[zetalyrae]

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove?

> A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well.

And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this?

Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.

Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union.

Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).

That's the hard problem.

[thepasch]

> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience

You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways:

1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?

2) "We have solved the easy problem of consciousness, we know exactly how the brain works" implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain. This, again, is not an assumption that's supported by anything than wishful thinking.

And, further:

> or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).

"Some math can produce consciousness" does not mean "ALL math HAS to produce consciousness" does not mean "EVERY PART of all math has to BE conscious."

Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.

[suzzer99]

Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's?

If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no.

And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees.

I'm not sure what to draw from this. But whenever I read something that speculates on the nature of consciousness, I always try to look at it through the lens of the human-to-tube worm scale. Does the argument survive a continuum, or does it depend on human consciousness being fundamentally unique in some way?

I guess you could argue that even though there's a continuum, consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles. Sort of like how technically I feel Alpha Centauri's gravity, but effectively it's zero. So in that case, the argument only has to survive mammals to say corvids.

[darkwater]

Did our ancestors that used the very first tools have consciousness? If they did, was the consciousness what helped them make the tools? Or was something else in their brains that helped in the tool making?

IMO consciousness is something that appears when you have enough "brain power" to spare, maybe as some side-effect of some evolutionary trait. I'm no expert and it's a very simplistic explanation, I know, but in general I tend to agree with the general idea exposed by Rovelli in the piece: consciousness is just a manifestation of the real world of which we are part, just one very complicated and that we are not able to understand (yet?).

[Brian_K_White]

There is brain power by the ton all over the place. The answer cannot be based on what a thing can do, but on what a thing chooses to do.

[spiorf]

The verb "chooses" here does a lot of the heavy lifting, and implies a consciusness that chooses. It's making the answer circular and it means that we are just pre-filtering the possible answers for our preconceptions.

My cat is not "less conscious" because he's choosing to sleep all day.

[Brian_K_White]

Any action that can possibly have a simple explaination, it doesn't matter if it can also have a complex explaination, is immaterial.

A cat doing anything that can be explained by simple tropism doesn't prove or disprove anything, it's simply data of no value one way or the other.

The fact that you sleep and so does a cat does not prove that you are just a cat or that the cat is actually postulating about the inner life of other cats but just choosing not to ever write it's thoughts down. It's simply a silly trivial surface thing to even talk about.

[wizzwizz4]

If I may equivocate for a moment: your cat is unconscious, which is less conscious than wakefulness.

[darkwater]

I'm not sure I'm following you, what do you mean? That other animals as well have enough brain power for consciousness?

[Brian_K_White]

I said brain power isn't interesting because it doesn't prove anything. There are things that we absolutely know are not conscious yet have a lot of brain power, ie countless pieces of simple deterministic software that we can explain all the way down to the atoms like a sewing machine.

Yes other animals have demonstrated brain power that exceeds some humans, or even all humans while they are young enough, if you just go by some sort of puzzle-solving abilities. The fact that you can figure out how to unscrew a jar lid, and so can an octopus, doesn't imply anything about the octopus being the same as a human in an octopus body.

Similarly observing something simpler exhibit some of the same outward behaviors you and every other human does also doesn't mean anything. Humans do a lot of very simple things. A human seeks food and comfort and avoids pain and damage. And so does a plant. Electric motors turn shafts, and so do humans. So you have to discount anything that's merely a commonality like that, including other things that seem more complex, and so seem like they are what makes us different. We do also have more simple brain power than most animals, and so it is like a correlation with consciousness, but it is not consciousness itself or automatic proof of it and doesn't automatically or necessarily produce it. It's probably a required ingredient though. IE all beef is meat but not all meat is beef, all consciousness may have brain power but not all brain power has consciousness.

But, repeating an example I used in another comment, if you had no other interface with the world except a remote controlled roomba, you would be able to make yourself known. Not by anything as plain as writing out words on the floor, but by actions. There are an infinite number of ways that you a conscious being could disclose your existense to me who can only see the roomba. You could be anything from caring to menacing by simple actions. Because it's not the capacity to roll across the floor, it's where & when you choose to roll across the floor that ends up speaking and disclosing intent, which discloses the "you" in there.

Watch any horror movie about the robots going wrong, or like twighlight zone episodes where you don't actually see much action but the person wakes up and there is a knife sitting next to them, and the presumption is the creepy doll placed it there while they slept. It's a message that they could have killed them any time they wanted to, and they want you to fear.

No other animal has ever done anything like that, that can only be explained by "I want you to know that I know." or more generally "I want you to have a particular thought.", only things that can be explained much more simply and directly. Some things seem to come close like animals caring for other animals, bringing another animal food etc, but that is really just anthropomorphizing, because we also have all those same animal condition components to our own existense. We also feel hunger, feel a desire to relieve someone else's hunger, protect our young, etc. And animals do have some ability to model what they see. They can observe another animal and model what it wants or fears etc, because the ability to predict other things behavior is very beneficial to survival. And we see that and think it proves more than it does.

If you're a roomba that pushes a cookie across the floor to me, that doesn't prove anything all by itself, but it could be part of it. It's like how a word isn't a novel or a philosophical concept, but the philosophical concept is communicated with words.

The idea is to try to recognize how llms are like a misdirection tricking us into thinking certain things simply because they use text as the thing they manipulate. That makes them seem way more human than they really are, simply because they are slicing and dicing prior recorded human communication, which up until now has been something unique to humans. You don't need any words at all to make yourself known to me as being not just a roomba.

[simiones]

> consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles

Note that at least one species of fish have been shown to very consistently pass the mirror test (they try to clean up a mark on their body they can only see in a mirror, then go back to the mirror to check, and repeat a few times). So, at least if you consider the mirror test to be a sign of consciousness in animals, then you might want to extend this to at least all chordata.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

The mirror test is just about intelligence. A p-zombie could easily pass it.

[simiones]

The mirror test is essentially the only pseudo-objective argument we have for believing that non-human animals are conscious - it proves that said animals have a concept of themselves as opposed to the rest of the environment. You are right that it is not necessarily very convincing, but I don't think we have anything much better.

Also, the entire point of p-zombies is that they can, by definition, pass any objective test that we can currently conceive. A p-zombie is, by definition, "something that behaves exactly like a human, but doesn't have any inner consciousness". Of course, just because we can define something at this high level doesn't mean that this thing can actually exist (e.g. we can define the concept "numbers that are bigger than 3 but smaller than 2", despite no such number existing).

[somenameforme]

You say "our" consciousness, but how do you know you're not the only conscious entity alive? The problem of consciousness is that not only is it plainly absurd sounding, but it's also completely unmeasurable. There is no test or metric you can use to determine whether I, you, or anything else has a consciousness. And I think this more or less immediately precludes logical reasoning about it.

[Brian_K_White]

You can't tell the difference between a person and an mp3 player saying the same words, even if the words are about inner life musings.

And you can't tell the difference between a person exhibiting many behavioral actions and something I could rig up with an electric motor and a light sensor to exhibit tropism, seeking things, avoiding other things.

But if you only had a remote controlled roomba to interact with the world, you would be able to make yourself known to me.

I don't mean that you could substitute a voice with writing out words on the floor, I mean your actions, the overall totality no single act, would would expose a driving source of actions that so far nothing else exhibits.

We just anthropomorphize everything because we have so much in common with all the other animals. When a dog or a dolphin does something, we have had experiences that we recognize as being practically identical, and we know what our experience was like. It's protecting it's baby. I protect MY baby! Yes and an electric motor can turn a crank, and you can turn a crank.

Simple outward alignments like that are some kind of logical trap everyone falls for because we don't have any other conceptual vocabulary to even think with.

[somenameforme]

This is an interesting take but are you not equating intelligence with consciousness?

[Brian_K_White]

No, the mere capacity to do something means nothing.

In other comments I've distilled that down to "It can't be about what a thing can do, but about what a thing chooses to do." Which is a bit too distilled by itself but whatever.

The ability to solve a puzzle is just a correlation, probably a required ingredient, not significant itself.

The comment above was more focussed on it's parent about what you can deduce from outside observations. It's not true that there is nothing to go on. It's merely true that you can come up with a lot of examples of observations that don't prove anything.

Hearing something say "I think, therefor I am." doesn't prove that it thinks or is. Seeing something solve a puzzle or care for a baby doesn't prove that it is the same as you who can also solve puzzles and would care for a baby.

And yet, no matter how limited your means of expression were, if you had any means of acting at all, you could and would make yourself known. How I don't know because it's infinite and context sensitive. You would do something that only has meaning to me or other immediate observers because it would somehow refer to other immediate context.

You're nothing but a remote controlled roomba, and just to make the point we'll artificially remove the obvious easy direct possibility of writing letters out on the floor or tapping out morse code by bumping into something, etc. You can only communicate by actions. You don't know morse code and something like that simple doesn't occur to you because not everyone thinks like that or is good at thinking of things like that.

Yet... You see me looking around for something, and you push the cookie I dropped across the floor to where I see it. Then when I reach for it you move in the way because you wish to tell me I'm not supposed to have sugar & carbs, and indeed I do get that message. No single act like that says or proves much by itself, but stuff like that adds up to a pattern that exceeds the same sorts of things any dog routinely does, and none of it requires hardly any brute brainpower. Or maybe it does require brute brain power but it doesn't have to mean an ability to solve impressive puzzles. IE a dog will absolutely model that you are looking for that cookie and will absolutely desire to please you by bringing it to you, but will not joke with you by bringing a particular type of cookie that you both know you don't like. But it could be trained to do all the same outward actions. It has the brainpower to figure out even very complicated rules.

[don_esteban]

Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's?

> If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no.

> And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees.

> I'm not sure what to draw from this.

At least the answer to this is simple:

'fundamentally different' is not a transitive function

:-)

[simiones]

The important point is that "not fundamentally different" is probably a transitive function. If A is not fundamentally different from B, and B is not fundamentally different from C, than A is not fundamentally different from C. Here A is human consciousness, B is gorilla consciousness, and C is baboon consciousness.

[don_esteban]

I disagree. Lets go over this slowly.

For almost all purposes, x + epsilon is not fundamentally different from x. Still, 1 is fundamentally different from 10^100, while you can get from 1 to 10^100 by adding epsilon.

Perhaps, one can argue that 0 is fundamentally different from 1. As in 0 + epsilon is fundamentally different from 0, for any non-zero epsilon (e.g. you can't divide by 0, but can for such epsilon).

I think both of us will agree that there is no fundamental difference between the consciousness of baboon and gorilla, and that there is a fundamental difference between the consciousness of a human and a bacteria.

Where we might differ is whether there is a fundamental difference between the consciousness of gorilla and human (some/many? think the humans are unique, and gorilla are not consciouss), and between the consciousness of baboon and a bacteria (maybe some believe 'all life has soul', including bacteria).

Where do you stand? Why do you think 'not fundamentally different' is transitive? Of course, if you apply it twice, the non-transitivity is not obvious. If you apply it 1000x, all the way to bacteria, its non-transitivity becomes obvious. Otherwise, you have to draw a sharp divide somewhere, between 'conscious' and 'non conscious', as in 'these two relatively closely related species are fundamentally different'.

The biggest biological gap I see between bacteria and human is probably between bacteria and eucaryotes, but somehow I doubt you would put the 'fundamentally different, consciousness-wise' there.

Btw., if that is not obvious, from my point of view, baboons are conscious. Not tothe level humans are, but sufficiently enough to make it obvious.

[cgio]

You are probably converging to Tononi’s IIT. Read the criticism from Aaronson too. Not fundamentally against your approach.

[__patchbit__]

Some scientists accept consciousness resides in single cell paramecia.

[philipallstar]

Saying "accept" assumes it's true. What's happening is "some scientists define consciousness incredibly broadly."

[svara]

> My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?

A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.

A bit like asking "Have you proven that ice cream? Are you sure maths can not prove that ice cream? Do you have empirical evidence?"

Asking for empirical evidence seems beside the point, since the issue is a logical one.

[DangitBobby]

As far as we know math can describe all of physics and sufficiently complex physics could describe our brains, thus math could describe our brains. Does that mean we aren't conscious? Where is the chain broken?

[svara]

There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step:

How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?

[DangitBobby]

Maybe I misunderstood you. You said this:

> A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.

Which I took to mean, people who think it's possible for math to result in consciousness is a "type error".

You gave this in response to:

> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?

So overall I'm confused what you actually believe and what you think is the "type error" here.

Maybe you meant that emperical proof is not possible. Which seems obvious, which is (I think) entirely the point of asking that rhetorical question: they know no one has had the emperical proof required to suggest consciousness doesn't arrive from math.

[chr1]

In that chain there is no distinction between subjective experience of mental state and evolution of physical state of the brain.

If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.

What most of the p-zombie supporters say is merely equivalent to adding an external observer. It is like saying that a player following a sim in a game, makes sims actions more meaningful, which is kind of true but also completely irrelevant to anything that the sims do.

[DangitBobby]

> If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.

I don't agree any more than I'd agree that knowledge of the strong force being a fundamental aspect of the way the universe functions is the same thing as understanding why there is a strong force (ignoring any version of the anthropic principle of course).

The hard problem asks _why_ consciousness exists, not just the mechanism. You can take the position that p-zombies are not possible and I would with you. That might give me some insight into consciousness to the effect of "consciousness is a requirement for introspection and desired preservation of self which improves the fitness of an organism that develops it" but it doesn't tell me _why_ or _how_ subjective arises.

[svara]

I don't think the question of whether subjective phenomena are casual has any bearing on whether there's a 'hard problem' and I also don't think the term 'hard problem' is used like that by others.

Whether subjective experience is casual or not is a different, additional question.

[satisfice]

The problem of consciousness is hard partly because it is objectively hard to make conscious people— all of whom are experts at the experience of living in their own bodies— agree on what consciousness is.

[zetalyrae]

> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness?

Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind?

> Implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain.

The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness. Is in: what is the shape of the answer, and can a collection of material facts about the world have that shape?

> Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.

This is just a tiresome ad hominem. I want to be a materialist and an eliminativist. I would like this to be simple!

[grumbel]

> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

Consciousness isn't something the information processing has, it is something the information processing does. It's a function, not some magic property that happens on top.

Consciousness is simply your brains ability to figure out what part of all the sensory input it gets can be attributed to the "self", just like other parts might be labeled as cats, dogs, table and chairs, some will be labeled as self.

And I am sure one day somebody will boil that down to some nice math, since fundamentally it's about networks. If the brain wants to move a hand from one spot to another, that's easy if it is its own hand, a couple of nerve impulses and it will happen. If that hand belongs to somebody else, moving it is a whole different ballgame. That fundamental different in connectedness should be expressible.

[GoblinSlayer]

>The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.

It's special pleading. What empirical knowledge you could acquire that would let you understand a tesseract? There are many things that are difficult to understand.

[dgfl]

Can we start by defining consciousness as something that could be quantified physically, rather than a nebulous concept? With a common shared ground, we could at least define why we are all sure that individual neurons are unconscious.

To anticipate a possible question about my definition: I don’t have a strict one. I’m almost completely with Rovelli on this one. I think the day we find a proper definition of the concept we’ll have done the first step is solving the (one and only) “easy” problem of consciousness. But I’m open to hearing your own definition since I feel like I just can’t grasp your concerns. I must be missing something.

[don_esteban]

> The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.

What about this: - this class of brain circuits are not not firing when the person is (unconscious, in deep sleep,a newborn/animal obviously just directly responding to outside stimuli), while obviously active when a person performs conscious activity - this class of brain circuits does not exists at very primitive species and is progressively more developed the higher the evolution chain you go

[raincom]

Eliminativism fails to 'save the phenomena.' It is one thing for a new theory to discard the theoretical entities of an old framework--in other words, to eliminate the explanans. It is quite another thing entirely to eliminate the explanandum, the very phenomenon we set out to explain.

[thepasch]

> If all information processing leads to consciousness

Did you actually read what you just responded to?

[zetalyrae]

Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

As I wrote elsethread: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?

[thepasch]

> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

I have no idea. If that's what the hard problem of consciousness boils down to - we don't know why some complex math produces consciousness and other complex math doesn't - then it boils down to "we haven't found the means to sufficiently analyze the math that does produce it." Which would turn it into... a math problem?

My suspicion is that it has something to do with evolutionary pressure. Consciousness is something that evolves when systems that include their own existence within their data model become much more likely to continue existing versus those that don't. Statistics does the rest.

[skirmish]

> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

Using Rovelli's example: why some clouds create a thunderstorm and not others? It is just a complex phenomenon that happens only under right conditions.

[don_esteban]

What about this:

Let us classify the information processing along two axis: a) low-level (evolutionarily ancient), direct stimuli-response, vs high-level (involving prefrontal cortex) b) processing stimuli from the outside world (sound, light) vs internal stimuli (tactile/pain ... all the way to internal stimuli originating in brain - 'thinking about thinking')

Note that both are continuous scale, not binary.

The consciousness would then be the high-level processing of internal signals. Obviously, consciousness also results being on continuous scale.

[robwwilliams]

Mainly because of recursive processes that modulate attentional focus, but of a special sort that we are just beginning to understand.

[simiones]

That would be part of the empirical facts we might hope to gather, if this is indeed the right direction for the explanation.

[grumbel]

Why is some software SuperMarioBros and other Microsoft Word? 'cause that's what the specific software is written to produce and the other is written to do produce else. Consciousness is not some magically thing on top of a information processing, it's what that specific bit of information processing produces. It's functional, it does stuff.

It should be kind of obvious due to the fact that we are conscious about our human self, not neurons, not brains, not microtubules or any other random implementation detail. We have zero clue what is going on in our brains, but we do have a high level description. Just as our brain can take some random electrical impulses from our eyes and decide that that's a "cat", it can take all the other input that goes around and conclude that that's a "self". It's perception, the brain trying to figure out what parts of the world it has direct control over.

[solveiga]

I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of the universe (or its non-existence), or to picture what it’s like to be dead. Our intuition simply isn’t equipped for these cases, period, and it pushes back hard against them. Consciousness belongs in that same category IMO

Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it. This self-referential loop is likely what we experience as "consciousness" and it becomes central to how we understand and navigate reality.

If we accept this framing, many traditional paradoxes dissolve on their own. The problem stops being "hard" in substance and becomes hard only in terms of imagination.

[zetalyrae]

> And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it.

But why a spreadsheet simulating the brain, and not just a spreadsheet doing normal financial math? In other words: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?

> Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it.

But this is A-consciousness, not P-consciousness. Which gets us back to square one: why does information processing give rise to experience at all?

[GoblinSlayer]

Because it's information processing that implements perception.

[nofriend]

> I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion.

who is eluded? people absolutely love this answer and give it constantly, not realizing that it's begging the question. in order for their to be an illusion, there needs to be someone to perceive the illusion.

[aoeusnth1]

The universe contains subsystems which can be described as eluded in the sense that we can take the intentional stance on these systems and describe their observable behavior as being in a state of illusion of separation.

[selcuka]

I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists.

It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our understanding of consciousness becomes clearer.

To use the same example: If there was a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in my brain, which one would be "I"? The original "I", or the spreadsheet?

Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer. There is only one "I" (since I can't be experiencing the world from two sets of eyes, one organic and one spreadsheet-eyes, simultaneously), so I have to choose one of them.

[thepasch]

This does not seem like a particularly difficult question to answer to me, and I suspect it's because I'm not particularly precious about what it means to "be me."

The logical answer is that this spreadsheet, supposing identical mechanical processes - inputs, outputs, stored data - and I would both be convinced that they're "me", and they'd both be correct in that they'd both be something that functions, and therefore thinks, acts, and experiences things identically to me. Two different processes on different hardware running the same code. The concept of "ego" is a result of this code. To me, I'd be "me" and the spreadsheet would be "a copy of me". To the spreadsheet, it would be the exact opposite.

Of course, that predisposes that the software isn't hardware-dependent. But even then, I wouldn't discount the possibility of an emulation layer.

It really isn't hard once you accept that we're not special for being able to think about ourselves.

[selcuka]

Note that you said "this spreadsheet and I", meaning that there is something particularly precious about the current "I". You don't think that you'd suddenly become the spreadsheet, "detaching" (can't find a better word) from your existing body. You intrinsicly assume that the spreadhseet would remain a third person from "your" perspective, even though it's a perfect replica.

[thepasch]

I don't follow? I can copy a file and then consider the two files to be separate copies of the same data?

What should I have said instead? "We"? "Him and it"? Self-modeling is part of my experience. I'm sure it'll be part of the spreadsheet's experience as well, if it functions identically to me.

I don't see the gotcha at all?

[selcuka]

I believe it's a concept that is hard to explain. This other comment of mine may be a bit clearer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175605

[aoeusnth1]

There is nothing which makes either of them are “you.” The feeling of Self is a useful predictor which a physical subsystem uses to nagivate the world and predict observations. “I” is not a physically real label which attaches the “you”-ness to physical systems, the physical systems simply are, and are inherently first-person in character. The only real you is the global quantum wave function, or whatever the underlying real stuff is doing.

Materialism directly implies no-self and Advaita Vedanta schools of thought.

[solveiga]

I think the key point in my theory is that my brain simply hasn't evolved to intuitively conceptualize it. I've asked similar questions before, including what it's like to die and be dead forever, and I can't form an intuitive understanding of it. My brain rejects the premise. But just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it won't happen. I'm pretty sure I will still be dead for trillions of years into the future.

To your question, the answer is similar. If we remove this limitation of intuition, there doesn't seem to be a real paradox. Both you and a spreadsheet-like copy of you would each claim to be the real you, and from an outside observer's perspective, there is no contradiction.

[selcuka]

> from an outside observer’s perspective, there is no contradiction

Indeed. As I said, the question is meaningless from an outside observer's perspective. The paper "Against Egalitarianism" by Benj Hellie [1] explains it better than I can:

> I trace this odd commitment to an egalitarian stance concerning the ontological status of personal perspectives—roughly, fundamental reality treats mine and yours as on a par.

[1] http://individual.utoronto.ca/benj/ae.pdf

[GoblinSlayer]

>Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer.

I think the question remains meaningful after substitution: why a giraffe is a giraffe and not an elephant? Likewise "both giraffe and elephant are elephants" is not a valid answer.

[thesmtsolver2]

The illusion framing/answer falls apart with some minor prodding.

What makes the computation in the brain special from other physical processes to give rise to this illusion?

The sewer system in NYC is complex. Does that also have the same illusion? Does the sewer in NYC have consciousness?

[solveiga]

What makes brain computation special? Nothing. That's my whole point. Does the sewer system in NYC have consciousness? It's impossible to answer, because there's no single accepted definition of consciousness. If something isn't clearly defined, it becomes very hard to meaningfully assess whether it applies or not.

But if we built a Turing complete, sewer-like system that simulated every neuron in a human brain, it will claim that it is real and conscious for sure. There's no paradox at physical level, intuitively conceptualizing it is the "hard" part.

[randallsquared]

> Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved

The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.

The hard problem only really needs consideration if we get to a point as you describe, where we fully understand everything happening in the brain and cannot assign consciousness to any part of it, even though we can turn it off and on again (e.g., with anesthesia).

[zetalyrae]

> The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation.

Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve.

But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.

[don_esteban]

> But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.

I think that is a question more about the people to whom you are explaining the solution to the hard problem of consciousness. The natural tendency (as with 'what is AI?') is to say 'ah, but that is the easy part, the hard part is <some other thing that they feel you have not explained properly>'.

[robwwilliams]

It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.

[simiones]

This problem, while interesting in its own right, is entirely irrelevant to consciousness. Especially because, regardless of how it's achieved, it's actually very clearly known that we do have temporal processes in our body - our tell-tale hearts being quite an iconic example.

[XorNot]

Why? You can build a clock with any basic oscillator and we're chock full of them.

[nothinkjustai]

> Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.

Not really, it only suggests that the brain function is involved in some way. If the brain is an “antenna” anesthesia could prevent it from functioning and that would be a totally consistent theory.

[randallsquared]

Agreed that you can still rescue dualism in that case, but I still think it's literally "strong evidence". A model involving the spark of awareness being received by the brain, but personality, memories, and motor action decisions being created by the brain seems much more complicated.

[hackinthebochs]

>Either all the computation happens "in the dark" [...] or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets

Why exclude the option that only specific kinds of computations are conscious, e.g. recursive control systems?

[zetalyrae]

For two reasons:

1. This requires explaining why only some kinds of information processing are privileged to be conscious, which seems rather arbitrary.

2. There's the question of levels of abstraction. Which information processor is conscious? The physical CPU, the zeroth VM, the first VM, the second VM, etc.

3. And there's the question of interpretation. What is computation? A CPU is "just" electrons moving about. Who says the motion of these 10^12 electrons represents arithmetic, or string concatenation, or anything else? The idea of abstract information processing above the bare causality of particles and fields is in itself a kind of dualism (or n-alism, because Turing completeness lets you emulate machines inside machines).

[hackinthebochs]

Saying everything is conscious is also dualism. it's saying that every kind of computation (or perhaps every physical substrate) has another dimension of properties that aren't physical/structural and don't interact with the physical/structural world. So it's not an explanatory boon but rather an extravagance.

The 'where is the consciousness' question is interesting but not really a hard problem. The issue can be solved by being clear about what purpose does consciousness serve then locate where that need is realized. Consciousness is about information integration and broad access as a substrate of decision making. Recursive integration identifies the where. But thinking in terms of nested VMs is sort of missing the point. The point is to trace the flow of information and find the points of broad integration. This may involve multiple substrates. Identifying a single thing as being conscious is a mistake. The consciousness is the most narrowly specified causal dynamic that grounds the information integration.

[robwwilliams]

Completely on the mark! Algorithms can differ qualitatively. Recursion.

[don_esteban]

Eh, not recursion. Self-reflection. Monitoring the state of the execution, and taking the action to guide it towards the desired outcome.

[unparagoned]

Funny enough Chalmers thinks a computation can be conscious. I believe he thinks that there are like special laws of computation that give rise to consciousness and that makes it dualism.

Makes no sense to me, to me if a simulation of physics gives rise to consciousness that’s pure physicalism

[unparagoned]

I think you are misunderstanding illusionism and the hard problem.

Illusionism does say that there is a conscious experience. So illusionism is convincing to many people who have conscious experiences.

The alien would be able to look at the computation and describe the conscious experience it has.

You could put human consciousness on an excel spreadsheet and it’ll still be conscious. Even Chalmers accepts a simulation would be conscious. So no that’s not a. Argument for p-zombies. Even people that use the pz argument don’t think that pz could actually exist.

But your conclusion is right, the simulation example does suggest that the consciousness in the hard problem doesn’t exist. Which just leaves the consciousness you experience explainable by easy problems. Which is the illusionist position.

Edit: and the hard problem isn’t just why there is consciousness. But why consciousness is impossible under physicalism. So in your post you are just actually referring to the easy problem of consciousness when suggesting it exists.

[gizajob]

Put human consciousness in an excel spreadsheet and get back to us.

[dgfl]

Look up the “China brain” idea. It’s basically the same. Could you explain why that wouldn’t be conscious a priori?

[didibus]

I suspect more things are conscious than we tend to assume. I would assume some level of intelligence requires a review/assessment process, something to evaluate what happened, what is good or bad, what should we have done instead, how can we do it better next time. This self-assessment becomes our experience of consciousness. Of course it feels incredible, unreal, like those feelings overwhelm us, because we are this function, and optimizing for those feelings is our function.

[rcxdude]

>why aren't my neurons individually conscious?

How do you know that they are not? Any subjective experience they have does not have to overlap with yours. (same with your skull, skeleton, or any other subset of your body).

(for me, having slowly become more aware of the distributed nature of my brain, I'm not even really sure there's only one consciousness in my mind!)

[justonceokay]

I’ll bite, I think your individual neurons are “just as” conscious as your whole body/environment system. They can’t advocate for themselves in words, but they have their own goals and interactions and decisions and needs.

Your aliens don’t know what it’s like to be you. But if these aliens decide to use your blueprints to print out a human, and the human says “ouch”, is it still the hard problem? This is what I don’t get.

Of course the music is different than just reading the score. A description of a process is not the process itself. We cannot know what it is like “to be” a bat but we also don’t know what it is like “to be” a spleen cell. Or the European futures market. Or a colony of ants, or the United States. These processes are complicated and intelligent, though not generally thought of having qualia. But I think it is only our hubris that differentiates the experience of an individual organism from that of our subsystems or supersystems.

[d0mine]

“Either or” is too extreme. Both can be true at the same time even if at different levels of abstraction eg a table and atoms it consists of may exist at the same time. Depending on the task different levels of abstraction may be useful. It is ridiculous to claim that a table doesn’t exist just because we can prove it is made of atoms (or strings excitation—doesn’t matter here)

On the other hand, "consciousness" concept might be as much useful for modeling thinking as “the four elements” for describing anatomy (not useful at all)—and we create better models eventually.

[essentia0]

'why aren't my neurons individually conscious?' why can you assume a slide rule is but a neuron isn't? your consciousness doesnt stop at your 'skull', it extends to your fingers and "interfaces" with the world in various ways, which is effectively a weaker, slower connection. neurons in your brain are also not equally distributed to how much they affect your immediate consciousness, but they all play a part in it

[dfabulich]

Rovelli writes, "I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”"

Carlos Rovelli has failed to understand the arguments for dualism, and is proudly sure that they must be nonsense.

If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.

IMO, the problem is actually one of epistemological framing. If I ask what "I" know, assuming that my internal experiences are the basis of my knowledge, then I can't accept materialism. But if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers, together we find only natural material, and no evidence for dualism.

(It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's best for me is to defect. What's best for us is to cooperate.)

[skirmish]

> If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.

Huh, evolution vs. creationism, many arguments happened over many years, yet one side was simply nonsensical.

> if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers

That is how science is done; if you reject that approach a priori, no wonder your conclusions become unreliable.

[simiones]

I don't think creationism is nonsensical, it's just wrong. But the concept overall is not nonsensical - in principle, if the universe were very different, a god could have molded humans out of clay and breathed life into them or whatever other fairy tale is preferred; it's not a logically inconsistent, so it's not nonsensical. Even something like Lamarckism is not nonsensical.

If you want to see an obviously nonsensical world view, you need to look at something like the Time Cube "theory". Rovelli is essentially claiming that dualism is more in this area - which I agree with the GP is quite unlikely for such a long discussed and influential philosophical idea.

[GoblinSlayer]

>We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.

Map the process by which you learn that you have experience. Then determine if this process works correctly. Alien needs to learn to code; they have difficulty, because they try to learn integrals without arithmetic and algebra. Before you can solve a complex problem, you should first train on easy problems.

[tardedmeme]

The really hard problem is that your gut, having a neural network as complex as your brain, is also probably conscious. And all it's ever known and will ever know is the feeling of pushing food through it and tasting different types of food. Now that's a horror story.

[ben_w]

> Now that's a horror story.

For us, sure; why would it be so for them?

Crows don't seem to be particularly upset by strutting around naked and eating bugs from the dirt.

The guts' idea of a horror story, if it has one, may be more like indigestion or norovirus.

[gizajob]

It’s only your labels in language that are splitting this system into separate parts.

[simiones]

Conversely, it may be that it's only labels in language that are unifying disparate parts into a single "neural system" concept. Ultimately the world is either individual particles and fields, or it is all Oneness, Brahman, and anything else is just arbitrary unification/division; but we can't know which is which.