we already know enough to realize that the hunter gatherer intuition of physical things becomes quite inadequate at the nano scale, so it's time to abandon it; despite that physics and physical share the same etymology, I'm not saying to abandon physics. And that consciousness and our imagination of things that don't exist do not require physical existence of things (using that intuition) so how can we say that we know what imagination is?

saying "but I believe in the materialist interpretation of modern science because I run from religion, that fusty old thing I fear, so I insist that consciousness be explainable by physical laws" is not a proof. I am an atheist, but our consciousnesses have created religion, so it exists as much as our other thoughts. What we see with our eyes we also are convinced exists, but in our heads, thinking about it, it has the same nature as our other thoughts, and imaginings.

[chaboud]

Okay. That I’m partly down with. Naming of objects is convenient, but very few objects that we name and count are, in fact, single things. That said, the categorization and grouping are awfully convenient for day to day living.

- that’s a long edit, but I’ll reply with a short one:

I’m not running from religion. I’m suggesting that enshrining consciousness as something ineffable and then demanding that it be fully mapped out by physics to not otherwise be a symptom of the preternatural is a sophistic argument.

[yibg]

You seem to be overloading the word "physical"? Information and computation are physical manifestations of e.g. electrons and physical bits. Information are stored (as far as we know) on physical things like memory or the brain. e.g. you damage the brain and memory goes away.

[fsckboy]

my comment said that I don't believe "physical bits" exist, or at least not as physical bits, so you using the term physical bits is ignoring what I said. When you and I meet and shake hands, we don't actually touch, rather our electrons repel each other, quite firmly. I'm saying that they don't need to be physical to do that.

I'm saying "we live in a simulation", except it's not (necessarily) a simulation, all we know is that it's all there is that we know about.

[chaboud]

That becomes a bit of a silly argument, in that it ends up making no real assertion.

Similar arguments were tried in the early days of the telescope in the 17th century, asserting that what was being observed could not be trusted due to the mediation of the lenses (early telescopes were generally refractive). While imperfections can limit and govern the information available via telescopes, there is no reason to believe that said information is false or somehow governed by anything other than physical phenomenon. It was, and is, the height of sophistry to make such an assertion.

[fsckboy]

my argument is only to get you to unassert that you know anything about the nature of the mind. (the other part, about the simulation, is how I find it more comfortable to think about the universe, but i have no proof, just like to point out that it's just as plausible)

[chaboud]

We actually (myself included, to an extent) know a great deal about the mind, perception, and cognition. There’s lots still to learn, but we’ve been poking, prodding, and experimenting for a long time.

I’ll give an example that is related to my current day job, where we make devices with displays (e.g., TV’s). I have commonly had people say that picture quality and color on televisions is subjective. However, until we’re into advanced features like content-adaptive processing, it isn’t. Instead, color is objectively and reproducibly measurable as a set of physical properties, and the mappings of those properties to the TV-buying public is very aligned with the science behind color theory.

Now, color theory as we apply it is a blend of physics (very, very reproducible) and perception. The perceptual part of color is largely reproducible over large populations, but there are certainly mutations, conditions, and variances that lead to some degree of varied perception, up to and including blindness (though TV’s these days throw off enough infrared that their brightness is generally detectable by non-sighted users). So, might we all be living in a simulation? Or a simulation of a simulation? Sure. But that has no practical impact because it is an unanswerable question.

Conversely, operating with the assumption that the physical-world sensing and reasoning apparatus available to me isn’t some complex prank is working out pretty well for the trillions+ creatures out there (insects could be an interesting discussion) that appear to be going about their daily lives. Why ask people to prove a negative?

In the meantime, we’ll continue to try to better understand how minds work.

[rini17]

Even if it's all computation, it might be worth it to distinguish sentient and not sentient computations. I think trying to arrive to it by examining particles is a detour at best.

[fsckboy]

if sentient computation exists as a subset of a computational structure (our universe) it must be said that the computational structure is sentient.

[rini17]

That's like saying all movement must have originated from some Prime Mover. Why is there need for such forced assumptions.

[adrianN]

We don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows you to determine whether an electron is conscious or not. Until we have that it’s quite pointless to discuss whether this phenomenon is magic or not imo. Furthermore, I don't think it's trivial to distinguish between magic and physics.

[tbrownaw]

> The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical.

That sounds an awful like you're taking as axiomatic that consciousness is non-physical i.e. magic.

[fsckboy]

you are asserting you know what consciousness is. I'm saying I don't know.

[lo_zamoyski]

> The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical.

There's a confusion here between "explained by physical laws" and "physical". The problem of qualia, I claim, shows that physics is not exhaustive when it comes to matter. Its methods are necessarily and entirely quantitative, which means anything that doesn't satisfy this presumption of quantifiability is either ignored, or given some frankly bad pseudo-reduction to the quantifiable (and even then, it relies on a tacit Cartesian sort of dualism to work, which is usually unacknowledged).

I make the initial distinction between "physical law" and "physical" because an Aristotle or an Aquinas would not deny that, say, dogs and cats and myriad animals are conscious (they would find the notion absurd), even as they hold that, of the animals, only human beings possess intellects, which, owing to their capacity for abstraction, must be immaterial. What does that mean? It means that just because physics cannot account for consciousness, either today or at all by virtue of its methods and scope, it does not follow that consciousness cannot be material. It may not be exclusively material perhaps, and perhaps consciousness, like "being", is analogical in meaning, and our use of the term suffers from a fallacy of univocity that it has only one meaning.

> my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.

While I reject mechanistic metaphysics, the notion that everything is "information" or "computation" is incoherent, or at the very least, stands in for something else, like idealism, which has its own set of problems. "Computation" comes from the Latin "computare", i.e., "com" ("with, together") and "putare" ("to reckon"). That is to say, computation is semiotic, so to speak. It is intentional, about something else. So it makes no sense to speak of computation as the ground of reality, because it is an operation that presupposes reality. Information suffers from analogous problems. You would only be passing the buck by appealing to them.

[mxkopy]

The hard problem of consciousness is the same as the problem of describing to someone a color they’ve never seen before (i.e. the problem of qualia).

Personally I think the information contained in qualia is finite and therefore physical but who knows

[aklein]

TBH, I don’t really understand why this is a problem. An explanation is not an experience; it cannot provide to the human brain the same information. Suppose you neurologically induced an experience of seeing that new color without “really” seeing it - surely this would be sufficient to communicate qualia? (And if not, surely it’s just a matter of adjusting the inducement to some degree).

[epiccoleman]

Isn't "an explanation is not an experience" basically the problem? Like, if you could perfectly describe all the physical conditions to induce the experience of a color, there would still be something missing from that description which you can't get without consciousness in the loop. You can't communicate or describe it without the actual experience part.

Most (all?) of our "science" doesn't require any sort of notion of consciousness to work, we can describe the motion of a projectile or an orbit in a way that doesn't depend on having an "experiencer." But there's this weird category of stuff for which that isn't true. (At least, for now).

[yibg]

Doesn't that just point to the fact that our ability to describe is limited and lossy? In the color example, we're trying to convey information about the effects of one of the senses without using that sense. It could very well be that without using that particular sense, the brain just isn't stimulated the same way.

[plorkyeran]

Would there still be something missing if you could “perfectly describe all the physical conditions to induce the experience of a color”? I don’t see any reason to assume that’s self-evidently true, and it’s not something that we have the ability to test. Obviously if you start from the assumption that qualia exists then you will conclude that it must exist.

[mxkopy]

We haven’t experimentally verified that such neurological inducement is possible. I bet we’ll be able to do so, but until then the question remains.

[chaps]

This sort of philosophical question becomes more important when you think of second-order-and-beyond. Think of, in this case, that color is just a manifestation of experience. But that manifestation of experience applies to, for example, the beautiful smells that a rose throws out into the world. To a degree, the redness has an affectation on the world, which is separate to each person.

my theory is that these things are just questions of resolutions of varying latencies.

[canjobear]

The nonphysicality of consciousness isn't taken as axiomatic, there are arguments for it. Consider the argument from knowledge, summarized in TFA:

> A related argument known as the “knowledge argument” was famously put forward by Frank Jackson. Imagine Mary, a scientist of the future who, for whatever reason, has spent her entire life in a black and white room, never having experiences of colors. She has, nevertheless, through her studies come to learn all the physical facts there are to know about the physics and physiology of color perception. For example, she knows down to the last detail what is going on in the surface of a red apple, and in the eyes and nervous system, when someone sees the apple. Suppose she leaves the room and finally comes to learn for herself what it is like to see red. In other words, she comes for the first time to have the qualia associated with the conscious experience of seeing a red apple. Surely she has learned something new. But since, by hypothesis, she already knew all the physical facts there were to know about the situation, her new knowledge of the qualia in question must be knowledge of something over and above the physical facts.

In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything. The version of this that I learned first was "what is it like to be a bat?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

Another one that I can recall offhand, from Descartes: Physical things have extension in space. One way to test whether something has extension in space is whether you can cut it in half. But your consciousness can't be cut in half, you can't even conceive of what this would mean. So it's not physical.

Make of the arguments what you may. I wrote term papers against both of the above in undergrad. But it's definitely something people have thought carefully about, not just an ideological assertion that consciousness Must Be Different.

[dragonwriter]

> In the thought experiment, when Mary sees red for the first time, it seems that she gains new knowledge that she did not have before even though she knew everything there is to know about the properties of matter involved. You have to either accept that she learned something nonphysical, or deny that she learned anything.

No, you don't. You just have to accept that the facts about physical phenomenon that can be learned through language are different than the physical experience of physical phenomena themselves, and that learning the latter is distinct from learning the former. The latter, however, is obviously physical.

And, even if it wasn't wrong in that way, that would be an argument for the nonphysicality of some subset of the subjects of knowledge, not an argument for the nonphysicality of consciousness.

[canjobear]

> the facts about physical phenomenon that can be learned through language are different than the physical experience of physical phenomena themselves

Whether she learned through language is irrelevant. Before seeing red, she might have learned about it by consulting extensive charts of the brain, or (black-and-white) videos of timecourses of brain activation. Maybe she even got to run computer simulations of her own brain response.

By construction Mary already knew everything physical about the color red, so the new knowledge she gained through consciously experiencing it is not knowledge about anything physical.

[j_bum]

Indeed, I think the parent comment presents a false dichotomy fallacy. Thanks for catching it

[plorkyeran]

The hypothetical scenario of knowing all of the physical facts about what it is like to see the color red does not seem particularly possible to me even without the constraint that it happen without having seen colors before. Since we are assuming that Mary understands the color red to a dramatically deeper degree than any human actually has, I don’t see how you can conclusively state that her reaction to finally seeing it would be something other than “yep that’s exactly what I expected”, with the only new information gained being that her knowledge actually does correspond to reality (or at least to her perception of such).

[andoando]

Is consciousness not special? It certainly isn't obvious to me my experience of the world isn't present in all matter. And how is it obvious that is a fundamental product of matter?

It seems to me youre just taking the opposite as an axiom without any basis.

My personal belief is the two viewpoints are not so contradictory. Consciousness can be a fundamental part of all matter (not simply an emergent phenomena or product of matter). This is no more magic to me than admitting matter has "energy" or does things randomly.

[chaboud]

If your consciousness is a product of matter, it isn’t special, and, sure, consciousness as we label it could arise in forms of other matter. That doesn’t mean that it’s present in all matter, in the same way that we don’t ascribe consciousness to a virus.

Consciousness is a label. It’s a noun that is used (among many long winded arguments, apparently) to mean a range of things, but relaxation of that label doesn’t extend to universal consciousness of matter without rendering that concept pointless.