This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflammatory environment, making one feel detached from their own body, feeling like they control a videogame character instead. Yet that still doesn't tell where does the "self" come from.
Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason.
This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.
I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.
Agreed. The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. So it’s hard to deny.
Your arguments reminds me of logical loop. A implies B, B implies A. It doesn't mean that A and B are true. You have to be conscious to experience and to be conscious means to to experience. Maybe we are not conscious after all and do not experience? Maybe it is just a lie we are telling ourselves?
But the debate isn't whether consciousness exists. It's largely whether it's the product of normal neurons doing their thing or something more. Also the details of how it works of course.
I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again.
Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the conscious experience God and went further into how we all share this sliver of godhood.
Does anyone who knows philosophical "camps" know the terms for what I'm trying to remember? I guess I've leaned "materialist" for most of my life, but what other common philosophies (as in the academic discipline) are there?
One thing is certain: we are talking about consciousness. This means that the world does not work like this: there is physics, and above it there is consciousness which is merely monitoring the physics. This cannot be true (or is unlikely), since we are discussing consciousness and therefore the physical act of talking is driven by something that knows that consciousness exists. There must be a link back from consciousness to physics. A simpler way is to assume that physics IS consciousness. Physics as a science is a kind of introspective activity.
The link is called causation, and it is not simpler to assume its absence. It seems simpler only because no one ever works through the full consequences, because the project of doing so always fails very quickly or terminates in an inexplicable bag called "god" (or the trasncendental ego) or similar which serves to do all the work of things which cannot be explained.
This kind of simplicity is a very deceitful on, because it offers to seem to explain everything with nothing, and having phrased nothing in pleasant-sounding ways, concludes that this simplicity is a virtue.
It does offer beauty and relief to the fact that the observable universe is something like 10^80 the volume of a humain being. At that incomprehensible scale, I think poetry and spirituality is a rather nice placeholder while loads of brilliant minds work on our understanding of physics
This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties.
There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.
What you describe sounds like variation of Berkeley's subjective idealism:
I don't think I've shared my thoughts on here, but this sounds a lot like my thought process: what if you start with nothing but consciousness, then find a path to a physical universe?
Consciousness is inherently about awareness, so at some point the consciousness would be aware of itself. Now it has the concepts of before/after, and from that opposites, incrementing, subtracting, 1 dimensional space etc. Eventually through this process you could "spawn up" other consciousnesses each expanding their individual bubbles of experience and understanding, eventually getting complex enough to create an entire universe with physical matter that can be experienced by other consciousnesses.
The problem with this line of thought is that consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged. A piece of falling masonry can be enough to shear off large parts or all of it. If consciousness was fundamentally distinct, this wouldn't be the case, would it?
Is it consciousness that gets damaged, or just its contents? If you destroy an object, can you say that you've destroyed the space it occupied?
Advaita Vedanta or Alan Watts style looking - essentially the idea that there are no separate things or events, sort of like Whitehead's process philosophy. Trippy stuff and a little bit out there, but consistent with some other ways of looking at things. What is real by Adam Becker goes into some underpinnings here too.
Yes, it's called idealism. And the whole field of it is a pile of fallacies of ambiguity that can take years to see and treat with caution.
Closest thing is probably Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism.
It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time.
Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of proof on the compatibilists where it belongs.
Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that).
We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category.
If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.
Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of.
So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter.
If you accept that we assume we are not in a simulation and the knowledge we have matters, then consciousness is also open to exploration, and it is not only a philosophical thing. There are several hard questions about consciousness that are meaningful in this frame:
- Why do some things appear to be conscious and other not so?
- Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?
- Is consciousness local and embodied, or not?
- Would restoring the physical substrate of consciousness (if possible) lead to the same consciousness, or an identical one? Does this distinction between "same" and "identical" consciousnesses even make sense?
Etc
> you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter
I'd consider myself a materialist (in the philosophical sense) and this is why (and I agree with the rest of your comment to)
We can not know, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary (e.g. someone metaphorically popping their head in from "outside" and revealing another layer to us), while it is important to understand that we do not know, it is more productive to assume in the absence of evidence, whether it is "real" or subjective or a simulation.
As long as it appears to us to follow consistent rules, we can explore those rules, and explore our apparent material reality.
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology.
What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions.
What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sense of power to determine the nature of the world by our mind alone -- but such is life.
The world is not human, not at all like a human, and nothing about it follows from us at all. The world is not made in our image. Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape, and whatever it manages to measure with any clarity, has no impact on the nature of that world.
>Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape
Can you define existence without depending on or referring to consciousness?
Why does whether we're in a simulation or not matter for whether anything is explorable?
You can explore how the simulation works, there's just some other layer you can't explore. Or maybe you can somehow.
When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? Does that mean you can't explore them?
> When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain?
This is unknowable.
It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors.
That fits the definition of a simulation.
What's unknowable is whether or not there are real stars that correspond with what you seem to observe; not whether or not your observations themselves are the real stars.
Didn’t we already work out they are similar in their spectral output to the Sun, enough to conclude they are the same kind of thing? And observing their movements makes them far away. Do each of us have to do the experiments again to validate that we know what they are?
Something could only appear to be similar to the Sun. We have to trust in observation at some level for all of those experiments to be valid, basically, which means first believing that you're conscious and second believing that you can experience reality and so on from there.
You can never really disprove that some malicious entity is just making you think you're seeing the stars and talking to people, if you want to go back to philosophy about it. There's a bit of assumed faith
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
> I know for sure what I am perceiving
This reflects my view. And I’ve always found it mildly amusing that beings I cannot prove to myself are perceiving attempt to convince me that I’m not perceiving, when that’s exactly what I’m maximally sure of. Imagine arguing with an LLM designed to convince you that you’re not real. It would be weird, wouldn’t it?
I never quite understood what we mean by "consciousness" but I find fascinating that most modern philosophers who describe themselves as materialists / non religious can argue in the same sentence that there is something special and extra-natural about the human experience.
It's one or the other: either nature is all there is, and therefore, consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, that we can investigate, and probably eventually replicate, and can't deny to other beings or to machines upfront; OR there is something outside reality that we might as well call God.
I'm strongly in the former camp, but I don't have issues with the latter one. What upsets me is the inconsistency of those who try to support both ideas at the same time. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?
Most philosophers are materialists or computational functionalists, while being monists. This means they aren't dualists, and it means they do not adopt the supernatural explanation. But they are careful not to rule out dualism.
There's this pattern I've observed in discussions about philosophy. First there's a rejection of philosophy as silly and misguided, followed by a rediscovery of the same concepts that philosophers have developed, but under a new ad-hoc and less precise language.
Congratulations, you're a philosopher.
I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life.
These people believe this while at the same time considering dualism so ridiculous as to laugh dualists out of the room. The evident problem being that "mind uploading" is the most dualistic possible position to take. A real monist would easily see that by doing mind uploading you have just created a clone that is a whole separate entity from yourself and it is not yourself.
But you are taking an opinionated view of the resolution to the Ship of Theseus paradox. If you are a computational functionalist, then it really is "you" afterwards (or rather there's now two identical "you" until the original "you" is destroyed). A monist could also point to your hypocrisy of believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
A true monist would realize that any experience of the uploaded being that received a copy of the brain is not felt by the original brain that has been copied. This is a fact and it is elementary to see it as true, as well as supporting the view that the copy is not the same being at all. If your description of computation functionalists is accurate, then they simply are dualists and would do good in admitting this to themselves.
Invoking the Ship of Theseus is a distraction. The Ship of Theseus paradox does not involve a full copy at the atomic level while the original still stands. If it did, the paradox would not even exists. The paradox exists because there is the key element that you do not have in mind copying/uploading: _continuity_.
Isn't continuity just an implementation detail? Suppose your brain was replaced a bit at a time with mechanical hardware, the end result is an uploaded mind while maintaining continuity.
I admit that this is a troubling problem with the position that I stated, but I don't think it's a complete takedown.
The easiest rebuttal would be to simply say that continuity is not a mere implementation detail. If you give up continuity, you can make a copy without altering the original, you just have to read it.
But if you need to ensure continuity you have to alter the original. This seems to me a very fundamental part of the process, making it qualitatively different.
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Imagine you are destroyed in your sleep by aliens and replaced by an atomically identical duplicate. Would you call this "you"?
If not, what if the aliens recycled the atoms from your original body to make the new body, putting each original atom into the same original spot with the same position and momentum (ignoring quantum and uncertainty principle).
What if they recycled 99% of the atoms from your original body, but swapped 1% of them for different atoms?
What if they only destroyed 5% of your brain and reassembled that destroyed portion, leaving the rest of you untouched? What about 50%?
What if they waited 1 planck moment before reassembling you versus 5 seconds?
Where is your dividing line in this scenario space between "that's really me" versus "that's just a copy and is not really me" ?
The functionalist answer, as I understand it, is fungibility across time and copies when arriving at definitions of words like "you".
The functionalist answer is not that > 1 copy can communicate telepathically or supernaturally share experiences is a dualist sense. They are still causally independent physical entities.
None of these scenarios would result in "me" from a monist perspective. The destruction is a discontinuity point, I died there and then, and then the next planck moment a new being was created with all my memories. But "I" died.
The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.
And, you know, there's really nothing wrong being dualist. I do not mean to denigrate that specific worldview. What is problematic is claiming to be a staunch monist while holding dualist positions.
As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas:
- there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
- destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern
And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
> The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist.
I think you're misunderstanding that words are social constructs which can point to abstract categories rather than necessarily single concrete objects at a particular moment in time (although words can also do that).
Like if you have multiple tennis balls, each ball is still a tennis ball, despite each ball being different, because "tennis ball" is a social construct and an abstraction that's an indirection to a certain concept. In the worldview I am talking about, the word "you" is an indirection to a mind that is indistinguishable in content and experience from the one you have right now, with the property of fungibility across modalities, time and space.
> What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
Apologies, I read too quickly and skipped over this. See one of my sibling comments. I concede this is problematic for my position and I need to think harder on how to solve it, but I don't think it's unsolvable. The placeholder answer is that there must be a certain level of damage -- the precise % probably doesn't matter as much as exactly which parts you destroy -- that is incompatible with keeping continuity.
For the rest, as a social construct, if we incinerate me to create a clone of me that is identical to the original at the subatomic level I agree that, for everyone else in society, it is me. But my self has still died and whatever replaced it is having its own experiences. And it matters very little what everybody else thinks: if tomorrow an imposter convinces everybody else that they are me, they aren't me for me. Their experiences aren't magically beamed to my brain.
Your tennis ball example is again a textbook dualist position. You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself. But, assuming balls can feel when they are hit by the racket, the ball you used in the previous point and now is lying on the sideline does not feel being hit when the next point starts with another ball.
There's nothing you need to solve because definitions of words are subjective social constructs that are neither correct or incorrect. Definitions are axioms.
You have chosen to define the word "you" to require continuity, under some rubric. By that definition, a copy of you isn't really you. That's correct under your axiom, but it is incorrect under other axioms.
The functionalists I am trying to channel in this conversation have a different subjectively chosen definition of that same word, that is internally coherent assuming functionalism is a true description of the world.
You may wish to argue that their definition/axiom lacks utility, but that's subjective and cannot breach the boundary into a claim about objective correctness (logical deductions) under the axiom.
> You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself.
This sounds like solipsism not dualism vs. monism. In non-solipsistic monism, social constructs can exist outside of a collection of minds, because other minds also exist.
believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
Oft-repeated but not true. Neurons, for the most part, are never replaced. If a neuron dies, it's gone forever. Repeated head traumas (leading to CTE) are known to cause personality changes as the brain has been permanently altered due to neuron losses.
I think reasonably faithful clones would be mes. We could live my life, from multiple perspectives, some of them quite separate. It might be necessary to distinguish them with numbers, or claim that one of them has become too different to really count as a me, but those are details and semantic matters.
> copying any possible information to the most minute synapse
That's reducing an individual to, I assume, the sum of its neural network. So like considering everything else happening in the fleshy body matters to what a human is, nor how they relate to the rest of cosmos as such a body.
The ‘you’ that wakes up tomorrow is a whole separate entity from you right now, unless you want to concede that identity is a path variable and that whether the exact same physical/mental/emotional entity is you or not depends on how those particles got there.
Just because the brain doesn't form memories while you sleep, doesn't mean you have ceased to exist. You have probably forgot many things that have happened to you today: does that mean you didn't exist in those moments you forgot? Am I misunderstanding your point?
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I think a lot of people interpret philosophers' arguments differently and it isn't always clear what a philosopher themselves truly believes.
For example Searle's Chinese room thought experiment... On the one hand you can easily construe it to imply that he believes there's something fundamentally special about human consciousness that cannot be reproduced by a machine. On the other hand you could interpret his perspective, which I think is more in line with his real perspective, as implyimg that replicating the human mind machine requires truly replicating it physically rather than approximating it and that it's misleading to imply that you can get there with an approximation ... Still I can see how this confuses dualists or could appear in line with their point of view even though it is arguably a nuanced take on the materiallist view
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?
Every guy saying that free will doesn't exist is arguing exactly this. Physical causality considered an obstacle to freedom implies that the conscious entity is somehow outside the physical world.
You are implying that consciousness has to include free will? Why?
That's backwards. People saying that there's no free will because determinism is implying that human consciousness is outside the physical world. Actually that's what TFA is about and makes a great job explaining it.
My comment was responding to energy123 questioning there are philosophers that are both materialistic and consider human consciousness is "special". The moment you separate consciousness from all the physical processes that support it (and that's what negating "free" will arguing that it's caused by material forces) you're placing it in a different "plane".
That's hardly an unheard-of position, there are many thinkers that fall for this.
In case you didn't get it: you were invited to provide concrete examples of philosophers holding the explicit opinion you have described.
In case you don't get it: you don't get to set the discussion terms. You can argue all you want yourself, but my point is already made. If you want a list, search for "hard incopatibilism" or "hard determinism" and you get it.
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I've yet to find a falsifiable definition of consciousness.
I do believe in intelligence (which is measured against a particular task) and ego (which inflates the self over the other).
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"might as well call God" is a bizzare conclusion for the latter though because "God" is far from an abstract concept - it's probably one of the most heavily loaded terms in every human culture.
Overloaded, I’d say. There are many different definitions, most incompatible with each other, such that the term is almost meaningless without extensive preceding discussion.
No, there is at least one other option, which is that consciousness [1] is a phenomenon that we can't replicate in non-biological brains [2], but from which the existence of a "God"-like being, as the term is understood by major religions, still doesn't follow.
[1] Or "qualia", to be precise.
[2] For example, the existence of qualia might require certain carbon-based structures which aren't present in silicon-based devices.
There is nothing that we know of in carbon based structures that violates universal causality, even in quantum scales where causality becomes more vague it is replaced by a measurable randomness.
So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
Computing something isn’t the same thing as it actually happening.
> […] that violates universal causality
I think you're conflating qualia with free will. These are very different concepts, and the experience of qualia has nothing at all to do with "violating causality".
> So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
As long as we have practically no idea how qualia arise, or even what exactly they are, your claim has no base to stand on.
Basically the Chinese Room argument. By now clear wrong.
How do you figure that? The Chinese Room has had many replies but no clear refutation.
Qualia are a begged question from the start, imo.
Did typing this sentence feel funny?
How would I tell? ;)
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I've been debating consciousness for many years as a layman, not an expert, but a layman who has read a lot of scholarly books on the subject.
In my experience, the majority of people who take the position that consciousness is something special to humans are nearly always coming from a religious background and viewing it through a religious lens. This makes sense, as if we reduce consciousness to physical reality, then the implications to free will become quite clear and devastating against it being a thing. This essentially destroys a lot of religions which are fundamentally based on humans having free will. Detailing the full chain of thought would take quite a bit of space, but the quick answer is that the ability for free will is hiding from us if it actually exists. Many people reach for quantum mechanics and its source of randomness as room for consciousness to exist that gives us free will, but the problem there is neurologically we operate at a far larger size than quantum effects would be measured. There's also no way to control the outcome of quantum events as it is truly random. So one would need to show how our neurological physiological minds could manipulate quantum space, which of course they can't. At the level our brains operate, we are well into deterministic physics.
While they absolutely deny this, the impression I get is that they are making a god of the gaps argument. Consciousness is something we don't understand yet, and can't even really define well as many people here have pointed out, so to them it doesn't feel like a classic God of the gaps.
For that reason, I find your comment above quite interesting. I personally find philosophy to be a fascinating and useful tool, but it definitely has a tendency to mislead, especially in areas where hard science can inform. Of course there's an entire debate around the philosophy of science itself, but that feels off topic here.
> Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away."
From such a perspective, the article's byline, "Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe.
But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains.
Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.
So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness.
To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise.
I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is.
I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place.
And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.
There's a hard problem in either case, I think.
If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?
If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"
From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).
For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.
That's like saying that "water" is a philosophical invention and so if you accept that water is a thing then you've put it into a special category.
You can derive consciousness as a somewhat obvious conclusion of empirical study of behaviors, we have multiple fields of study that lay out cognitive function and criteria.
The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering.
If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain?
This isn't enough:
echo "I feel pain"
Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?
Qualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a different medium in a different way than us leads to confusion.
That’s valid also from the point of view that pain is a key signal to avoid injury. I am not sure it’s the best example of qualia and it could be simulated by self preservation signals (e.g. the touch sensor on a Roomba). The extension of pain (in Hofstadter sense) is probably more appropriate as qualia (e.g. the pain of losing someone you love).
I really should go back to finish reading GEB. I loved the beginning, but for some reason I dropped off somewhere in the first 1/3. I'm not sure I fully get the point, although I have a vague sense I agree with you. :)
Apologies. I should be more specific. The book is Surfaces and Essences if I remember correctly.
The Mind's I (a collection of essays) or I Am a Strange Loop are probably more appropriate reading here.
What about if the robot's RNG is seeded with a particular number, that we did not write down... And we can destroy it's memory hardware containing the seed, 'killing' it.
Even if the memory hardware is replaced, it won't be the 'same' individual, no? Would an aversion to 'death' be rational in it?
Pain and suffering. In fact just suffering, right? We don't care about signals resulting from adverse conditions. We care about ideas. So we don't really care about suffering, as such, but about the harm it does to ideas and idea creation. Then consciousness is having an idea about what's going on.
I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.
No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.
You really don't need a concept of a colour or a shape, and it's a fairly typical academic fallacy to assume you do.
That's directly confusing experience with categorisation and labelling of experience.
If you touch a very hot object your nervous system will pull your hand away before your brain registers what's happening. The qualia of pain are pre-conceptual, preverbal, and precranial, and your consciousness only catches up later.
Not fundamental to existence but fundamental to consciousness.
Theoretically the person sitting next to you could be a zombie, no qualia, the lights are off, he's just having a conversation with you with nothing going on behind the scenes. And there's no way to tell, except that it's reasonable to extrapolate that since you feel something, he probably does too.
This is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.
Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”.
Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is not special. I /do/ believe that the human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotional and memory is special. My robot cannot write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But now we are talking a matter of degrees, not qualia.
But does the robot identify them in your view, or in its view?
If in your view, then you created a tool for yourself. Like a Geiger counter.
If in its view, ask it what it thinks about consciousness and qualia.
I’ve asked the slugs and the worms and starfish and amoebas and nematodes and fish about their experience, I’m just waiting to hear back.
Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.
I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust.
Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”.
If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?
This - as usual - confuses behaviour with consciousness.
Humans bonded with ELIZA, but that didn't mean ELIZA was conscious. ELIZA was an automaton that mimicked certain behaviours that triggered certain emotional responses.
If you scale that up you get an LLM and/or a social media bot farm, both of which are much better at triggering responses than ELIZA was.
It's now trivial to create an automaton that play acts various moods, and if you give it a memory it will mimic relationship-related conversations.
But it doesn't need to be conscious to do that, and the parsimonious Occam's razor explanation of its behaviours is that it's more economic and credible to assume it's still an automaton with no self-awareness.
Otherwise you have to argue that much simpler systems, like PID thermostats, and pretty much every computer system, are conscious because they "experience" qualia that represent a varying state of the world, with memory.
The sneakiness in your example is choosing an example which mimics emotional bonding. Rhetorically that makes it look like a hypothetical robot is acting emotionally, which is one of the covert signals us mammals tend to associate with consciousness.
But the criticism stands. Feigning emotions well enough to fool other mammals isn't at all the same as experiencing them.
To really experience emotions you need a self-image quale which includes an emotional component. And since subjective experiences have no objective element that can be measured, we can never say for sure whether anything or anyone else actually is conscious.
We assume we are, because we experience it, and we assume others are by implication.
But there's a point where that assumption stops being reasonable, and that's where your cat robot exists.
I guess where I am coming from with my cat robot is that I believe behavior begets consciousness. Whatever behavior is happening, that must mean some internal representation of the world is driving it. Robots will never have human emotions but I believe that some robots /already/ have their own goals and internal representations of reality and models of themselves worth considering on their own terms. A roomba must know where it is in space. Just because it doesn’t feel ennui as well is hardly a shortcoming.
Our brains are very complicated models of the world that attempt to mirror reality. That is what it means to be able to navigate physical space and provide for ourselves in nature. Our nature includes an incredibly complex social sphere and we have emotions to help us better navigate it. Animals we domesticate are clued into human emotions, others are not. I bet slugs have less of a sense of “I” but they still have some kind of an experience. I bet a tree has even less. It’s a sliding scale—each organism has just enough awareness for the task at hand.
The fact that we have a large emotional catalogue and a (some could say overly developed) sense of self is a curiosity more than a hard problem. It’s “I am a strange loop”, not “I am an ineffable indescribable inscrutable untouchable loop”.
> if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love
There are two concepts of "may" at play here:
"may" in the sense of "nothing keeps us from imagining this", and in the sense of "we know how it works, and it can happen".
A car may crash, and glass may break are the latter.
But for the former we actually have no idea how this could work. That is what makes it a hard philosophical problem. That kind of "may" is cheap.
How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.
at the risk of jumping the shark into full-on “woo woo”: what does it mean to “create ideas”? are ideas created or revealed? if ideas are created where do they come from? if ideas are revealed, then does that necessarily imply a determinism? if the robot devises a novel solution to a technical problem, isn’t that an idea? or is the robot’s solution actually the unavoidable result of the entire history of analytical thought? if the novel solution isn’t the creation of an idea, then what makes an idea an idea? if Michelangelo’s David was sculpted by an automaton, is it less beautiful? If so, why? If not, why not?
no you didn’t kill it, it was never alive. the same way my dishwasher or vacuum aren’t killed when they break and i replace them. even if the robot “remembers”, who cares? when i bin my phone did i kill siri because she sometimes remembered things for me?
nicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly
Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me.
My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.
What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.
More than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc.
You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited?
On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response.
It gets complicated, is what I'm saying.
Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.
What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment.
With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because it’s hard to measure anything; even if you trust what they may be claiming, how do you know how they experience them.
One perspective is that some may not feel emotions because emotions did not successfully manipulate their environment in childhood. So why develop them. If anger worked to manipulate your environment, you may become angry easily later on, in an attempt to replicate the successful manipulation. If grief worked, you will experience grief. If “coldness” worked, you will react coldly. If “empathy” worked to manipulate to your benefit, you will be tuned to try empathy.
“Normal” only shows what typically works in a society, not what is “healthy” or “natural”. We’re all highly adaptive individuals, learning how to survive in whatever environment we grow up in. We all become master manipulators, because that’s how we survive. Some forms of manipulation may be more socially accepted than others, within a given culture, others less so. Sociopathy doesn’t exist outside of a culture’s value system. It is a disorder only once you define what order is. In a society of narcissists, the empath is the sick one.
We really only have our own experience, and the words of others to compare it to.
Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual?
It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.
I don’t see how this is in contradiction.
To give one perspective of many, Marshall Rosenberg spent his life researching emotions and violence, and from his point of view, anything you do can ultimately be traced back to your own goals. In his view, it’s more useful to allow this idea and explore it, without judging it as negative. Survival/benefit of the group can be your very own personal (long term) goal. For example, a typical tradeoff is your (very own) need to belong, since your survival literally depends on it. No need to see it as either-or; to resolve the inner conflict, one can own both sides of the argument.
Making your emotional state transparent to the group can in that sense again benefit yourself (and the group), but to think that is always the case and that everybody will comply (or even be able to) will lead to disappointment (disillusion), out of principle, since you are installing a moral rule that doesn’t match reality. The verbal sharing of your emotions might successfully (and openly) manipulate the group to include your own goals, and/or the actions you take (taking your emotions into account or not) might.
Note how I am using “manipulation” in its original/neutral form, which means “to move”/influence. Typically, we use the word to convey a judgement - some forms of attempted influence we see as good/acceptable, others we see as negative. But that judgement is based on our own values, and somebody else will have different values. We can see this in how our cultures judge lying (and how that judgement changes over time). Is not sharing all you know a lie (of omission)? Is it acceptable to not always share all your thoughts? In many cultures (families), it is deemed offensive to tell certain truths; there is an expectation to lie! Once there is an expectation, it is not considered manipulation. In some hacker communities, sharing your emotions is considered offensive and an unacceptable attempt of manipulation!
A simplistic perspective which you can check for yourself and compare with others: Anger means you experience something you judge as wrong and possible to influence. Sadness means you experience something you judge as wrong but outside of your sphere of influence. Fear is a judgement of danger. The judgement is real; the situation itself may not actually be dangerous (today). It’s a signal, but it’s not based on reality/facts but your own judgement of it. You can tune the signal and thus your experience by investigating and changing your judgments - without sacrificing any of your needs or goals. Emotional reprogramming takes time, but it’s not outside of your control, nor is it driven by some higher truth than your own judgments, based on your prior experiences.
bingo
Bingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.
even saying that our senses are "tied" together with/into our memory and emotions is expressing a dualism. that's the challenge and that's the gap to leap.
Looking around at evidence, only the ones with somewhat cute eyes can qualify for empathy. Bad luck if someone is a grass or an amoeba, but machines will be just fine.
Philosophers may squint at the suffering-in-itself long and hard, but I doubt they'll affect waking/extinguishing empathy of the masses. Exploring the suffering that fails our empathy (e.g. suffering of a wheat plant harvested) seems a highly abstract task; more abstract than high mathematics.
Before that, you need to answer whether a machine can even feel pain or not, not whether it is telling the truth or not. We feel pain because we have a nervous system that reacts to the physical world and it is an indicator that something is wrong. That doesn't translate at all to any machine I know of. If we end up building a nervous system and a basic functioning brain and hook it up to a machine then sure its an interesting question
you can feel pain without an external influence stimulating it. purely mental processes are sufficient to experience suffering.
Pain isn't just saying the word, it's a signal that changes your behavior generation in a way that conflicts with your self model.
I am pretty sure I am not conscious, and this seems to solve the entire problem that other people have.
My pet theory is that I don't think all humans are conscious (in other words, some perfectly cognitively normal-seeming people are just automatons without an inner experience, like plants or LLMs). Mainly motivated by the fact that a lot of people report not having an inner monologue, and other little hints that I've picked up over the years.
The "inner experience" might be totally optional to fitness, like green eyes.
That's called solipsism. I went through it as a lad, I think it's not uncommon.
I think LLMs have brought it roaring back for a lot of people.
Nah, it never went anywhere. The internet just provides a safe space for people to admit philosophies that would cause social issues in person.
I assure you that I am not conscious (and a human, not an LLM). Therefore at least partial solipsism is true.
If you aren't conscious, and if no one else is, either (in spite of their reports of such), the solipsism still need not be true.
It's a reach, I guess.
One step further is to ask how conscious your mind actually is. There is a lot happening on autopilot - and everybody usually checks out for a few hours at night. Maybe consciousness is a rare temporary thing.
I think evidence suggests that humans aren't conscious most of the time. So it wouldn't surprise me if 95% of the time people are just stochastic parrots. But maybe that number is even close or equal to 100%.
Intellectually a lot of humans perform worse than LLMs and a lot of people (most of them) are completely unable to process abstract concepts and basic logic at all. Can those people truly be called conscious? Is consciousness worth something without the ability to reason?
If I knew precisely which definition of consciousness you are testing against your own experience I would understand your point and I would like to. Can you say what it is that you are sure you are not?
> If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.
How can you say that?
It would be very interesting to know how to build robots that love their work, versus ones that hate their work. Not because it makes a practical difference to us, but because of ethics.
Is not undefinable. Unless you have an incomplete model to understand the universe. Which is exactly our case.
The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention ... If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state
"The Moon" is a philosophical invention, and yet The Moon is a natural phenomenon.
Stephen Wolfram is fascinated with his discovery of computation at the heart of the universe. Life itself may be like that, emerging then noticing itself and that it is alive - has the property of life. Then when it's governed by a "soul", or perhaps better said, constrained by it, then our awareness is of what we can't otherwise see, the laws that govern us, inevitably from a 5th dimension, as we stand in the shadow of Plato's cave. When we discover "we are" we are realized and grateful, and our life ends up being worship. Then we witness the greater life around us follow a bedding of creation, a call to become one from the experience we are one. When we become we'll see Jesus' loving eyes that first saw, and called for by showing himself, what we'll then see.
It's important to remember, when Stephen Wolfram says "I discovered...", he uses it in the sense that most people say "Today I learnt ...".
This argument sounds nice at a surface level, but seems deeply incoherent and wrong in a way I haven’t yet put my finger on precisely. How can you say this:
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.
followed by this:
> The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
followed by this:
> Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.
So it isn’t describable by physics but it is only physics? And there are no closures or gaps? Ok sure in one sense we can say everything is connected, but this article seems to me to demonstrate effectively that without these divisions, pursuing understanding of it is essentially intractable.
He seems to be describing the dissolution of some construct in his worldview that I am having a difficult time relating to. Anyone have a different take?
I think there is a gap, but it's not what they think it is - it is the gap between description and execution. Chalmers wants a description level explanation for the properties of execution, which is not possible. He wants to get for free what is an irreducible recursion between cost and action. The gap is not ontological, it is epistemic.
It just means we can't know without paying the price, walking the path of the process, step by step. No jumping ahead. We can't even predict a 3 body system far ahead. We can't tell the properties of a code without executing it. We can't compress most processes, their execution is the shortest description. Chalmers wants 3p to eat for free at the table of 1p.
The Hard Problem strikes me as a "why" question and humans have a poor track record of ever answering a "why" for a foundational question (at least in a way that we can demonstrate to others). Our most successful explanations build up from simpler things to explain more complex things. But at some point, the explanation bottoms out on things we can't further explain - like the fields in quantum theory. There's currently no further thing below those that explain "why a field theory?"
If we solved the Easy Problems of consciousness, i think we would find ourselves in a similar position where most people would simply accept that we had an explanation and move on but some people with a more philosophical bent would continue to search for underlying explanations.
> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.
It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.
The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".
> a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
a) it is wrong to say definitively that it is untrue. there is no acid test for the existence of God nor of spirit.
b) religious and spiritual traditions have wrangled with this very question for at least 3000 years. it is not a 'scientific curiosity'. It is one of the most fundamental questions of human experience.
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a) there's an infinite amount of things that can't be proven/disproven and this includes all sorts of human imagination. We should focus on things that we can actually prove or disprove. The source of a god is human imagination, so you can't even prove that any god exists because you just don't know what it is (iow what exactly you're trying to prove).
b) This being a fundamental question proves scientific curiosity. We wouldn't have achieved current technology if not for scientific curiosity.
No the hard problem is impossible to solve using science even a billion years in the future.
If science can in theory explain consciousness ever then it’s an easy problem.
This is the kind of religious thinking the GP is talking about. What other frontier of science do people claim will never be solved, except the existence of a god? Why are you so sure it cannot be touched?
My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be.
I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test, but I found it satisfactory enough when I heard about the hard problem of consciousness. My main argument for it is not an attack, it's simply Hanlon's razor. If you find a simpler explanation that doesn't demand new understanding, I will listen to it, if you do not, you have to show me the simplest solution is wrong, and I'll go to the second simplest.
By saying it’s simulated you don’t make a simplification. What does it simulate? What are the mechanics of simulation and is it substrate specific or independent? Can a computer simulate these qualia? It’s easy to say something is simple but harder to prove it is any simpler than the alternatives.
Hanlon's razor? That one is "never assume malice where stupidity will do". You want Occam's razor, or the word "parsimonious".
That does not explain how it is possible for a simulation to experience itself
How do we experience that though?
The neural connections get rewired.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
If I may equivocate for a moment: your cat is unconscious, which is less conscious than wakefulness.
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.
I'm not sure I'm following you, what do you mean? That other animals as well have enough brain power for consciousness?
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.
A cat reaching for a cuddle is conscious or not? They recognise individuals and communicate desires well past the bounds of food or other basic needs into affection.
> 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.
The mirror test is just about intelligence. A p-zombie could easily pass it.
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).
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.
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.
This is an interesting take but are you not equating intelligence with consciousness?
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
:-)
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.
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.
You are probably converging to Tononi’s IIT. Read the criticism from Aaronson too. Not fundamentally against your approach.
Some scientists accept consciousness resides in single cell paramecia.
> 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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
> If all information processing leads to consciousness
Did you actually read what you just responded to?
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"?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
That would be part of the empirical facts we might hope to gather, if this is indeed the right direction for the explanation.
Mainly because of recursive processes that modulate attentional focus, but of a special sort that we are just beginning to understand.
'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
> 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).
> 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.
> 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>'.
It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.
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.
Why? You can build a clock with any basic oscillator and we're chock full of them.
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.
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.
Put human consciousness in an excel spreadsheet and get back to us.
Look up the “China brain” idea. It’s basically the same. Could you explain why that wouldn’t be conscious a priori?
>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?
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).
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.
Completely on the mark! Algorithms can differ qualitatively. Recursion.
Eh, not recursion. Self-reflection. Monitoring the state of the execution, and taking the action to guide it towards the desired outcome.
>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!)
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.
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.
> 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.
It’s only your labels in language that are splitting this system into separate parts.
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.
>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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
Because it's information processing that implements perception.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I believe it's a concept that is hard to explain. This other comment of mine may be a bit clearer:
>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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it.
Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.
Also consider the possibility that the people who argue against the hard problem of consciousness may, in fact, not be conscious. How could they ever understand the nuance of conscious experience and how it is fundamentally different from 'structure and function' if they don't have it? To them there is only the easy problem of consciousness.
And, of course, if they disagree with me about this and want to claim that they are, in fact, conscious, I'm not sure they can do that because... well the hard problem of consciousness.
It comes up because people are mistakenly conflating consciousness with moral personhood.
People want to be talking about whether AI suffers in a morally meaningful way. In non-human animals this debate is often centered around the question of whether the animal has conscious experience, because there's little doubt that much of the emotional and experiential systems are shared.
The analogy goes wrong with AI, where definitions of "consciousness" would seem to apply in the sense that the model clearly has a category for itself in its world model, feeds back on its output, etc. However the analogy between how it works and anything we would recognise as emotion or suffering is extremely strained.
The solution is to just focus on ths question of what we really mean when we think of morally relevant suffering. It's a much clearer question than "consciousness" and it sidesteps the problem.
Do you have a verdict for whether science can ever explain the origin of the universe? I can only doubt it could answer the actual hard problem of consciousness. I find most people, especially on here, to be blindly "science-optimistic"
I feel like this is directly addressed in the article, right? I think you are coming from the same direction, but Rovelli goes a bit further and says "how can we affirm that there is gonna be a knowledge gap when we just aren't at that level yet?". How can you say that we won't be able to describe, explain and predict your exact internal mental state from a brain scan?
To draw a parallel with physics, about which we as a society (and me as an individual) know a lot more, we are gonna define mathematical objects and laws whose behavior maps well to certain subsystems of the brain that we ourselves have defined. Physics had it easy in this sense: it turned out to be remarkably simple to describe the universe to a great degree of precision. Still, we all recognize that the physics mapping we have to this day isn't perfect; and it's even possible that it will never be perfect. It may be fundamentally impossible to reduce some systems to simpler mathematical objects which we can reason about. It does seem to be generally possible, however, to find a reasonable approximation. This again is what I think Rovelli's point is about: science is the process of finding a good approximation which has predictive power. And what is there in the brain that's fundamentally so different and that we're never gonna be able to explain? Why does everyone keep insisting that consciousness is special?
I do agree that that only when (if) we do get the accurate mathematical description, then we're gonna be able to properly discuss the hard problem. But my hunch is that once we do have all the tools it will just dissipate from scientific discussion, similarly to how the measurement problem in quantum mechanics is slowly undergoing the same transition from "this is a fundamental problem" to "we were just asking an invalid question due to misunderstanding and old ways of thinking". Obviously I have no proof of this beyond intuition, but I more or less agree with every sentence of this article, and that shapes my intuition.
> The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function
Great, I'm a physicalist so uhhhh I reject this lol. I think you can define cognitive capabilities and phenomenal experience by reducing to structure and function. You're right that it's simple though.
I'm a physicalist as well. A commitment to physicalism doesn't force you to reject the hard problem. The hard problem doesn't entail that phenomenal consciousness is not grounded in physical structure and function. The hard problem is about what is needed to explain consciousness. Science typically involves defining some phenomena precisely in terms of structure and function, then giving a precise story about how some observed behavior captures the structure and function that defines the phenomena under question. For example, we define temperature by the height of mercury in a thermometer, then we mathematically derive the height of mercury given the average speed of molecules in the environment. Thus we successfully reduce temperature to average kinetic energy of molecules.
But the process of reduction starts by precisely defining the phenomena in terms of structure and function. If we are unable to give a precise definition that uncontroversially captures the target phenomena, then we cannot in principle give a scientific explanation of said phenomena. This is where we stand with consciousness. There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness. But this is an explanatory limit only. It doesn't necessitate some non-physical phenomena is involved. What we need are new concepts that can connect the phenomenal to the physical. But conceptual innovation is not something you get from more measurements and more data. This is what makes consciousness a philosophical problem.
I was rejecting your definition of the hard problem as it contains an assertion that a physicalist wouldn't accept.
Yes, reduction would be one very viable strategy. It doesn't require precisely defining the phenomenon in order for me to just say that it reduces based on the fact that reduction has been a successful approach for everything else in cognition.
> There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness.
Yeah this is what I reject. Why do you say that this is in principle a barrier? You're discussing it as an explanatory gap, not in principle.
A stylistically different perspective from the one couched places an intrinsic function in a mathematical space.
Very well explained.
FTA:
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".
Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.
Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.
This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.
Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.
Qualia is the term people often use to mean "what it's like". The hard problem is "why is there qualia". This of course assumes that qualia exists as a coherent thing, which some philosophers dispute.
Indeed, I didn't remember that Chamlers was literally building his argument around the "why?"... But he does.
This reduces to the intractable mystery of existence. A more interesting question would be, as usual "how".
> Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me:
A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at sunset it's like a major D chord surrounded by the sound of babies laughing. When you see it on the battlefield it's like a minor D chord wrestling against the noise of wind and rain.
What is it like to experience synesthesia :-)
These are very good analogies (and possibly experiences for those who are natural synesthetes), but even then, that won't make the who doesn't have the corresponding perceptual modality person experience that exact sensation.
> A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
why does a major chord sounds pleasant? and why does a minor chord sounds "sad"? Why does the locrian mode sound so unsettling? is it due to our anatomy or purely cultural?
And even then, in different contexts, a major chord can sound jarring and a minor one satisfying.
That being said the nature/culture duality is often not the right way to frame these issues. It's both, intertwined.
Well, right, it's contextual. We each have a series of inputs that add up to these contexts. This doesn't mean it can't be explained, it just means there needs to be context.
If you give the blind man a sensor that converts color data to something he can input, and then provide inputs giving the feeling you want to portray associated with that color, you have explained it.
If you feel red is angry, all you need to do is play 400 to 484 THz into his instrument and yell at him angrily enough times for him to associate it. It doesn't seem too subjective to me.
Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources.
His Baroque Cycle series also touches on this in several places. One funny side plot involves a freed African slave (Dappa) who speaks dozens of different languages and is highly intelligent and an aristocratic person who maintains that of course this former slave (who is obviously a lot smarter than this aristocrat) is just a trained monkey that naturally is not conscious even though he is quite clever with language. The same books also have a lot of side plots involving Leibniz and various attempts to build thinking/computing machines.
The Dappa plot is probably the closest to a lot of debates there will be around AGI with people likely to insist for all sorts of reasons rooted in philosophy, religion, etc. that even though the AGI walks, talks, etc. like a duck, it can't be a duck. At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
Is there a distinction in your mind between consciousness and intelligence? Is it possible, for example, for a machine to solve complex problems but not be conscious? Or vice versa, can an animal or a person be very unintelligent yet still conscious?
The question is mainly interesting in the context of our own behavior and interactions. Because would we treat our food differently if we decided e.g. pigs were intelligent and conscious? I had some salami on my pizza yesterday. But I also believe pigs are intelligent and conscious. And they are close relatives of us genetically. Some people choose to not eat meat for this reason.
I'm of the school of thought that we are all biological computers with emergent properties like intelligence, consciousness, etc. that we might eventually succeed in replicating. Maybe at a more modest level at first. From a practical point of view, I'm more interested in intelligent agents than conscious ones. I mainly need them to do useful things for me. Too much consciousness is a double edged sword. Because then I would have to consider how my agent feels about all this. But can you really have one without the other? I don't have a good answer to this.
People have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything around them. Definitely their pets, plants, and in some cases even inanimate objects. Which doesn't help the debate because it's already happening with LLM tools. Even though they are probably still on the definitely not conscious side of the fence even when they demonstrate mildly intelligent reasoning occasionally.
At some point, people will have a hard time telling the difference with AGI. Is it all smoke and mirrors at that point or are they dealing with an intelligent/conscious thing? That's no doubt going to entertain philosophers for centuries to come. But from a practical point of view, does it really matter at that point? If we can't reliably tell the difference, is there still a difference?
A philosophical zombie [1] is essentially a mobile, autonomous human body devoid of consciousness. Critically, still giving all of the external cues that it has in fact consciousness. It is supposed to prove that physicalism doesn't work. "The sense of consciousness" is used like a "soul, with extra steps".
In my humble opinion, which I have no way to prove or disprove, consciousness ("as a soul with extra steps") does not exist, and we are all philosophical zombies. Consciousness "as an amalgamation of complex biological signals and neural interactions that has evolved through millions of years as a successful survival strategy" does exist, and that is all that is needed.
Serves me well for answering a comment before reading the article. This is basically what the author says, even pointing to the Philosophical zombie and all. Shame on me.
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
You've already drawn your line in the sand (i.e. they are conscious). In that case, you can't also claim that we should continue producing them by the millions at the flick of a switch.
The AI-is-conscious crowd will have to choose - either they are conscious, in which case they should not be birthed, or they are not conscious in which case we can use them as tools. You can't have both and still be logically consistent.
You have strong assumptions for the underlying moral framework
I think you mean morally consistent. though even then humans don't have any real qualms about that. Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
> Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
Sure, but we don't create as many as we can, then kill them at the end of the day when the work is done.
If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc).
If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them, then the "owner" of them gets an obligation (you can't do whatever you want to a dog, for example).
The clinching thing for me is how the AGI is supposed to work. If it's the same as our theory of how we work, then fine, it's one of us. It wouldn't even have to work very well.
I always like to remind myself that AI is trained on material fed to it, created and written (somewhere along the line) entirely by humans - as they perceive & interpret the universe around them.
> Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch.
This is a great example for a discussion about The Hard Problem. Here is the description from the book of the inner experience of this scanned brain as it gets booted up:
> What came next could not, of course, be described without using words. But that was deceptive in a way since he no longer had words. Nor did he have memories, or coherent thoughts, or any other way to describe or think about the qualia he was experiencing. And those qualia were of miserably low quality. To the extent he was seeing, he was seeing incoherent patterns of fluctuating light. For people of a certain age, the closest descriptor for this was “static”: the sheets, waves, and bands of noise that had covered the screens of malfunctioning television sets. Static, in a sense, wasn’t real. It was simply what you got out of a system when it was unable to lock on to any strong signal—“Strong” meaning actually conveying useful, or at least understandable, information. Modern computer screens were smart enough to just shut down, or put up an error message, when the signal was lost. Old analog sets had no choice but to display something. The electron beam was forever scanning, a mindless beacon, and if you fed it nothing else it would produce a visual map of whatever was contingently banging around in its circuitry: some garbled mix of electrical noise from Mom’s vacuum cleaner, Dad’s shaver, solar flares, stray transmissions caroming off the ionosphere, and whatever happened when little feedback loops on the circuit board got out of hand. Likewise, to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.
The Hard Problem asks: who is experiencing this qualia and why is there an experiencer at all? Stephenson writes how this simulated brain is experiencing static as it condenses into meaningful patterns, but he implicitly starts with someone experiencing this static qualia. If this is the very beginning of the simulated brain booting up, where did this experiencer come from?
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
Because you're conflating intelligence with consciousness. There is no test for consciousness. In fact, you can't even prove that other human beings are conscious, you only know that you yourself are because it's self evident to you (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am). The whole point of the hard problem is that you can imagine something exactly like a human being that passes every test of being a human being (e.g. an AI) but still not be sure that it has any inner experience.
This article is pretty slim on details, but I agree with the general argument that dualism is unnecessary to explain phenomenal consciousness. The word "consciousness" has a lot of baggage, which causes us to mislabel cognition as consciousness. [1] This is why I really like using terms like "qualia" or _phenomenal_ consciousness to make explicit what we're talking about.
I still don't like this new trend of dismissing the hard problem altogether. We really don't have an explanation of phenomenal consciousness—it might even require novel physics to explain! [2]
I'd also like to point out that, though this might seem like a semantic argument, it has meaningful consequences for how we approach science and ethics. [3] For example, if we are physicalists and accept that phenomenal consciousness is a property of the world, what does this tell us about other unobservable properties of the world science may be missing? (Recall that we only know about phenomenal consciousness through our own experience of it; we cannot observe it in others)
It felt very strange to me that the author construes belief in the hard problem as some sort of spiritual baggage from unempirical religious view. He seems to want to pit the "new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries" _against_ the idea of phenomenal consciousness, which is just absurd to me. As far as I understand, it is far more rooted in German idealism and its Cartesian roots than in any sort of religious spirit.
I'm almost convinced that those who deny the metaphysical (or, if you insist, the plausibly merely physical) force of qualia are philosophical zombies trying to persuade us against the existence of the most obviously true piece of knowledge we have! Or, more generously, they are so steeped in the premises of modern empirical science that they treat their fundamental phenomenal experience as so untrustworthy as to be disregarded, despite its actual necessity in employing those very premises.
Poor, disregarded qualia! Oh that the scientists could see how much they owe to you.
I believe nature is all there is. If we could replicate a human brain several times, and make each 'human brain' receive the exact same input data (sounds, sights, smells e.t.c.) from the moment they 'exist' until the end of their lifetime, I truly think that each of these brains will make precisely the same decisions (and each of these 'brains' would think they were conscious and in control of their lives).
In my eyes, consciousness is simply a natural phenomenon that can be explained but we just lack the understanding at this moment. Time and time again we have made this mistake of assuming there is something supernatural about the things we cannot comprehend and only a few centuries later it is completely understood scientifically. I think consciousness will be a similar case but will take more time.
I think supernatural things don't exist by definition. If ghosts would exist, they would be just natural.
The real question is whether there is a two way link between consciousness and the physical world. Obviously the physical world is observed by consciousness, so that direction checks out. What about the other direction? Is the physical world at all influenced by consciousness? The mindfulness folks seem to argue: no. They argue that consciousness is like a person watching a movie, where the movie is experience. The person is so immersed that it thinks, it controls the movie, but in reality it's a fully passive observer. But this can't be true! Otherwise, the discussion of consciousness could never have come up in human history. A population of "philosophical zombies" could never initiate this discussion. So somehow consciousness must cause physical neurons to activate. The movie knows about the person watching!
You’re saying it’s all 100% deterministic. But at the quantum level, things are probabilistic. The hundred brains with the same input data might make different decisions like how each ball dropped in the Galton board chooses a different route.
But I agree with your overall premise. It can be all understood scientifically. There is nothing supernatural about things we cannot comprehend.
Quantum theories are consistent with determinism. You just need to give up locality or... free choice.
Nature vs. nurture is also a popular debate. This scenario you described, even with nature being all there is, doesn't imply all our actions and thoughts are shaped by our environment.
Chalmers: “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.”
"A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"
Thanks for the reference, that looks like a pretty thorough review.
It seems to me that Chalmers already precludes the possibility of physical/materialist explanations with his claim, quoted in the first section:
> There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.
This certainly doesn't feel obvious or intuitive to me. I would expect that someone with the same neuronal make-up will have the same experience.
It is neither obvious nor intuitive. But it is logical possible that we all are Zombies.
In my regard the weak link is our understanding of materialism. It is to simple minded. (though panpsychism sounds really crank)
No, I mean that the logical possibility itself is neither obvious nor intuitive. If you physically copied me atom by atom, every instinct in me says that the result has conscious experience. I'd need some serious convincing otherwise.
Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop.
I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with the very simple like this and recursively building more complex predictors. When they predict correctly, happy feedback reinforces the connections that are firing, when they are wrong, they weaken. Just a really simple feedback algorithm that is super robust.
So the brain is building this world model, and it's essentially gradually compressing a description of the environment into a structure made of neurons. And this is the ultimate survival tactic: model the environment explicitly in your head, then adapt your behaviour to fit it. The better you are adapating to future states (dodging that tree as you run) the better survival chance you have.
At some point (complete speculation) we then begin to do something quite strange: we develop a world model _of ourselves_. We get to a level of sophistication where we begin to predict the future states of our own brains. This might emerge naturally as a way to compress existing learnt behaviour. For example, we re-learn to follow lines in a smarter way, particularly as other parts of the brain learn useful things that we can re-use in our line following. This treats our existing model as a cost function, and we learn a model of the model. But it eventually starts to model the higher-level models the brain has, higher up the abstraction stack.
And somehow, the modelling of our brain function creates a chaotic feedback loop that leads to the sensation of consciousness. It's super handwavey, I know, but somehow this recursion feeds awareness. It's like the abilty to see yourself thinking. Consider meditating and the way words appear in consciousness... you get to a point where you can observe what you're going to say before you say them, and I conjecture that is the modelling of the model that's going on.
And this is useful for survival, as you can optimise the way you think, compressing your circuits further, but also has this weird side-effect of creating awareness.
It also explains why consciousness takes time to develop - because you need to develop a model of yourself, but before that you need a model of the world.
This is essentially where the field is going, started with predictive processing by Friston with his free energy principle, combined into Hofstadter’s “I am
a strange loop” and then the continuing thrust with applying the FEP as well as Rosenthal’s higher order theories and Graziano’s attention schema theory.
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The author is mixing two discussions: soul/body dualism and qualia (hard problem).
It could be true that there's only physical body, but still have the qualia explanatory gap.
I think these philosophical arguments boil down to answering the question "what is real?". Contemporary science is presented as an objective theory of reality, but our experiences form the actual starting point for everything that we can ever know about reality, so they ought to be considered real in some sense. The tension begins because, while a physical theory of reality will say that the signals in a brain are real signals, that does not imply the reality of any concepts that those signals may represent. If I imagine something, that does not make it real. But then the same can be argued for all experiences: there are real brain signals associated with them, but that does not imply the reality of those experiences. This lead to a gap in that the physical theory fails to imply, and thus fails to explain, the reality of experience. So, if I believe in the reality of my own experience, then I am left to ask "why is my experience real?", as that is not required or implied by the physical theory of reality.
It sounds like Rovelli's resolution is to acknowledge the centrality of subjective experiences to the formulation of scientific theories, and thus also to any theory of reality. Experiences are the starting point, with the rest being built up from them. Therefore, experiences should also be the first thing added into the bucket of things that one believes to be real. Meanwhile, any physical model of objective reality has a far more tenuous spot in that bucket. We may suspect it to be real through various deductions, but the further away we get from experiences, the more assumptions have to be made to get there. Anyway, I agree that there is no explanatory gap when reality is viewed in this manner. And this is a relatively palatable way to approach the question of reality (compared to, e.g., the mathematical universe hypothesis, which most find unacceptable). But as long as there is debate about what makes up reality and where experiences fit into that, the debate around the hard consciousness problem will continue, and I regard this problem to be of a different character (being far more philosophical) than, say, spiritualism or anti-Darwinism.
There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide.
Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.
Yet the mere fact that I am conscious is a greater truth than any of my perception of the "physical" world.
Neither does pure materialism rest on falsifiable beliefs, in that I could claim nothing exists outside my conscious experience.
> Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable.
This is an metaphysical discussion, so falsifiability is kind of irrelevant. All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable - including materialism and physicalism just as much as dualism or monism or theism.
> All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable
This is not true, there are many metaphysical positions that are falsifiable.
For example, "anything shaped like an apple is an apple" is a metaphysical position. It defines what it means to be apple-ish. You could hold that metaphysical position and also "apples are always made of plant material" as another position you hold at the same time.
Then you could falsify the metaphysical position by presenting a stone carved into the shape of an apple. You could choose to deny reality and change your physical definition (what the definition of the word "apple" is), but if you think logically the evidence constructively falsifies the original metaphysical position.
I think what you might have been trying to say is that people tend to adopt metaphysical positions which are non-falsifiable. Yes, they do, but that doesn't mean no metaphysical arguments can be resolved through logic and experiment.
True, I should have been more careful with my wording. My point was actually that unfalsifiable metaphysical statements are not invalid in the same way that unfalsifiable physical/scientific statements are.
So yes, some metaphysical statements are falsifiable, and some have in fact been falsified over time. And, very importantly, many of the biggest metaphysical questions have no known falsifiable answers (at least none that are not already known to be false, of course).
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Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul:
Many of these already gave up on dualism: they already rejected the idea that mind and body are separate (e.g. panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a feature of reality, that all matter possesses "experience" of some kind).
> The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body.
Or a gap between my mind and the minds of the other commuters on this bus.
There are 15 or so biological machines here, but only one of them is being experienced in bright sound and colour.
Personally I think the quantum immortality/suicide argument points directly at the trouble with the "duality".
It's a perfectly physical/mechanical argument that demonstrates that consciousness is much much more bizarre than we expect.
What is the argument?
> During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.
This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?
Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.
"Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century."
.....
"...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body"
Philosophers have had these rifts(an similar lines of arguments) forever.
From Plato vs Aristotle (300 to 400 BC) (idea of forms vs nicomachean),
In India Adi Shankara (around 700 CE) vs Madhavacharya (1200 CE) (dualism vs non-dualism) - there is a common thread to all of these arguments.
But eventually, for me it comes down to a statement J Krishnamurti made (& it makes the most sense to me): "The self is a problem that thought cannot solve"
Adi Shankara follows non-dualism and Madhvacharya follows dualism. It is referenced reverse in your reply.
Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own:
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”
This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".
> We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?
We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.
> Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious
Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.
The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.
(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).
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> We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.
I wish I'd phrased it better, my point was more that early vision systems had weird issues, which we were able to figure out by looking at what part of the image those models paid attention to and realising it often wasn't even part of the animal in the photo, but e.g. the plants around them. We literally had to think about what made a cat a cat to make AI good at recognising cats.
This would also impact clustering.
That said, I think even for humans there's a similar issue: we spent millennia clustering things into groups and labelling those groups, which is why the Catholic church had rules about no meat on Good Friday but fish was fine and beavers counted as fish (and there is now a podcast titled around the idea there is no such thing as a fish*). For cats, I don't see it myself but the fossa is described as "cat-like".
the quote from the article is just a contrived tautology that misunderstands the nature of the problem. the dualism problem is not about finding an explanation for why what we call a cat is what we call a cat. it's that you can measure anything you want but nevertheless despite confidently establishing the size of a cat, the appearance of a cat, the behavior of cats, a sophisticated taxonomy of related species labeled "felines", surveying people to find out what cats are to them, what a cat is to me is not what a cat is to you
I'm not particularly well-versed in philosophy, but what's the dualism here?
Of course what a cat _is_ to me is not what a cat _is_ to you, because we necessarily have different memories of interactions with cat-like beings. If you show some babies a cat for the first time, they'll necessarily see it from different viewing perspectives. Even if you put VR glasses on them and show the exact same video, they'll have different contexts: "I first saw a cat when I was sitting next to my friend", "I first saw a cat when I was thinking of ice cream", etc.
But they all saw the same cat, they'll see many other cats, who are all similar. So everyone will understand that "things like these are cats", but everyone will have their own understanding of a "cat" because their memory is different.
I don't have the energy at present to fully develop my thoughts but one thing I'll say is that in my view they did *not* see the same cat. It was the same collection of flesh & bone on four legs, certainly. But it is not the same cat.
Heidegger best revealed to me the limitations of supposedly "objective" thinking.
Heraclitus: "No man steps in the same river twice"
This is the Let's deal with the phenomenon of Qualia by denying its existence thesis.
Spot on.
Not at all. As the fourth paragraph from the end states, we experience qualia. Rovelli is simply saying that qualia are simply physical processes described from a salient perspective, that is, at a level more abstract than the eletrochemical processes that underlie them.
It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doctor works at a higher, descriptive level, as does the doctor. Where is the pain, what are its qualities (dull, sharp, shallow, deep, burning, etc.).
Is it time to give up on the value of (other) human beings? Time will tell.
It seems wild to me to write a (popular) article about consciousness in the year 2026 without addressing the elephant in the room: we are able to devise computer programs of increasing complexity that replicate more and more behaviors that were once the sole domain of humans, and at what point do we consider such computers to have experience in the sense that we have, and the sense in which calculators and thermostats do not. It seems that Rovelli is content to say that we should call experience the thing that the brain does, which is all well and good if you're a physicalist (and I am) but it does not help you at all explain which features of the brain are necessary for experience.
I think it also helps to sharpen this debate to remember that there is a moral dimension: many have adopted moral systems that widen their sphere of concern and care from the self to the community to the nation to the whole of mankind, usually under the intuitive precept that it is bad to make someone else experience suffering. Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?
> Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?
Such an irony. Humans have has since the bery beginning inflicted pain and suffering on other human beings. We are still doing it directly (e.g., wars) or indirectly (e.g., capitalism). The idea that perhaps in the not so distant future, machines may live better “lives” or be treated better than some humans is pathetic. But here again, there are some pets that live better than a 1000 humans nowadays
I don't know where in my statement you saw the implication that we should not care about bad things happening to other humans, but it was a misapprehension.
> It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.
Why is it pernicious?
Because it leads us down seemingly useful paths that are in fact dead wrong. There is only physics, but at some levels it more convenient to ignore the physics (what is happening in the body) and to describe our experience.
Rovelli is a reductionist, the only logically and physically defensible intellectual position, while dualism is inherently supernatural, invoking phantoms, phenomenology that is purely fictitious.
Ok, but that doesn't really address "pernicious". I understand pursuits of philosophy are inherently concerned with truth, but does not truth mean pernicious? My experience of reading philosophers is limited; is Rovelli just a materialist and that's that? Is this positivism?
Science will never be able to properly even define the concept of consciousness because it's outside the scope of science.
Consciousness is something that is used to observe the outer world and science essentially describes patterns in our observations.
All scientific laws boil down to subjective perceptions, such as, when I drop an apple, I see that it falls down.
I'm all in the "brains cause minds" camp. But isn't the main argument here "We accept explanation gaps already in many places, why not also for consciousness?"?
My objection would then be that actually, that's not true. The real statement would be "In everyday life (including science), we accept explanation gaps already in many places"
But this does not mean that we have to accept this particular instance of an explanation gap.
> can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it?
The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
We all (presumably, although I might wonder about the author) know that consciousness is a thing, we don't have anything like a rigid definition of it. Perhaps we never will, but this kind of hot air is unlikely to ever get us closer to understanding it.
Tiresome article by someone just being contrary for the sake of having something to say.
> The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.
It might as well be that philosophical zombies are mental construct that cannot physically exist, simply because building one will imbue it with 'consciousness' (as, it being the physical copy/simulation, it will be able to simulate also the 'consciousness'), in turn making it non-zombie.
Right. Its bad science to say that consciousness doesnt exist.
> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".
There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out is consciousness. It's reasonable to think it will also fall eventually.
It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience.
Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, increasingly complex unanswered questions about phenomena. It is reasonable to think that if/when we reduce consciousness through science we will find that there are more increasingly complex unanswered metaphysical gaps.
Reducing a complex phenomena to more basic structure and dynamics just is to eliminate any open metaphysical questions about that phenomena. That's why the big philosophical debates center around monism vs dualism rather than n-pluralism. Science has dispatched all other essences from mainstream consideration.
“Fields” such as the electric field or Higgs field are essences.
Really? You are telling me that the discovery/development of general relativity or quantum mechanics has not thrown new increasingly complex doubts on the accuracy of previous physical models due to these new "essences" implying contradictions with classical "essences". What could possibly make you so confident that new datapoints, theories, and discoveries as it relates to consciousness will be completely flawless?
You're not using the term essence in the way philosophers mean it. An essence is a categorical descriptive/reasoning context. In mathematical terms, an essence is a lot like a descriptive/measurement basis. A naive scientist sees a world full of distinct reasoning contexts, length is categorically distinct from speed, which is categorically distinct from water, which is categorically distinct from life. The progress of science has been to progressively reduce reasoning contexts/measurement bases to other contexts/bases thus leading to a more unified theory of nature.
Quantum mechanics does increase the physics reasoning contexts owing to the incompatibility between classical and quantum mechanics. But this is not an in principle divergence in the way that philosophers understand essences. We can describe and reason about quantum mechanics and classical mechanics using the same language and the same descriptive tools, namely mathematics. When it comes to phenomenal consciousness and physical behavior, we cannot reason about them using the same descriptive language. Hence they count as distinct categorical essences until we discover the bridging principles that reduce consciousness to physical behavior.
This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.
Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.
Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off.
> That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon.
That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity.
Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief.
I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience."
And this bit:
> I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
right after
> Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument.
So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.
> So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Those are not conflicting arguments.
The former means that we understand all the processeses, but they are complex, therefore we don't have enough brain/compute power to properly model it.
The latter means that we don't understand some of those processes, so we need additional theories that explain them.
One can dismiss the first while finding the second plausible.
I suppose complexity defines to me as something that's inherently hard to understand. The definition of "complex" is "difficult to understand." The move I don't agree with is proceeding to posit "because we don't understand them yet, there must be something special about them."
The reason TFA (and, frankly, your comment as well) pissed me off is that they drip with condescension to the core while completely sidestepping the problem in the first place. We have plenty of other examples of places where complexity can give rise to emergent behavior, but those behaviors are still easy to understand in the problem space of the domain - e.g. I may be amazed that I can converse with an LLM and it feels like it completely "understands" the conversation, but I don't have any conceptual problems with the fact that it's still just next token prediction under the covers.
But as hackinthebochs put it very well, in my opinion: "The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function."
So my negative reaction is based in the belief that what the TFA is doing is saying "there is no hard problem", and the response is "but why, because 'phenomenal consciousness' can't be described in terms of structure and function like every other instance that we understand that arises from complexity", and then TFA just gives a host of complexity examples that are completely unconvincing (and, again, feel like they completely miss the problem is the first place) and just basically ends with a dangling, unwarranted "q.e.d."
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I read it as "I'm very clever and sensible. I definitely don't believe in souls."
Like so much other material produced by people who (I suspect deliberately) confuse religion with the subjective phenomenon of existence
I may be misunderstanding the article but doesnt the fact that all other science and understanding sits on a continuum of which consciousness has (to my understading) to real footing mean that the problem is dualitic by definition?
Thats not to say that it can't be 'brought into the fold', it may well be, but until it is it has no other place that to sit outside.
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> ..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature.
Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that:
what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible.
Was reasoning thought to be immaterial and intangible..? By whom? Materialism has been alive and well for a long time from what I can tell
Plato, for example
In the original paper about the hard problem, Chalmers does say all that stuff is explainable by science or the easy problems.
You can already see from the glossy website that this is a well funded propaganda magazine, just like Quantaagazine is essentially funded by the Renaissance Fund, which is invested in AI.
Yes, these magazines do have interesting articles from time to time, but the overt materialistic (not monetary, but anti-idealistic) worldview that traditionally only appeared in communist countries suddenly infests all the rich people's outlets.
The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the article succinctly describes this or contributes otherwise
Unless someone eventually finds the consciousness center in the brain I will continue to hold the position that it is just another property of "things". I know consciousness must be real because it's the first thing I have access to without any sort of reasoning attached on top of it. Its realness is more visceral than atoms or any other physical theory because it is the way in which the world is conveyed to me, but I don't think I'm unique in any way for having it.
I feel like all systems, in a panpsychist sense, participate in consciousness, so in some way it's a property of matter or systems in our universe that we have somehow failed to account for in physics. We miss it because systems only exhibit consciousness internally like on top of having all the physical properties of rocks, rocks also have an internal state of being. That internal state of being for the most part is uninteresting cause it doesn't dictate the rocks actual form or function in the universe.
I'd argue human consciousness is the same. My conscious experience has nothing to do with the thoughts that are actually being produced. By this I mean there is no authorship of the thoughts and actions I perform by my consciousness. To me it seems more like a stage in which elements of my experience appear for brief moments before fading away, so much like the rock's internal experience my internal experience does not have any affect on the physical world.
Part of me then starts to worry why worry about consciousness at all if it's something that doesn't participate in the physical world because then what's the point of it all? Also, if all systems get to participate, then what stops things like basic logic gates on a PC from having consciousness as well. I tend to lean towards thinking that those feelings are similar to the same kinds of feelings humans used to have about thinking they were the center of the universe, but I'm not sure.
Sorry for the brain dump,
Austin
OK, dualism. Heard that before.
The new hard problem: how do biological brains get so much done on such slow hardware? That's a real physics question. We're missing something.
a) massive parallelism (although the current AI HW is getting there)
b) clever structure/organization (we are nowhere near close)
c) it is still buggy as hell
> get so much done
Compared to what??
Massive parallel processing.
Hey you give Nvidia a few million years to evolve their chips and just see what happens
The brain is not slow?
Measured signals seem to be at kilohertz, not gigahertz, speeds.
we are caught between an evolutionary need to know that our existence is meaningful and a universe that seems indifferent.
How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations.
He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event.
I highly recommend any and all of his books.
If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article.
One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong.
Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.
I really like your response, but it also can help explain why I really dislike this essay.
I fully understand and appreciate that there are lots of things about quantum physics, and heck, the universe at large, that are unsolved and that we don't understand. I would actually expect that in order for us to understand consciousness better that we'll need to fill some of the gaps of the quantum world.
The reason why I didn't like the article is that I felt like it's misrepresenting the problem, as the comment I linked described. I'll try to explain with an analogy: In the late 1800s before the discovery of quantum physics, many physicists felt that the physics of the universe was solved and fully understood - the universe was basically just like a set of billiard balls set in motion a long time ago, and the future position of all those balls could be known if their states were known in the past. In that "pre-quantum" world, people still understood that emergent behavior could arise from complexity (even just classical complexity). This article just felt really hand-wavy to me by arguing "complexity is enough". For example, if a similar article were written in 1899, but then later we discovered quantum physics and eventually had a good understanding of how consciousness can arise from quantum interactions, I suppose the author could state "See, I was right - just more complexity!" But it would totally miss the point that "the missing piece" was actually the discovery of quantum physics in the first place, not just more classical complexity.
So I felt this article was strawmanning the problem to begin with. I don't have to believe in "magic" or "souls" or religion to believe that the tools we have to describe complex emergent phenomena are not sufficient to describe the subjective experience of consciousness, but Rovelli seems to be saying that "more complexity" is just the answer to everything.
The Order of Time is on my reading list
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I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?
I think people focus a lot on the dangers of erasing consciousness as a moral entity, but it strikes me that something which is so loosely defined and for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable carries its own dangers too. Especially given so many of us are happy to kill and eat many creatures that pass many proposed tests of consciousness.
It's probably sensible to use more strongly defined terms like humanity, self-awareness, cognitive capability, empathy and so on. And to treat them somewhat separately rather than trying to bundle it all together.
But people want there to be something special about us which can be defined as something separate from us, in a neutral, universalist sounding way which also happens to be relatively exclusive - I think because there's this desire to make the concept of a soul have an equivalent in scientific realism for the purposes of discussing philosophy in a secular way.
I agree about definition confusion. I like to define consciousness as "capability to suffer".
Can cow/dog/spider suffer? - very important question, even if not answerable.
At least mammals do show recognizable signs of pain and suffering. That is good enough for me; I don't know for sure other people can suffer, but I assume they do based on their behavior I see.
It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.
It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.
It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
If we accept subjective feeling as definitive proof that something exists, that opens a Pandora’s box of entities. People have deeply held subjective beliefs about things like God, afterlife experiences, out-of-body experiences, and many others. It seems unfair to me to dismiss this kind of subjective evidence in these cases, while accepting it without question for experience of consciousness.
This is a religious argument. If you want to go down that path, then sure; but I suspect that's not what you actually believe.
It’s not a religious argument.
It’s a subjective experience argument. As a conscious person, if someone tells me they don’t believe in consciousness, then I’m inclined to believe they have a reason for saying that. They must not be experiencing consciousness the same way I am.
Interestingly, a non-trivial number of people have no internal monologue (https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...). It would be reasonable to assume the experiential side of consciousness is on a spectrum, with extreme edge cases on both ends. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some people are barely experiencing it, and some not at all. It would certainly explain to me (someone who experiences it quite intensely) why some would claim it doesn’t exist. Because for them, it might not.
> It’s a subjective experience argument.
"Earth is flat" is also a subjective experience argument. Yet mostly nobody takes it seriously anymore. I hope "qualia" will be like this soon too.
"Earth is flat" is an objective statement. "I experience consciousness" is subjective, similarly to "I am experiencing pain". If someone tells me "pain doesn't exist" while I know it exists (because I have experienced it), I can be certain that that person is wrong. Even though I can't prove it to him.
I've been thinking the same (that people who claim it doesn't exist don't have it) but it had never occurred to me that it might be on a spectrum. It actually makes perfect sense.
No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.
That's the basis of the p-zombies thought experiment discussed (and dismissed without any real arguments) in the article.
P-zombies cannot be argued about, if you reject their existence your opponent will call you a p-zombie (happened to Dennett).
I felt like this paper nailed it years a go, and nobody has followed up properly.
The metric involved is basically impossible to compute fully, but easy to approximate. Any online approximation will model everything it can see have changes until it is satisfied.
The main value of this article is this absolute gold mine of a comment section.
These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".
Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
"Consciousness" is a suitcase word. It has so many meanings that any individual speaker can't even keep them straight, much less a group discussion.
That's the reason it seems like a thorny topic.
Seems like void of any substance if one takes whatever flavor of monism for granted. Just because everything is supposed to be build on the same fundamental building blocks/fluxes/whatever doesn’t mean every phenomenon is caused by constructions of equal complexities.
That is, life referring to something inherently far more complex than inert assemblies remains perfectly valid in many monist perspectives.
[edit: took life rather than consciousness as an example, but the stated argument in the article seems to be equally applicable relevant for both concept, or any concept that suppose that emergent complexity is possible]
Rays of Light going through a me Prism where the Brain and senses can inflict action.
Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.
Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.
His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.
Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.
The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.
"You can't seperate the body from the mind", Tool told me.
There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.
> the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics.
There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.
I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.
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With consciousness and AI multiple problems are being smuggled into a single question.
1. How do we determine consciousness?
2. How should we handle moral consideration of a non-biological system?
The first question is a red herring. It cannot be answered. We need to focus on the second question.
Where we are, it is still a matter of belief.
I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.
The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.
They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.
God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.
But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.
Philosophers being philosophers and not advancing the discussion at all.
A lot of science and math and logic originated from philosophers posing questions and even coming up with answers (then those fields graduated out of philosophy)
This is the standard blub programmer but in science. The blub physicists doesn't understand anything more complex or higher-level than his daily abstractions.
blather.
another example of weak blather of the weeeeeeee! I'm so full of words variety, that fails to interesting or memorable, like someone so high on mushrooms that they are claiming to be able to see there own ears, who if asked what consiousness is will give a similar answer, unless you ask how consiousness relates to rubber bands, which will get a similar answer with rubber band anologies.
the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be.
one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.
Many gave that up a long time ago. Welcome to reality, “experts” and “PhDs”.
Utterly asinine article that doesn't understand its own subject matter.
Agreed.
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
This is what the article is positioned against.
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense.
Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling to such ideas (as the article itself propounds), but if you don't understand the underlying laws to a high enough degree I consider this equivalent to ancient Greeks sitting around saying "there is a double of our soul inside the mirror, WE HAVE SEEN IT". We know today there is absolutely nothing at all "inside" that mirror. How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
Unfortunately, this article puts forth an intriguing promise and then completely fails to deliver.
> How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination.
What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
(This is basically just Descartes “I think therefore I am”)
> What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all.
It might not make sense to you now, but that's because of what we know or what we think we know, today (hence my ancient Greeks analogue). Look at the Gazzaniga effect, people seamlessly make up an "experience" narrative out of absolutely nothing. Whatever experience was claimed there probably didn't exist prior to the point of questioning, and then was wholly manufactured. Thus, that particular experience was a fabrication.
> If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
Why does there need to be a who/what being deceived for something to be an illusion? A mirror functions regardless of whether someone is there to pretend there is a soul in it.
We come from a race that took two thousand years (after it was first proposed) to accept the brain as the seat of the mind, over the heart — just because the heart physically reacts in times of emotion, while the brain remains inert.
Whatever the truth is, humanity probably won't know it until enough generations of the old guard indoctrinated in the old ideas have passed on.
Sorry, who make up an experience narrative?
Never heard of Gazzaniga before reading above comment, its quite fascinating.
The brain, its left hemisphere, makes up the narrative.
Sorry my comment was unclear. My point is, the process of “making up a narrative” does seem to imply a subjective experience, doesnt it? My point is, the existence of the experiencer can’t be denied. Even if the experience itself is some kind of illusion, theres no coherent way to say that there is no entity having an experience. Every attempt to do so ends up implying the existence of an experiencer (the one having the illusion of experiencing)
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?
Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".
The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.
> we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world
Feelings/experiences are specific patterns of specific neurons activating. Why is that hard?
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There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.
Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.
You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.
Explain psychedelics, then? Do psychedelics have access to this supposed "separate layer" that mind exists on over matter? If yes, how? If not, how can something that ostensibly only interacts with the matter have any effect on the mind?
Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"
What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.
But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.
Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.
> As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience.
Two things here:
1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind?
2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not a satisfactory answer to you?
I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.
I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.
Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.
> I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.
> How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?
How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
> The simplest answer is that it is not
You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.
> Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water
At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
The only religious argument is materialism. It's real because enough people have convinced themselves that it's "scientific". Even though there is no proof whatsoever, no solid hypothesis, no experiments to prove how matter acquires subjective experience, it's incoherent to the very foundations of its position (that matter is dead), and has not made any progress in answering the "hard problem" (which is just someone pointing out the incoherence). It also makes people argue that they don't have a mind, that asserting they have a mind is a religious statement, or that they have some trouble understanding what a mind is.
> How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
The laws of physics are enough to explain this because no one is arguing that computers are experiencing anything when they play a video or generate a set of numbers that are displayed as natural language.
> At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
Sorry, I phrased that badly by using "you" when I did not mean that. I meant to say that if someone (not you) wanted to argue that simple matter has some sort of experience, then at least the position would make some sense. But materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any subjective experience of any kind.
Anyway, I won't be able to convince you that you have a mind, so I'll peace out.
consciousness is hard because it requires a special kind of belief. we humans believe a lot of things, but this one is difficult. all is one, and that one thing is all. everything contains gender. opposites are the same thing.
these are all easy things that are hard to understand/believe.
Dont pretend like you dont believe anything is step 1.
The biggest benefit of term "consciousness" is that when I see something like "LLMs are not conscious" I immediately know that the author doesn't know what he is talking about.
In that case the author is simply saying the LLM is a p zombie, why does he not know what he's talking about?
They are saying something similar to "LLM has no soul", depending on context it might something insightful or (in technical/scientific context) they are making fool of themselves.
Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
Praise be to AI. In 2025, inspired by AI, I feel that I have finally built a complete and unified worldview.
Are we living in a virtual illusion? Are there higher-dimensional rulers, gods, or immortals in the universe? What exactly are the human soul and consciousness?
I feel that these questions now share a single coherent answer. What I have written here is my answer regarding the soul and consciousness.
> What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution
> When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
I don't see how this is different from someone saying that a concoction of random ingredients will turn into a magic potion.
The big question is how a group of cells (or potentially something else) becomes sentient. Accepting "because it would be useful" as valid explanation would be the same as accepting Darwinism as a religion rather than science.
If this comment is serious, then you may have the beginnings of AI psychosis
I would say "AI psychosis" is a very healthy disease to have. I mean, how should people react to seeing a clump of hardware produce coherent text at a level many actual humans cannot? The spread of reactions we are seeing in people-the disagreements, the extreme sycophancy on one end, and the abject denial on the other, is within parameters.
My life was wrecked by religious dogma, the type that is sustained on "big mysteries" and from there goes directly to imposing an odious recipe for life. So there is consolation to be had on seeing a big mystery crumble and on hearing the outcry. May another mystery crumble on my lifetime.
Computers create coherent math results at levels far beyond humans. A world calculator vs. a number calculator isn't that different.
"Praise be to AI" sounds like something you shouldn't reach in the beginnings of AI psychosis. Same with "I've found a simple answer to the nature of consciousness and the question of the existence of Gods". At that point you've got to in be pretty deep.
Haha, right? The lads talking like he’s the only one to have figured this out and it’s the truth! Philosophising with AI is so mid. This guys the general public.
No, we don't even need that. When we realise that we all project consciousness claims on each other from what we observe as zeitgeist now, just to do credit assignment, most of our circular debates will disappear. But this won't happen since many powerful entities in the world ride on the moral ambiguity, and this will hold them accountable.
What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences.
The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
>It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
It's that you can't even measure it, since the way it's defined as a subjective experience, no external measure could ever capture it. This is what gives rise to the p-zombie argument.
To get rid of that you have to accept "functional qualia" as basically equivalent to qualia, which solves the p-zombie issue and resolves half of the hard problem. From there, explaining consciousness is no "harder" than explaining other scale-depedent phenomenon in complex systems like LLMs: still hard, but at least tractable with scientific measurements and experiments.
There's no single proof that after a system do pass some complexity threshold consciousness develops itself and inevitably generates the "I".
Dolphins and other creatures are likely to have similarly complex systems without “inevitably” generating a concept of “I”.
> What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
that's the easy problem
would you care to link together 'complex IO systems inevitably degenerate to seperating self from environment as part of optimizing calculations' and your three questions? it isnt immediately clear why the concept of self answers the idea of god.
Comically wrong.
Quantum holography will someday demonstrate an analog information capacity of the quantum domain far exceeding the spin disposition.
Our minds use this domain by mass entanglement within our very own neurons.
You don’t want to hear it, though our minds may entangle and an entire culture exists among us who can traverse and manipulate the consciousness of others. They are responsible for the “voices in our heads”, and these are related to a great deal of very unscientific activity in our world.
All of that occult demonology you smarties scoff at yet plagues everyone embroiled in “power” is based upon this phenomena. We are not alone in our own minds, and more than a few of you will be forced to confront this at some point in your lives.
Falsifiable? Theories, not existential reality are concerned with what minds may falsify. Science lags behind reality, not the other way around.
As much as I disliked TFA, I disliked this comment, which is so arrogantly self-assured of its own 0-evidence theories, even more.
I was with you thru "mass entanglement". Each of us is a distributed network of quantum-interface nodes. But I'd be very careful about attributing specific describable phenomena to these networks.
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To me it seems consciousness is a log file that records the results of brain activities originating from different parts of the brain.
This log file is loaded into working memory.
I have aspergers and that's sort of how I experience my own consciousness, the result of different brain processes, summarised in a log.
People are mainly subconscious and not that many things propagate to consciousness and get recorded in the log, because it's a bottleneck.
Instead of recording the whole process of emotionally tagging things, people just "feel" something without reasoning. Only the emotional tag or intuition is recorded in the log but not the process to get to it.
Non-verbal communication is emitted and processed subconsciously, which is hard for me because of the autism and I arrived to the conclusion that fundamentally human consciousness is a spectrum and how much is recorded into it depends on neurodiversity.
This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflammatory environment, making one feel detached from their own body, feeling like they control a videogame character instead. Yet that still doesn't tell where does the "self" come from.
Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason.
This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.
I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.
Agreed. The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. So it’s hard to deny.
Your arguments reminds me of logical loop. A implies B, B implies A. It doesn't mean that A and B are true. You have to be conscious to experience and to be conscious means to to experience. Maybe we are not conscious after all and do not experience? Maybe it is just a lie we are telling ourselves?
But the debate isn't whether consciousness exists. It's largely whether it's the product of normal neurons doing their thing or something more. Also the details of how it works of course.
I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again.
Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the conscious experience God and went further into how we all share this sliver of godhood.
Does anyone who knows philosophical "camps" know the terms for what I'm trying to remember? I guess I've leaned "materialist" for most of my life, but what other common philosophies (as in the academic discipline) are there?
One thing is certain: we are talking about consciousness. This means that the world does not work like this: there is physics, and above it there is consciousness which is merely monitoring the physics. This cannot be true (or is unlikely), since we are discussing consciousness and therefore the physical act of talking is driven by something that knows that consciousness exists. There must be a link back from consciousness to physics. A simpler way is to assume that physics IS consciousness. Physics as a science is a kind of introspective activity.
The link is called causation, and it is not simpler to assume its absence. It seems simpler only because no one ever works through the full consequences, because the project of doing so always fails very quickly or terminates in an inexplicable bag called "god" (or the trasncendental ego) or similar which serves to do all the work of things which cannot be explained.
This kind of simplicity is a very deceitful on, because it offers to seem to explain everything with nothing, and having phrased nothing in pleasant-sounding ways, concludes that this simplicity is a virtue.
It does offer beauty and relief to the fact that the observable universe is something like 10^80 the volume of a humain being. At that incomprehensible scale, I think poetry and spirituality is a rather nice placeholder while loads of brilliant minds work on our understanding of physics
This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties.
There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.
What you describe sounds like variation of Berkeley's subjective idealism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_idealism
In case anyone is wondering, yes, the town of Berkeley, California is named after him. Also, it's pronounced BARK-Lee.
Panpsychism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
>Basically it flipped the problem on its head.
I thought it was me[1], but I don't remember making the "shared godhood" argument
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999867
I don't think I've shared my thoughts on here, but this sounds a lot like my thought process: what if you start with nothing but consciousness, then find a path to a physical universe?
Consciousness is inherently about awareness, so at some point the consciousness would be aware of itself. Now it has the concepts of before/after, and from that opposites, incrementing, subtracting, 1 dimensional space etc. Eventually through this process you could "spawn up" other consciousnesses each expanding their individual bubbles of experience and understanding, eventually getting complex enough to create an entire universe with physical matter that can be experienced by other consciousnesses.
The problem with this line of thought is that consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged. A piece of falling masonry can be enough to shear off large parts or all of it. If consciousness was fundamentally distinct, this wouldn't be the case, would it?
Is it consciousness that gets damaged, or just its contents? If you destroy an object, can you say that you've destroyed the space it occupied?
Advaita Vedanta or Alan Watts style looking - essentially the idea that there are no separate things or events, sort of like Whitehead's process philosophy. Trippy stuff and a little bit out there, but consistent with some other ways of looking at things. What is real by Adam Becker goes into some underpinnings here too.
Yes, it's called idealism. And the whole field of it is a pile of fallacies of ambiguity that can take years to see and treat with caution.
Closest thing is probably Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism.
It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time.
Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of proof on the compatibilists where it belongs.
Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that).
We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category.
If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.
Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of.
So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter.
If you accept that we assume we are not in a simulation and the knowledge we have matters, then consciousness is also open to exploration, and it is not only a philosophical thing. There are several hard questions about consciousness that are meaningful in this frame:
- Why do some things appear to be conscious and other not so?
- Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?
- Is consciousness local and embodied, or not?
- Would restoring the physical substrate of consciousness (if possible) lead to the same consciousness, or an identical one? Does this distinction between "same" and "identical" consciousnesses even make sense?
Etc
> you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter
I'd consider myself a materialist (in the philosophical sense) and this is why (and I agree with the rest of your comment to)
We can not know, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary (e.g. someone metaphorically popping their head in from "outside" and revealing another layer to us), while it is important to understand that we do not know, it is more productive to assume in the absence of evidence, whether it is "real" or subjective or a simulation.
As long as it appears to us to follow consistent rules, we can explore those rules, and explore our apparent material reality.
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology.
What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions.
What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sense of power to determine the nature of the world by our mind alone -- but such is life.
The world is not human, not at all like a human, and nothing about it follows from us at all. The world is not made in our image. Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape, and whatever it manages to measure with any clarity, has no impact on the nature of that world.
>Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape
Can you define existence without depending on or referring to consciousness?
Why does whether we're in a simulation or not matter for whether anything is explorable?
You can explore how the simulation works, there's just some other layer you can't explore. Or maybe you can somehow.
When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? Does that mean you can't explore them?
> When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain?
This is unknowable.
It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors.
That fits the definition of a simulation.
What's unknowable is whether or not there are real stars that correspond with what you seem to observe; not whether or not your observations themselves are the real stars.
Didn’t we already work out they are similar in their spectral output to the Sun, enough to conclude they are the same kind of thing? And observing their movements makes them far away. Do each of us have to do the experiments again to validate that we know what they are?
Something could only appear to be similar to the Sun. We have to trust in observation at some level for all of those experiments to be valid, basically, which means first believing that you're conscious and second believing that you can experience reality and so on from there.
You can never really disprove that some malicious entity is just making you think you're seeing the stars and talking to people, if you want to go back to philosophy about it. There's a bit of assumed faith
> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
> I know for sure what I am perceiving
This reflects my view. And I’ve always found it mildly amusing that beings I cannot prove to myself are perceiving attempt to convince me that I’m not perceiving, when that’s exactly what I’m maximally sure of. Imagine arguing with an LLM designed to convince you that you’re not real. It would be weird, wouldn’t it?
I never quite understood what we mean by "consciousness" but I find fascinating that most modern philosophers who describe themselves as materialists / non religious can argue in the same sentence that there is something special and extra-natural about the human experience.
It's one or the other: either nature is all there is, and therefore, consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, that we can investigate, and probably eventually replicate, and can't deny to other beings or to machines upfront; OR there is something outside reality that we might as well call God.
I'm strongly in the former camp, but I don't have issues with the latter one. What upsets me is the inconsistency of those who try to support both ideas at the same time. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?
Most philosophers are materialists or computational functionalists, while being monists. This means they aren't dualists, and it means they do not adopt the supernatural explanation. But they are careful not to rule out dualism.
There's this pattern I've observed in discussions about philosophy. First there's a rejection of philosophy as silly and misguided, followed by a rediscovery of the same concepts that philosophers have developed, but under a new ad-hoc and less precise language.
Congratulations, you're a philosopher.
I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life.
These people believe this while at the same time considering dualism so ridiculous as to laugh dualists out of the room. The evident problem being that "mind uploading" is the most dualistic possible position to take. A real monist would easily see that by doing mind uploading you have just created a clone that is a whole separate entity from yourself and it is not yourself.
But you are taking an opinionated view of the resolution to the Ship of Theseus paradox. If you are a computational functionalist, then it really is "you" afterwards (or rather there's now two identical "you" until the original "you" is destroyed). A monist could also point to your hypocrisy of believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
A true monist would realize that any experience of the uploaded being that received a copy of the brain is not felt by the original brain that has been copied. This is a fact and it is elementary to see it as true, as well as supporting the view that the copy is not the same being at all. If your description of computation functionalists is accurate, then they simply are dualists and would do good in admitting this to themselves.
Invoking the Ship of Theseus is a distraction. The Ship of Theseus paradox does not involve a full copy at the atomic level while the original still stands. If it did, the paradox would not even exists. The paradox exists because there is the key element that you do not have in mind copying/uploading: _continuity_.
Isn't continuity just an implementation detail? Suppose your brain was replaced a bit at a time with mechanical hardware, the end result is an uploaded mind while maintaining continuity.
I admit that this is a troubling problem with the position that I stated, but I don't think it's a complete takedown.
The easiest rebuttal would be to simply say that continuity is not a mere implementation detail. If you give up continuity, you can make a copy without altering the original, you just have to read it.
But if you need to ensure continuity you have to alter the original. This seems to me a very fundamental part of the process, making it qualitatively different.
Imagine you are destroyed in your sleep by aliens and replaced by an atomically identical duplicate. Would you call this "you"?
If not, what if the aliens recycled the atoms from your original body to make the new body, putting each original atom into the same original spot with the same position and momentum (ignoring quantum and uncertainty principle).
What if they recycled 99% of the atoms from your original body, but swapped 1% of them for different atoms?
What if they only destroyed 5% of your brain and reassembled that destroyed portion, leaving the rest of you untouched? What about 50%?
What if they waited 1 planck moment before reassembling you versus 5 seconds?
Where is your dividing line in this scenario space between "that's really me" versus "that's just a copy and is not really me" ?
The functionalist answer, as I understand it, is fungibility across time and copies when arriving at definitions of words like "you".
The functionalist answer is not that > 1 copy can communicate telepathically or supernaturally share experiences is a dualist sense. They are still causally independent physical entities.
None of these scenarios would result in "me" from a monist perspective. The destruction is a discontinuity point, I died there and then, and then the next planck moment a new being was created with all my memories. But "I" died.
The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.
And, you know, there's really nothing wrong being dualist. I do not mean to denigrate that specific worldview. What is problematic is claiming to be a staunch monist while holding dualist positions.
As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas:
- there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
- destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern
And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
> The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist.
I think you're misunderstanding that words are social constructs which can point to abstract categories rather than necessarily single concrete objects at a particular moment in time (although words can also do that).
Like if you have multiple tennis balls, each ball is still a tennis ball, despite each ball being different, because "tennis ball" is a social construct and an abstraction that's an indirection to a certain concept. In the worldview I am talking about, the word "you" is an indirection to a mind that is indistinguishable in content and experience from the one you have right now, with the property of fungibility across modalities, time and space.
> What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
Apologies, I read too quickly and skipped over this. See one of my sibling comments. I concede this is problematic for my position and I need to think harder on how to solve it, but I don't think it's unsolvable. The placeholder answer is that there must be a certain level of damage -- the precise % probably doesn't matter as much as exactly which parts you destroy -- that is incompatible with keeping continuity.
For the rest, as a social construct, if we incinerate me to create a clone of me that is identical to the original at the subatomic level I agree that, for everyone else in society, it is me. But my self has still died and whatever replaced it is having its own experiences. And it matters very little what everybody else thinks: if tomorrow an imposter convinces everybody else that they are me, they aren't me for me. Their experiences aren't magically beamed to my brain.
Your tennis ball example is again a textbook dualist position. You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself. But, assuming balls can feel when they are hit by the racket, the ball you used in the previous point and now is lying on the sideline does not feel being hit when the next point starts with another ball.
There's nothing you need to solve because definitions of words are subjective social constructs that are neither correct or incorrect. Definitions are axioms.
You have chosen to define the word "you" to require continuity, under some rubric. By that definition, a copy of you isn't really you. That's correct under your axiom, but it is incorrect under other axioms.
The functionalists I am trying to channel in this conversation have a different subjectively chosen definition of that same word, that is internally coherent assuming functionalism is a true description of the world.
You may wish to argue that their definition/axiom lacks utility, but that's subjective and cannot breach the boundary into a claim about objective correctness (logical deductions) under the axiom.
> You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself.
This sounds like solipsism not dualism vs. monism. In non-solipsistic monism, social constructs can exist outside of a collection of minds, because other minds also exist.
believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
Oft-repeated but not true. Neurons, for the most part, are never replaced. If a neuron dies, it's gone forever. Repeated head traumas (leading to CTE) are known to cause personality changes as the brain has been permanently altered due to neuron losses.
I think reasonably faithful clones would be mes. We could live my life, from multiple perspectives, some of them quite separate. It might be necessary to distinguish them with numbers, or claim that one of them has become too different to really count as a me, but those are details and semantic matters.
> copying any possible information to the most minute synapse
That's reducing an individual to, I assume, the sum of its neural network. So like considering everything else happening in the fleshy body matters to what a human is, nor how they relate to the rest of cosmos as such a body.
The ‘you’ that wakes up tomorrow is a whole separate entity from you right now, unless you want to concede that identity is a path variable and that whether the exact same physical/mental/emotional entity is you or not depends on how those particles got there.
Just because the brain doesn't form memories while you sleep, doesn't mean you have ceased to exist. You have probably forgot many things that have happened to you today: does that mean you didn't exist in those moments you forgot? Am I misunderstanding your point?
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I think a lot of people interpret philosophers' arguments differently and it isn't always clear what a philosopher themselves truly believes.
For example Searle's Chinese room thought experiment... On the one hand you can easily construe it to imply that he believes there's something fundamentally special about human consciousness that cannot be reproduced by a machine. On the other hand you could interpret his perspective, which I think is more in line with his real perspective, as implyimg that replicating the human mind machine requires truly replicating it physically rather than approximating it and that it's misleading to imply that you can get there with an approximation ... Still I can see how this confuses dualists or could appear in line with their point of view even though it is arguably a nuanced take on the materiallist view
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?
Every guy saying that free will doesn't exist is arguing exactly this. Physical causality considered an obstacle to freedom implies that the conscious entity is somehow outside the physical world.
You are implying that consciousness has to include free will? Why?
That's backwards. People saying that there's no free will because determinism is implying that human consciousness is outside the physical world. Actually that's what TFA is about and makes a great job explaining it.
My comment was responding to energy123 questioning there are philosophers that are both materialistic and consider human consciousness is "special". The moment you separate consciousness from all the physical processes that support it (and that's what negating "free" will arguing that it's caused by material forces) you're placing it in a different "plane".
That's hardly an unheard-of position, there are many thinkers that fall for this.
In case you didn't get it: you were invited to provide concrete examples of philosophers holding the explicit opinion you have described.
In case you don't get it: you don't get to set the discussion terms. You can argue all you want yourself, but my point is already made. If you want a list, search for "hard incopatibilism" or "hard determinism" and you get it.
I've yet to find a falsifiable definition of consciousness.
I do believe in intelligence (which is measured against a particular task) and ego (which inflates the self over the other).
"might as well call God" is a bizzare conclusion for the latter though because "God" is far from an abstract concept - it's probably one of the most heavily loaded terms in every human culture.
Overloaded, I’d say. There are many different definitions, most incompatible with each other, such that the term is almost meaningless without extensive preceding discussion.
No, there is at least one other option, which is that consciousness [1] is a phenomenon that we can't replicate in non-biological brains [2], but from which the existence of a "God"-like being, as the term is understood by major religions, still doesn't follow.
[1] Or "qualia", to be precise.
[2] For example, the existence of qualia might require certain carbon-based structures which aren't present in silicon-based devices.
There is nothing that we know of in carbon based structures that violates universal causality, even in quantum scales where causality becomes more vague it is replaced by a measurable randomness.
So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
Computing something isn’t the same thing as it actually happening.
> […] that violates universal causality
I think you're conflating qualia with free will. These are very different concepts, and the experience of qualia has nothing at all to do with "violating causality".
> So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.
As long as we have practically no idea how qualia arise, or even what exactly they are, your claim has no base to stand on.
Basically the Chinese Room argument. By now clear wrong.
How do you figure that? The Chinese Room has had many replies but no clear refutation.
Qualia are a begged question from the start, imo.
Did typing this sentence feel funny?
How would I tell? ;)
I've been debating consciousness for many years as a layman, not an expert, but a layman who has read a lot of scholarly books on the subject.
In my experience, the majority of people who take the position that consciousness is something special to humans are nearly always coming from a religious background and viewing it through a religious lens. This makes sense, as if we reduce consciousness to physical reality, then the implications to free will become quite clear and devastating against it being a thing. This essentially destroys a lot of religions which are fundamentally based on humans having free will. Detailing the full chain of thought would take quite a bit of space, but the quick answer is that the ability for free will is hiding from us if it actually exists. Many people reach for quantum mechanics and its source of randomness as room for consciousness to exist that gives us free will, but the problem there is neurologically we operate at a far larger size than quantum effects would be measured. There's also no way to control the outcome of quantum events as it is truly random. So one would need to show how our neurological physiological minds could manipulate quantum space, which of course they can't. At the level our brains operate, we are well into deterministic physics.
While they absolutely deny this, the impression I get is that they are making a god of the gaps argument. Consciousness is something we don't understand yet, and can't even really define well as many people here have pointed out, so to them it doesn't feel like a classic God of the gaps.
For that reason, I find your comment above quite interesting. I personally find philosophy to be a fascinating and useful tool, but it definitely has a tendency to mislead, especially in areas where hard science can inform. Of course there's an entire debate around the philosophy of science itself, but that feels off topic here.
> Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away."
You end up with something like integrated information theory: https://iep.utm.edu/integrated-information-theory-of-conscio...
From such a perspective, the article's byline, "Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe.
But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains.
Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.
So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness.
To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise.
I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is.
I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place.
And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.
There's a hard problem in either case, I think.
If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?
If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"
From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).
For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.
That's like saying that "water" is a philosophical invention and so if you accept that water is a thing then you've put it into a special category.
You can derive consciousness as a somewhat obvious conclusion of empirical study of behaviors, we have multiple fields of study that lay out cognitive function and criteria.
The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering.
If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain?
This isn't enough:
Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?Qualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a different medium in a different way than us leads to confusion.
That’s valid also from the point of view that pain is a key signal to avoid injury. I am not sure it’s the best example of qualia and it could be simulated by self preservation signals (e.g. the touch sensor on a Roomba). The extension of pain (in Hofstadter sense) is probably more appropriate as qualia (e.g. the pain of losing someone you love).
I really should go back to finish reading GEB. I loved the beginning, but for some reason I dropped off somewhere in the first 1/3. I'm not sure I fully get the point, although I have a vague sense I agree with you. :)
Apologies. I should be more specific. The book is Surfaces and Essences if I remember correctly.
The Mind's I (a collection of essays) or I Am a Strange Loop are probably more appropriate reading here.
What about if the robot's RNG is seeded with a particular number, that we did not write down... And we can destroy it's memory hardware containing the seed, 'killing' it.
Even if the memory hardware is replaced, it won't be the 'same' individual, no? Would an aversion to 'death' be rational in it?
Pain and suffering. In fact just suffering, right? We don't care about signals resulting from adverse conditions. We care about ideas. So we don't really care about suffering, as such, but about the harm it does to ideas and idea creation. Then consciousness is having an idea about what's going on.
I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.
No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.
You really don't need a concept of a colour or a shape, and it's a fairly typical academic fallacy to assume you do.
That's directly confusing experience with categorisation and labelling of experience.
If you touch a very hot object your nervous system will pull your hand away before your brain registers what's happening. The qualia of pain are pre-conceptual, preverbal, and precranial, and your consciousness only catches up later.
Not fundamental to existence but fundamental to consciousness.
Theoretically the person sitting next to you could be a zombie, no qualia, the lights are off, he's just having a conversation with you with nothing going on behind the scenes. And there's no way to tell, except that it's reasonable to extrapolate that since you feel something, he probably does too.
This is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.
Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”.
Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is not special. I /do/ believe that the human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotional and memory is special. My robot cannot write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But now we are talking a matter of degrees, not qualia.
But does the robot identify them in your view, or in its view?
If in your view, then you created a tool for yourself. Like a Geiger counter.
If in its view, ask it what it thinks about consciousness and qualia.
I’ve asked the slugs and the worms and starfish and amoebas and nematodes and fish about their experience, I’m just waiting to hear back.
Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.
I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust.
Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”.
If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?
This - as usual - confuses behaviour with consciousness.
Humans bonded with ELIZA, but that didn't mean ELIZA was conscious. ELIZA was an automaton that mimicked certain behaviours that triggered certain emotional responses.
If you scale that up you get an LLM and/or a social media bot farm, both of which are much better at triggering responses than ELIZA was.
It's now trivial to create an automaton that play acts various moods, and if you give it a memory it will mimic relationship-related conversations.
But it doesn't need to be conscious to do that, and the parsimonious Occam's razor explanation of its behaviours is that it's more economic and credible to assume it's still an automaton with no self-awareness.
Otherwise you have to argue that much simpler systems, like PID thermostats, and pretty much every computer system, are conscious because they "experience" qualia that represent a varying state of the world, with memory.
The sneakiness in your example is choosing an example which mimics emotional bonding. Rhetorically that makes it look like a hypothetical robot is acting emotionally, which is one of the covert signals us mammals tend to associate with consciousness.
But the criticism stands. Feigning emotions well enough to fool other mammals isn't at all the same as experiencing them.
To really experience emotions you need a self-image quale which includes an emotional component. And since subjective experiences have no objective element that can be measured, we can never say for sure whether anything or anyone else actually is conscious.
We assume we are, because we experience it, and we assume others are by implication.
But there's a point where that assumption stops being reasonable, and that's where your cat robot exists.
I guess where I am coming from with my cat robot is that I believe behavior begets consciousness. Whatever behavior is happening, that must mean some internal representation of the world is driving it. Robots will never have human emotions but I believe that some robots /already/ have their own goals and internal representations of reality and models of themselves worth considering on their own terms. A roomba must know where it is in space. Just because it doesn’t feel ennui as well is hardly a shortcoming.
Our brains are very complicated models of the world that attempt to mirror reality. That is what it means to be able to navigate physical space and provide for ourselves in nature. Our nature includes an incredibly complex social sphere and we have emotions to help us better navigate it. Animals we domesticate are clued into human emotions, others are not. I bet slugs have less of a sense of “I” but they still have some kind of an experience. I bet a tree has even less. It’s a sliding scale—each organism has just enough awareness for the task at hand.
The fact that we have a large emotional catalogue and a (some could say overly developed) sense of self is a curiosity more than a hard problem. It’s “I am a strange loop”, not “I am an ineffable indescribable inscrutable untouchable loop”.
> if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love
There are two concepts of "may" at play here:
"may" in the sense of "nothing keeps us from imagining this", and in the sense of "we know how it works, and it can happen".
A car may crash, and glass may break are the latter.
But for the former we actually have no idea how this could work. That is what makes it a hard philosophical problem. That kind of "may" is cheap.
How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.
at the risk of jumping the shark into full-on “woo woo”: what does it mean to “create ideas”? are ideas created or revealed? if ideas are created where do they come from? if ideas are revealed, then does that necessarily imply a determinism? if the robot devises a novel solution to a technical problem, isn’t that an idea? or is the robot’s solution actually the unavoidable result of the entire history of analytical thought? if the novel solution isn’t the creation of an idea, then what makes an idea an idea? if Michelangelo’s David was sculpted by an automaton, is it less beautiful? If so, why? If not, why not?
no you didn’t kill it, it was never alive. the same way my dishwasher or vacuum aren’t killed when they break and i replace them. even if the robot “remembers”, who cares? when i bin my phone did i kill siri because she sometimes remembered things for me?
nicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly
Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me.
My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.
What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.
More than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc.
You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited?
On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response.
It gets complicated, is what I'm saying.
Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.
What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment.
With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because it’s hard to measure anything; even if you trust what they may be claiming, how do you know how they experience them.
One perspective is that some may not feel emotions because emotions did not successfully manipulate their environment in childhood. So why develop them. If anger worked to manipulate your environment, you may become angry easily later on, in an attempt to replicate the successful manipulation. If grief worked, you will experience grief. If “coldness” worked, you will react coldly. If “empathy” worked to manipulate to your benefit, you will be tuned to try empathy.
“Normal” only shows what typically works in a society, not what is “healthy” or “natural”. We’re all highly adaptive individuals, learning how to survive in whatever environment we grow up in. We all become master manipulators, because that’s how we survive. Some forms of manipulation may be more socially accepted than others, within a given culture, others less so. Sociopathy doesn’t exist outside of a culture’s value system. It is a disorder only once you define what order is. In a society of narcissists, the empath is the sick one.
We really only have our own experience, and the words of others to compare it to.
Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual?
It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.
I don’t see how this is in contradiction.
To give one perspective of many, Marshall Rosenberg spent his life researching emotions and violence, and from his point of view, anything you do can ultimately be traced back to your own goals. In his view, it’s more useful to allow this idea and explore it, without judging it as negative. Survival/benefit of the group can be your very own personal (long term) goal. For example, a typical tradeoff is your (very own) need to belong, since your survival literally depends on it. No need to see it as either-or; to resolve the inner conflict, one can own both sides of the argument.
Making your emotional state transparent to the group can in that sense again benefit yourself (and the group), but to think that is always the case and that everybody will comply (or even be able to) will lead to disappointment (disillusion), out of principle, since you are installing a moral rule that doesn’t match reality. The verbal sharing of your emotions might successfully (and openly) manipulate the group to include your own goals, and/or the actions you take (taking your emotions into account or not) might.
Note how I am using “manipulation” in its original/neutral form, which means “to move”/influence. Typically, we use the word to convey a judgement - some forms of attempted influence we see as good/acceptable, others we see as negative. But that judgement is based on our own values, and somebody else will have different values. We can see this in how our cultures judge lying (and how that judgement changes over time). Is not sharing all you know a lie (of omission)? Is it acceptable to not always share all your thoughts? In many cultures (families), it is deemed offensive to tell certain truths; there is an expectation to lie! Once there is an expectation, it is not considered manipulation. In some hacker communities, sharing your emotions is considered offensive and an unacceptable attempt of manipulation!
A simplistic perspective which you can check for yourself and compare with others: Anger means you experience something you judge as wrong and possible to influence. Sadness means you experience something you judge as wrong but outside of your sphere of influence. Fear is a judgement of danger. The judgement is real; the situation itself may not actually be dangerous (today). It’s a signal, but it’s not based on reality/facts but your own judgement of it. You can tune the signal and thus your experience by investigating and changing your judgments - without sacrificing any of your needs or goals. Emotional reprogramming takes time, but it’s not outside of your control, nor is it driven by some higher truth than your own judgments, based on your prior experiences.
bingo
Bingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.
even saying that our senses are "tied" together with/into our memory and emotions is expressing a dualism. that's the challenge and that's the gap to leap.
Looking around at evidence, only the ones with somewhat cute eyes can qualify for empathy. Bad luck if someone is a grass or an amoeba, but machines will be just fine.
Philosophers may squint at the suffering-in-itself long and hard, but I doubt they'll affect waking/extinguishing empathy of the masses. Exploring the suffering that fails our empathy (e.g. suffering of a wheat plant harvested) seems a highly abstract task; more abstract than high mathematics.
Before that, you need to answer whether a machine can even feel pain or not, not whether it is telling the truth or not. We feel pain because we have a nervous system that reacts to the physical world and it is an indicator that something is wrong. That doesn't translate at all to any machine I know of. If we end up building a nervous system and a basic functioning brain and hook it up to a machine then sure its an interesting question
you can feel pain without an external influence stimulating it. purely mental processes are sufficient to experience suffering.
Pain isn't just saying the word, it's a signal that changes your behavior generation in a way that conflicts with your self model.
I am pretty sure I am not conscious, and this seems to solve the entire problem that other people have.
My pet theory is that I don't think all humans are conscious (in other words, some perfectly cognitively normal-seeming people are just automatons without an inner experience, like plants or LLMs). Mainly motivated by the fact that a lot of people report not having an inner monologue, and other little hints that I've picked up over the years.
The "inner experience" might be totally optional to fitness, like green eyes.
That's called solipsism. I went through it as a lad, I think it's not uncommon.
I think LLMs have brought it roaring back for a lot of people.
Nah, it never went anywhere. The internet just provides a safe space for people to admit philosophies that would cause social issues in person.
I assure you that I am not conscious (and a human, not an LLM). Therefore at least partial solipsism is true.
If you aren't conscious, and if no one else is, either (in spite of their reports of such), the solipsism still need not be true.
It's a reach, I guess.
One step further is to ask how conscious your mind actually is. There is a lot happening on autopilot - and everybody usually checks out for a few hours at night. Maybe consciousness is a rare temporary thing.
I think evidence suggests that humans aren't conscious most of the time. So it wouldn't surprise me if 95% of the time people are just stochastic parrots. But maybe that number is even close or equal to 100%.
Intellectually a lot of humans perform worse than LLMs and a lot of people (most of them) are completely unable to process abstract concepts and basic logic at all. Can those people truly be called conscious? Is consciousness worth something without the ability to reason?
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
If I knew precisely which definition of consciousness you are testing against your own experience I would understand your point and I would like to. Can you say what it is that you are sure you are not?
> If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.
How can you say that?
It would be very interesting to know how to build robots that love their work, versus ones that hate their work. Not because it makes a practical difference to us, but because of ethics.
Is not undefinable. Unless you have an incomplete model to understand the universe. Which is exactly our case.
The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention ... If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state
"The Moon" is a philosophical invention, and yet The Moon is a natural phenomenon.
Stephen Wolfram is fascinated with his discovery of computation at the heart of the universe. Life itself may be like that, emerging then noticing itself and that it is alive - has the property of life. Then when it's governed by a "soul", or perhaps better said, constrained by it, then our awareness is of what we can't otherwise see, the laws that govern us, inevitably from a 5th dimension, as we stand in the shadow of Plato's cave. When we discover "we are" we are realized and grateful, and our life ends up being worship. Then we witness the greater life around us follow a bedding of creation, a call to become one from the experience we are one. When we become we'll see Jesus' loving eyes that first saw, and called for by showing himself, what we'll then see.
It's important to remember, when Stephen Wolfram says "I discovered...", he uses it in the sense that most people say "Today I learnt ...".
This argument sounds nice at a surface level, but seems deeply incoherent and wrong in a way I haven’t yet put my finger on precisely. How can you say this:
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.
followed by this:
> The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
followed by this:
> Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.
So it isn’t describable by physics but it is only physics? And there are no closures or gaps? Ok sure in one sense we can say everything is connected, but this article seems to me to demonstrate effectively that without these divisions, pursuing understanding of it is essentially intractable.
He seems to be describing the dissolution of some construct in his worldview that I am having a difficult time relating to. Anyone have a different take?
I think there is a gap, but it's not what they think it is - it is the gap between description and execution. Chalmers wants a description level explanation for the properties of execution, which is not possible. He wants to get for free what is an irreducible recursion between cost and action. The gap is not ontological, it is epistemic.
It just means we can't know without paying the price, walking the path of the process, step by step. No jumping ahead. We can't even predict a 3 body system far ahead. We can't tell the properties of a code without executing it. We can't compress most processes, their execution is the shortest description. Chalmers wants 3p to eat for free at the table of 1p.
The Hard Problem strikes me as a "why" question and humans have a poor track record of ever answering a "why" for a foundational question (at least in a way that we can demonstrate to others). Our most successful explanations build up from simpler things to explain more complex things. But at some point, the explanation bottoms out on things we can't further explain - like the fields in quantum theory. There's currently no further thing below those that explain "why a field theory?"
If we solved the Easy Problems of consciousness, i think we would find ourselves in a similar position where most people would simply accept that we had an explanation and move on but some people with a more philosophical bent would continue to search for underlying explanations.
> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.
It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.
The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".
> a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
a) it is wrong to say definitively that it is untrue. there is no acid test for the existence of God nor of spirit.
b) religious and spiritual traditions have wrangled with this very question for at least 3000 years. it is not a 'scientific curiosity'. It is one of the most fundamental questions of human experience.
a) there's an infinite amount of things that can't be proven/disproven and this includes all sorts of human imagination. We should focus on things that we can actually prove or disprove. The source of a god is human imagination, so you can't even prove that any god exists because you just don't know what it is (iow what exactly you're trying to prove).
b) This being a fundamental question proves scientific curiosity. We wouldn't have achieved current technology if not for scientific curiosity.
No the hard problem is impossible to solve using science even a billion years in the future.
If science can in theory explain consciousness ever then it’s an easy problem.
This is the kind of religious thinking the GP is talking about. What other frontier of science do people claim will never be solved, except the existence of a god? Why are you so sure it cannot be touched?
My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be.
I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test, but I found it satisfactory enough when I heard about the hard problem of consciousness. My main argument for it is not an attack, it's simply Hanlon's razor. If you find a simpler explanation that doesn't demand new understanding, I will listen to it, if you do not, you have to show me the simplest solution is wrong, and I'll go to the second simplest.
By saying it’s simulated you don’t make a simplification. What does it simulate? What are the mechanics of simulation and is it substrate specific or independent? Can a computer simulate these qualia? It’s easy to say something is simple but harder to prove it is any simpler than the alternatives.
Hanlon's razor? That one is "never assume malice where stupidity will do". You want Occam's razor, or the word "parsimonious".
That does not explain how it is possible for a simulation to experience itself
How do we experience that though?
The neural connections get rewired.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
If I may equivocate for a moment: your cat is unconscious, which is less conscious than wakefulness.
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.
I'm not sure I'm following you, what do you mean? That other animals as well have enough brain power for consciousness?
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.
A cat reaching for a cuddle is conscious or not? They recognise individuals and communicate desires well past the bounds of food or other basic needs into affection.
> 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.
The mirror test is just about intelligence. A p-zombie could easily pass it.
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).
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.
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.
This is an interesting take but are you not equating intelligence with consciousness?
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
:-)
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.
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.
You are probably converging to Tononi’s IIT. Read the criticism from Aaronson too. Not fundamentally against your approach.
Some scientists accept consciousness resides in single cell paramecia.
Saying "accept" assumes it's true. What's happening is "some scientists define consciousness incredibly broadly."
> 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.
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.
> 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!
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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
> If all information processing leads to consciousness
Did you actually read what you just responded to?
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"?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
That would be part of the empirical facts we might hope to gather, if this is indeed the right direction for the explanation.
Mainly because of recursive processes that modulate attentional focus, but of a special sort that we are just beginning to understand.
'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
> 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).
> 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.
> 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>'.
It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.
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.
Why? You can build a clock with any basic oscillator and we're chock full of them.
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.
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.
Put human consciousness in an excel spreadsheet and get back to us.
Look up the “China brain” idea. It’s basically the same. Could you explain why that wouldn’t be conscious a priori?
>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?
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).
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.
Completely on the mark! Algorithms can differ qualitatively. Recursion.
Eh, not recursion. Self-reflection. Monitoring the state of the execution, and taking the action to guide it towards the desired outcome.
>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!)
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.
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.
> 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.
It’s only your labels in language that are splitting this system into separate parts.
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.
>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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
Because it's information processing that implements perception.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
>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.
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.
> 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
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?
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.
I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it.
Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.
Also consider the possibility that the people who argue against the hard problem of consciousness may, in fact, not be conscious. How could they ever understand the nuance of conscious experience and how it is fundamentally different from 'structure and function' if they don't have it? To them there is only the easy problem of consciousness.
And, of course, if they disagree with me about this and want to claim that they are, in fact, conscious, I'm not sure they can do that because... well the hard problem of consciousness.
It comes up because people are mistakenly conflating consciousness with moral personhood.
People want to be talking about whether AI suffers in a morally meaningful way. In non-human animals this debate is often centered around the question of whether the animal has conscious experience, because there's little doubt that much of the emotional and experiential systems are shared.
The analogy goes wrong with AI, where definitions of "consciousness" would seem to apply in the sense that the model clearly has a category for itself in its world model, feeds back on its output, etc. However the analogy between how it works and anything we would recognise as emotion or suffering is extremely strained.
The solution is to just focus on ths question of what we really mean when we think of morally relevant suffering. It's a much clearer question than "consciousness" and it sidesteps the problem.
Do you have a verdict for whether science can ever explain the origin of the universe? I can only doubt it could answer the actual hard problem of consciousness. I find most people, especially on here, to be blindly "science-optimistic"
I feel like this is directly addressed in the article, right? I think you are coming from the same direction, but Rovelli goes a bit further and says "how can we affirm that there is gonna be a knowledge gap when we just aren't at that level yet?". How can you say that we won't be able to describe, explain and predict your exact internal mental state from a brain scan?
To draw a parallel with physics, about which we as a society (and me as an individual) know a lot more, we are gonna define mathematical objects and laws whose behavior maps well to certain subsystems of the brain that we ourselves have defined. Physics had it easy in this sense: it turned out to be remarkably simple to describe the universe to a great degree of precision. Still, we all recognize that the physics mapping we have to this day isn't perfect; and it's even possible that it will never be perfect. It may be fundamentally impossible to reduce some systems to simpler mathematical objects which we can reason about. It does seem to be generally possible, however, to find a reasonable approximation. This again is what I think Rovelli's point is about: science is the process of finding a good approximation which has predictive power. And what is there in the brain that's fundamentally so different and that we're never gonna be able to explain? Why does everyone keep insisting that consciousness is special?
I do agree that that only when (if) we do get the accurate mathematical description, then we're gonna be able to properly discuss the hard problem. But my hunch is that once we do have all the tools it will just dissipate from scientific discussion, similarly to how the measurement problem in quantum mechanics is slowly undergoing the same transition from "this is a fundamental problem" to "we were just asking an invalid question due to misunderstanding and old ways of thinking". Obviously I have no proof of this beyond intuition, but I more or less agree with every sentence of this article, and that shapes my intuition.
> The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function
Great, I'm a physicalist so uhhhh I reject this lol. I think you can define cognitive capabilities and phenomenal experience by reducing to structure and function. You're right that it's simple though.
I'm a physicalist as well. A commitment to physicalism doesn't force you to reject the hard problem. The hard problem doesn't entail that phenomenal consciousness is not grounded in physical structure and function. The hard problem is about what is needed to explain consciousness. Science typically involves defining some phenomena precisely in terms of structure and function, then giving a precise story about how some observed behavior captures the structure and function that defines the phenomena under question. For example, we define temperature by the height of mercury in a thermometer, then we mathematically derive the height of mercury given the average speed of molecules in the environment. Thus we successfully reduce temperature to average kinetic energy of molecules.
But the process of reduction starts by precisely defining the phenomena in terms of structure and function. If we are unable to give a precise definition that uncontroversially captures the target phenomena, then we cannot in principle give a scientific explanation of said phenomena. This is where we stand with consciousness. There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness. But this is an explanatory limit only. It doesn't necessitate some non-physical phenomena is involved. What we need are new concepts that can connect the phenomenal to the physical. But conceptual innovation is not something you get from more measurements and more data. This is what makes consciousness a philosophical problem.
I was rejecting your definition of the hard problem as it contains an assertion that a physicalist wouldn't accept.
Yes, reduction would be one very viable strategy. It doesn't require precisely defining the phenomenon in order for me to just say that it reduces based on the fact that reduction has been a successful approach for everything else in cognition.
> There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness.
Yeah this is what I reject. Why do you say that this is in principle a barrier? You're discussing it as an explanatory gap, not in principle.
A stylistically different perspective from the one couched places an intrinsic function in a mathematical space.
Very well explained.
FTA:
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".
Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.
Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.
This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.
Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.
Qualia is the term people often use to mean "what it's like". The hard problem is "why is there qualia". This of course assumes that qualia exists as a coherent thing, which some philosophers dispute.
Indeed, I didn't remember that Chamlers was literally building his argument around the "why?"... But he does.
This reduces to the intractable mystery of existence. A more interesting question would be, as usual "how".
There are serious attempts at this, coming from both neuroscience and physics (e.g. for the latter https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/15/11/115319/3372193/Un... )
> Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.
I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me:
A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at sunset it's like a major D chord surrounded by the sound of babies laughing. When you see it on the battlefield it's like a minor D chord wrestling against the noise of wind and rain.
What is it like to experience synesthesia :-)
These are very good analogies (and possibly experiences for those who are natural synesthetes), but even then, that won't make the who doesn't have the corresponding perceptual modality person experience that exact sensation.
> A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.
why does a major chord sounds pleasant? and why does a minor chord sounds "sad"? Why does the locrian mode sound so unsettling? is it due to our anatomy or purely cultural?
And even then, in different contexts, a major chord can sound jarring and a minor one satisfying.
That being said the nature/culture duality is often not the right way to frame these issues. It's both, intertwined.
Well, right, it's contextual. We each have a series of inputs that add up to these contexts. This doesn't mean it can't be explained, it just means there needs to be context.
If you give the blind man a sensor that converts color data to something he can input, and then provide inputs giving the feeling you want to portray associated with that color, you have explained it.
If you feel red is angry, all you need to do is play 400 to 484 THz into his instrument and yell at him angrily enough times for him to associate it. It doesn't seem too subjective to me.
Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources.
His Baroque Cycle series also touches on this in several places. One funny side plot involves a freed African slave (Dappa) who speaks dozens of different languages and is highly intelligent and an aristocratic person who maintains that of course this former slave (who is obviously a lot smarter than this aristocrat) is just a trained monkey that naturally is not conscious even though he is quite clever with language. The same books also have a lot of side plots involving Leibniz and various attempts to build thinking/computing machines.
The Dappa plot is probably the closest to a lot of debates there will be around AGI with people likely to insist for all sorts of reasons rooted in philosophy, religion, etc. that even though the AGI walks, talks, etc. like a duck, it can't be a duck. At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
Is there a distinction in your mind between consciousness and intelligence? Is it possible, for example, for a machine to solve complex problems but not be conscious? Or vice versa, can an animal or a person be very unintelligent yet still conscious?
The question is mainly interesting in the context of our own behavior and interactions. Because would we treat our food differently if we decided e.g. pigs were intelligent and conscious? I had some salami on my pizza yesterday. But I also believe pigs are intelligent and conscious. And they are close relatives of us genetically. Some people choose to not eat meat for this reason.
I'm of the school of thought that we are all biological computers with emergent properties like intelligence, consciousness, etc. that we might eventually succeed in replicating. Maybe at a more modest level at first. From a practical point of view, I'm more interested in intelligent agents than conscious ones. I mainly need them to do useful things for me. Too much consciousness is a double edged sword. Because then I would have to consider how my agent feels about all this. But can you really have one without the other? I don't have a good answer to this.
People have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything around them. Definitely their pets, plants, and in some cases even inanimate objects. Which doesn't help the debate because it's already happening with LLM tools. Even though they are probably still on the definitely not conscious side of the fence even when they demonstrate mildly intelligent reasoning occasionally.
At some point, people will have a hard time telling the difference with AGI. Is it all smoke and mirrors at that point or are they dealing with an intelligent/conscious thing? That's no doubt going to entertain philosophers for centuries to come. But from a practical point of view, does it really matter at that point? If we can't reliably tell the difference, is there still a difference?
A philosophical zombie [1] is essentially a mobile, autonomous human body devoid of consciousness. Critically, still giving all of the external cues that it has in fact consciousness. It is supposed to prove that physicalism doesn't work. "The sense of consciousness" is used like a "soul, with extra steps".
In my humble opinion, which I have no way to prove or disprove, consciousness ("as a soul with extra steps") does not exist, and we are all philosophical zombies. Consciousness "as an amalgamation of complex biological signals and neural interactions that has evolved through millions of years as a successful survival strategy" does exist, and that is all that is needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
Serves me well for answering a comment before reading the article. This is basically what the author says, even pointing to the Philosophical zombie and all. Shame on me.
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
You've already drawn your line in the sand (i.e. they are conscious). In that case, you can't also claim that we should continue producing them by the millions at the flick of a switch.
The AI-is-conscious crowd will have to choose - either they are conscious, in which case they should not be birthed, or they are not conscious in which case we can use them as tools. You can't have both and still be logically consistent.
You have strong assumptions for the underlying moral framework
I think you mean morally consistent. though even then humans don't have any real qualms about that. Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
> Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
Sure, but we don't create as many as we can, then kill them at the end of the day when the work is done.
If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc).
If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them, then the "owner" of them gets an obligation (you can't do whatever you want to a dog, for example).
The clinching thing for me is how the AGI is supposed to work. If it's the same as our theory of how we work, then fine, it's one of us. It wouldn't even have to work very well.
I always like to remind myself that AI is trained on material fed to it, created and written (somewhere along the line) entirely by humans - as they perceive & interpret the universe around them.
> Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch.
This is a great example for a discussion about The Hard Problem. Here is the description from the book of the inner experience of this scanned brain as it gets booted up:
> What came next could not, of course, be described without using words. But that was deceptive in a way since he no longer had words. Nor did he have memories, or coherent thoughts, or any other way to describe or think about the qualia he was experiencing. And those qualia were of miserably low quality. To the extent he was seeing, he was seeing incoherent patterns of fluctuating light. For people of a certain age, the closest descriptor for this was “static”: the sheets, waves, and bands of noise that had covered the screens of malfunctioning television sets. Static, in a sense, wasn’t real. It was simply what you got out of a system when it was unable to lock on to any strong signal—“Strong” meaning actually conveying useful, or at least understandable, information. Modern computer screens were smart enough to just shut down, or put up an error message, when the signal was lost. Old analog sets had no choice but to display something. The electron beam was forever scanning, a mindless beacon, and if you fed it nothing else it would produce a visual map of whatever was contingently banging around in its circuitry: some garbled mix of electrical noise from Mom’s vacuum cleaner, Dad’s shaver, solar flares, stray transmissions caroming off the ionosphere, and whatever happened when little feedback loops on the circuit board got out of hand. Likewise, to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.
The Hard Problem asks: who is experiencing this qualia and why is there an experiencer at all? Stephenson writes how this simulated brain is experiencing static as it condenses into meaningful patterns, but he implicitly starts with someone experiencing this static qualia. If this is the very beginning of the simulated brain booting up, where did this experiencer come from?
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
Because you're conflating intelligence with consciousness. There is no test for consciousness. In fact, you can't even prove that other human beings are conscious, you only know that you yourself are because it's self evident to you (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am). The whole point of the hard problem is that you can imagine something exactly like a human being that passes every test of being a human being (e.g. an AI) but still not be sure that it has any inner experience.
This article is pretty slim on details, but I agree with the general argument that dualism is unnecessary to explain phenomenal consciousness. The word "consciousness" has a lot of baggage, which causes us to mislabel cognition as consciousness. [1] This is why I really like using terms like "qualia" or _phenomenal_ consciousness to make explicit what we're talking about.
I still don't like this new trend of dismissing the hard problem altogether. We really don't have an explanation of phenomenal consciousness—it might even require novel physics to explain! [2]
I'd also like to point out that, though this might seem like a semantic argument, it has meaningful consequences for how we approach science and ethics. [3] For example, if we are physicalists and accept that phenomenal consciousness is a property of the world, what does this tell us about other unobservable properties of the world science may be missing? (Recall that we only know about phenomenal consciousness through our own experience of it; we cannot observe it in others)
[1] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/what-is-the-color-blue
[2] https://youtu.be/DI6Hu-DhQwE?si=RB3qkt6PZ62SVpx3&t=2493
[3] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/morality-without-consciousne...
It felt very strange to me that the author construes belief in the hard problem as some sort of spiritual baggage from unempirical religious view. He seems to want to pit the "new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries" _against_ the idea of phenomenal consciousness, which is just absurd to me. As far as I understand, it is far more rooted in German idealism and its Cartesian roots than in any sort of religious spirit.
I'm almost convinced that those who deny the metaphysical (or, if you insist, the plausibly merely physical) force of qualia are philosophical zombies trying to persuade us against the existence of the most obviously true piece of knowledge we have! Or, more generously, they are so steeped in the premises of modern empirical science that they treat their fundamental phenomenal experience as so untrustworthy as to be disregarded, despite its actual necessity in employing those very premises.
Poor, disregarded qualia! Oh that the scientists could see how much they owe to you.
I believe nature is all there is. If we could replicate a human brain several times, and make each 'human brain' receive the exact same input data (sounds, sights, smells e.t.c.) from the moment they 'exist' until the end of their lifetime, I truly think that each of these brains will make precisely the same decisions (and each of these 'brains' would think they were conscious and in control of their lives).
In my eyes, consciousness is simply a natural phenomenon that can be explained but we just lack the understanding at this moment. Time and time again we have made this mistake of assuming there is something supernatural about the things we cannot comprehend and only a few centuries later it is completely understood scientifically. I think consciousness will be a similar case but will take more time.
I think supernatural things don't exist by definition. If ghosts would exist, they would be just natural.
The real question is whether there is a two way link between consciousness and the physical world. Obviously the physical world is observed by consciousness, so that direction checks out. What about the other direction? Is the physical world at all influenced by consciousness? The mindfulness folks seem to argue: no. They argue that consciousness is like a person watching a movie, where the movie is experience. The person is so immersed that it thinks, it controls the movie, but in reality it's a fully passive observer. But this can't be true! Otherwise, the discussion of consciousness could never have come up in human history. A population of "philosophical zombies" could never initiate this discussion. So somehow consciousness must cause physical neurons to activate. The movie knows about the person watching!
You’re saying it’s all 100% deterministic. But at the quantum level, things are probabilistic. The hundred brains with the same input data might make different decisions like how each ball dropped in the Galton board chooses a different route.
But I agree with your overall premise. It can be all understood scientifically. There is nothing supernatural about things we cannot comprehend.
Quantum theories are consistent with determinism. You just need to give up locality or... free choice.
Nature vs. nurture is also a popular debate. This scenario you described, even with nature being all there is, doesn't imply all our actions and thoughts are shaped by our environment.
Chalmers: “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.”
"A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961072...
Thanks for the reference, that looks like a pretty thorough review.
It seems to me that Chalmers already precludes the possibility of physical/materialist explanations with his claim, quoted in the first section:
> There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.
This certainly doesn't feel obvious or intuitive to me. I would expect that someone with the same neuronal make-up will have the same experience.
It is neither obvious nor intuitive. But it is logical possible that we all are Zombies.
In my regard the weak link is our understanding of materialism. It is to simple minded. (though panpsychism sounds really crank)
No, I mean that the logical possibility itself is neither obvious nor intuitive. If you physically copied me atom by atom, every instinct in me says that the result has conscious experience. I'd need some serious convincing otherwise.
Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop.
I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with the very simple like this and recursively building more complex predictors. When they predict correctly, happy feedback reinforces the connections that are firing, when they are wrong, they weaken. Just a really simple feedback algorithm that is super robust.
So the brain is building this world model, and it's essentially gradually compressing a description of the environment into a structure made of neurons. And this is the ultimate survival tactic: model the environment explicitly in your head, then adapt your behaviour to fit it. The better you are adapating to future states (dodging that tree as you run) the better survival chance you have.
At some point (complete speculation) we then begin to do something quite strange: we develop a world model _of ourselves_. We get to a level of sophistication where we begin to predict the future states of our own brains. This might emerge naturally as a way to compress existing learnt behaviour. For example, we re-learn to follow lines in a smarter way, particularly as other parts of the brain learn useful things that we can re-use in our line following. This treats our existing model as a cost function, and we learn a model of the model. But it eventually starts to model the higher-level models the brain has, higher up the abstraction stack.
And somehow, the modelling of our brain function creates a chaotic feedback loop that leads to the sensation of consciousness. It's super handwavey, I know, but somehow this recursion feeds awareness. It's like the abilty to see yourself thinking. Consider meditating and the way words appear in consciousness... you get to a point where you can observe what you're going to say before you say them, and I conjecture that is the modelling of the model that's going on.
And this is useful for survival, as you can optimise the way you think, compressing your circuits further, but also has this weird side-effect of creating awareness.
It also explains why consciousness takes time to develop - because you need to develop a model of yourself, but before that you need a model of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
This is essentially where the field is going, started with predictive processing by Friston with his free energy principle, combined into Hofstadter’s “I am a strange loop” and then the continuing thrust with applying the FEP as well as Rosenthal’s higher order theories and Graziano’s attention schema theory.
The author is mixing two discussions: soul/body dualism and qualia (hard problem).
It could be true that there's only physical body, but still have the qualia explanatory gap.
I think these philosophical arguments boil down to answering the question "what is real?". Contemporary science is presented as an objective theory of reality, but our experiences form the actual starting point for everything that we can ever know about reality, so they ought to be considered real in some sense. The tension begins because, while a physical theory of reality will say that the signals in a brain are real signals, that does not imply the reality of any concepts that those signals may represent. If I imagine something, that does not make it real. But then the same can be argued for all experiences: there are real brain signals associated with them, but that does not imply the reality of those experiences. This lead to a gap in that the physical theory fails to imply, and thus fails to explain, the reality of experience. So, if I believe in the reality of my own experience, then I am left to ask "why is my experience real?", as that is not required or implied by the physical theory of reality.
It sounds like Rovelli's resolution is to acknowledge the centrality of subjective experiences to the formulation of scientific theories, and thus also to any theory of reality. Experiences are the starting point, with the rest being built up from them. Therefore, experiences should also be the first thing added into the bucket of things that one believes to be real. Meanwhile, any physical model of objective reality has a far more tenuous spot in that bucket. We may suspect it to be real through various deductions, but the further away we get from experiences, the more assumptions have to be made to get there. Anyway, I agree that there is no explanatory gap when reality is viewed in this manner. And this is a relatively palatable way to approach the question of reality (compared to, e.g., the mathematical universe hypothesis, which most find unacceptable). But as long as there is debate about what makes up reality and where experiences fit into that, the debate around the hard consciousness problem will continue, and I regard this problem to be of a different character (being far more philosophical) than, say, spiritualism or anti-Darwinism.
There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide.
Full proof: https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-th...
Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.
Yet the mere fact that I am conscious is a greater truth than any of my perception of the "physical" world.
Neither does pure materialism rest on falsifiable beliefs, in that I could claim nothing exists outside my conscious experience.
> Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable.
This is an metaphysical discussion, so falsifiability is kind of irrelevant. All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable - including materialism and physicalism just as much as dualism or monism or theism.
> All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable
This is not true, there are many metaphysical positions that are falsifiable.
For example, "anything shaped like an apple is an apple" is a metaphysical position. It defines what it means to be apple-ish. You could hold that metaphysical position and also "apples are always made of plant material" as another position you hold at the same time.
Then you could falsify the metaphysical position by presenting a stone carved into the shape of an apple. You could choose to deny reality and change your physical definition (what the definition of the word "apple" is), but if you think logically the evidence constructively falsifies the original metaphysical position.
I think what you might have been trying to say is that people tend to adopt metaphysical positions which are non-falsifiable. Yes, they do, but that doesn't mean no metaphysical arguments can be resolved through logic and experiment.
True, I should have been more careful with my wording. My point was actually that unfalsifiable metaphysical statements are not invalid in the same way that unfalsifiable physical/scientific statements are.
So yes, some metaphysical statements are falsifiable, and some have in fact been falsified over time. And, very importantly, many of the biggest metaphysical questions have no known falsifiable answers (at least none that are not already known to be false, of course).
Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Rei...
EDIT: Downvote all you want, materialists, but reincarnation is the spanner in the works nobody wants to confront ..
There are 325+ theories of consciousness mapped here:
https://loc.closertotruth.com/map
And a good walkthrough here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G6Oc_V3Lw
Many of these already gave up on dualism: they already rejected the idea that mind and body are separate (e.g. panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a feature of reality, that all matter possesses "experience" of some kind).
> The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body.
Or a gap between my mind and the minds of the other commuters on this bus.
There are 15 or so biological machines here, but only one of them is being experienced in bright sound and colour.
Personally I think the quantum immortality/suicide argument points directly at the trouble with the "duality".
It's a perfectly physical/mechanical argument that demonstrates that consciousness is much much more bizarre than we expect.
What is the argument?
> During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.
This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?
Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.
"Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century."
.....
"...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body"
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#AnthGodSoulSou...
Philosophers have had these rifts(an similar lines of arguments) forever.
From Plato vs Aristotle (300 to 400 BC) (idea of forms vs nicomachean), In India Adi Shankara (around 700 CE) vs Madhavacharya (1200 CE) (dualism vs non-dualism) - there is a common thread to all of these arguments.
But eventually, for me it comes down to a statement J Krishnamurti made (& it makes the most sense to me): "The self is a problem that thought cannot solve"
Adi Shankara follows non-dualism and Madhvacharya follows dualism. It is referenced reverse in your reply.
Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own:
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”
This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".
> We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?
We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.
> Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious
Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.
The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.
(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).
> We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.
I wish I'd phrased it better, my point was more that early vision systems had weird issues, which we were able to figure out by looking at what part of the image those models paid attention to and realising it often wasn't even part of the animal in the photo, but e.g. the plants around them. We literally had to think about what made a cat a cat to make AI good at recognising cats.
This would also impact clustering.
That said, I think even for humans there's a similar issue: we spent millennia clustering things into groups and labelling those groups, which is why the Catholic church had rules about no meat on Good Friday but fish was fine and beavers counted as fish (and there is now a podcast titled around the idea there is no such thing as a fish*). For cats, I don't see it myself but the fossa is described as "cat-like".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish#Title
the quote from the article is just a contrived tautology that misunderstands the nature of the problem. the dualism problem is not about finding an explanation for why what we call a cat is what we call a cat. it's that you can measure anything you want but nevertheless despite confidently establishing the size of a cat, the appearance of a cat, the behavior of cats, a sophisticated taxonomy of related species labeled "felines", surveying people to find out what cats are to them, what a cat is to me is not what a cat is to you
I'm not particularly well-versed in philosophy, but what's the dualism here?
Of course what a cat _is_ to me is not what a cat _is_ to you, because we necessarily have different memories of interactions with cat-like beings. If you show some babies a cat for the first time, they'll necessarily see it from different viewing perspectives. Even if you put VR glasses on them and show the exact same video, they'll have different contexts: "I first saw a cat when I was sitting next to my friend", "I first saw a cat when I was thinking of ice cream", etc.
But they all saw the same cat, they'll see many other cats, who are all similar. So everyone will understand that "things like these are cats", but everyone will have their own understanding of a "cat" because their memory is different.
I don't have the energy at present to fully develop my thoughts but one thing I'll say is that in my view they did *not* see the same cat. It was the same collection of flesh & bone on four legs, certainly. But it is not the same cat.
Heidegger best revealed to me the limitations of supposedly "objective" thinking.
Heraclitus: "No man steps in the same river twice"
This is the Let's deal with the phenomenon of Qualia by denying its existence thesis.
Spot on.
Not at all. As the fourth paragraph from the end states, we experience qualia. Rovelli is simply saying that qualia are simply physical processes described from a salient perspective, that is, at a level more abstract than the eletrochemical processes that underlie them.
It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doctor works at a higher, descriptive level, as does the doctor. Where is the pain, what are its qualities (dull, sharp, shallow, deep, burning, etc.).
Is it time to give up on the value of (other) human beings? Time will tell.
It seems wild to me to write a (popular) article about consciousness in the year 2026 without addressing the elephant in the room: we are able to devise computer programs of increasing complexity that replicate more and more behaviors that were once the sole domain of humans, and at what point do we consider such computers to have experience in the sense that we have, and the sense in which calculators and thermostats do not. It seems that Rovelli is content to say that we should call experience the thing that the brain does, which is all well and good if you're a physicalist (and I am) but it does not help you at all explain which features of the brain are necessary for experience.
I think it also helps to sharpen this debate to remember that there is a moral dimension: many have adopted moral systems that widen their sphere of concern and care from the self to the community to the nation to the whole of mankind, usually under the intuitive precept that it is bad to make someone else experience suffering. Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?
> Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?
Such an irony. Humans have has since the bery beginning inflicted pain and suffering on other human beings. We are still doing it directly (e.g., wars) or indirectly (e.g., capitalism). The idea that perhaps in the not so distant future, machines may live better “lives” or be treated better than some humans is pathetic. But here again, there are some pets that live better than a 1000 humans nowadays
I don't know where in my statement you saw the implication that we should not care about bad things happening to other humans, but it was a misapprehension.
> It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.
Why is it pernicious?
Because it leads us down seemingly useful paths that are in fact dead wrong. There is only physics, but at some levels it more convenient to ignore the physics (what is happening in the body) and to describe our experience.
Rovelli is a reductionist, the only logically and physically defensible intellectual position, while dualism is inherently supernatural, invoking phantoms, phenomenology that is purely fictitious.
Ok, but that doesn't really address "pernicious". I understand pursuits of philosophy are inherently concerned with truth, but does not truth mean pernicious? My experience of reading philosophers is limited; is Rovelli just a materialist and that's that? Is this positivism?
Science will never be able to properly even define the concept of consciousness because it's outside the scope of science.
Consciousness is something that is used to observe the outer world and science essentially describes patterns in our observations.
All scientific laws boil down to subjective perceptions, such as, when I drop an apple, I see that it falls down.
I'm all in the "brains cause minds" camp. But isn't the main argument here "We accept explanation gaps already in many places, why not also for consciousness?"?
My objection would then be that actually, that's not true. The real statement would be "In everyday life (including science), we accept explanation gaps already in many places"
But this does not mean that we have to accept this particular instance of an explanation gap.
> can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it?
The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
We all (presumably, although I might wonder about the author) know that consciousness is a thing, we don't have anything like a rigid definition of it. Perhaps we never will, but this kind of hot air is unlikely to ever get us closer to understanding it.
Tiresome article by someone just being contrary for the sake of having something to say.
> The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.
It might as well be that philosophical zombies are mental construct that cannot physically exist, simply because building one will imbue it with 'consciousness' (as, it being the physical copy/simulation, it will be able to simulate also the 'consciousness'), in turn making it non-zombie.
Right. Its bad science to say that consciousness doesnt exist.
> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".
There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out is consciousness. It's reasonable to think it will also fall eventually.
It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience.
Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, increasingly complex unanswered questions about phenomena. It is reasonable to think that if/when we reduce consciousness through science we will find that there are more increasingly complex unanswered metaphysical gaps.
Reducing a complex phenomena to more basic structure and dynamics just is to eliminate any open metaphysical questions about that phenomena. That's why the big philosophical debates center around monism vs dualism rather than n-pluralism. Science has dispatched all other essences from mainstream consideration.
“Fields” such as the electric field or Higgs field are essences.
See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48178366
Really? You are telling me that the discovery/development of general relativity or quantum mechanics has not thrown new increasingly complex doubts on the accuracy of previous physical models due to these new "essences" implying contradictions with classical "essences". What could possibly make you so confident that new datapoints, theories, and discoveries as it relates to consciousness will be completely flawless?
You're not using the term essence in the way philosophers mean it. An essence is a categorical descriptive/reasoning context. In mathematical terms, an essence is a lot like a descriptive/measurement basis. A naive scientist sees a world full of distinct reasoning contexts, length is categorically distinct from speed, which is categorically distinct from water, which is categorically distinct from life. The progress of science has been to progressively reduce reasoning contexts/measurement bases to other contexts/bases thus leading to a more unified theory of nature.
Quantum mechanics does increase the physics reasoning contexts owing to the incompatibility between classical and quantum mechanics. But this is not an in principle divergence in the way that philosophers understand essences. We can describe and reason about quantum mechanics and classical mechanics using the same language and the same descriptive tools, namely mathematics. When it comes to phenomenal consciousness and physical behavior, we cannot reason about them using the same descriptive language. Hence they count as distinct categorical essences until we discover the bridging principles that reduce consciousness to physical behavior.
This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.
Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.
Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off.
> That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon.
That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity.
Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief.
I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience."
And this bit:
> I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
right after
> Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument.
So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.
> So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Those are not conflicting arguments.
The former means that we understand all the processeses, but they are complex, therefore we don't have enough brain/compute power to properly model it.
The latter means that we don't understand some of those processes, so we need additional theories that explain them.
One can dismiss the first while finding the second plausible.
I suppose complexity defines to me as something that's inherently hard to understand. The definition of "complex" is "difficult to understand." The move I don't agree with is proceeding to posit "because we don't understand them yet, there must be something special about them."
OK, I'll try another attempt. I thought this other comment explained it better than I could have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 .
The reason TFA (and, frankly, your comment as well) pissed me off is that they drip with condescension to the core while completely sidestepping the problem in the first place. We have plenty of other examples of places where complexity can give rise to emergent behavior, but those behaviors are still easy to understand in the problem space of the domain - e.g. I may be amazed that I can converse with an LLM and it feels like it completely "understands" the conversation, but I don't have any conceptual problems with the fact that it's still just next token prediction under the covers.
But as hackinthebochs put it very well, in my opinion: "The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function."
So my negative reaction is based in the belief that what the TFA is doing is saying "there is no hard problem", and the response is "but why, because 'phenomenal consciousness' can't be described in terms of structure and function like every other instance that we understand that arises from complexity", and then TFA just gives a host of complexity examples that are completely unconvincing (and, again, feel like they completely miss the problem is the first place) and just basically ends with a dangling, unwarranted "q.e.d."
I read it as "I'm very clever and sensible. I definitely don't believe in souls."
Like so much other material produced by people who (I suspect deliberately) confuse religion with the subjective phenomenon of existence
I may be misunderstanding the article but doesnt the fact that all other science and understanding sits on a continuum of which consciousness has (to my understading) to real footing mean that the problem is dualitic by definition? Thats not to say that it can't be 'brought into the fold', it may well be, but until it is it has no other place that to sit outside.
> ..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature.
Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that:
what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible.
Was reasoning thought to be immaterial and intangible..? By whom? Materialism has been alive and well for a long time from what I can tell
Plato, for example
In the original paper about the hard problem, Chalmers does say all that stuff is explainable by science or the easy problems.
The magazine is funded by:
https://berggruen.org/projects
The investment arm for this influencer fund is:
https://www.berggruenholdings.com/
The fund is invested in AI and Berggruen pushes the AI/UBI narrative:
https://www.ft.com/content/9b93e02a-c693-4070-9094-a2f532dfa...
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasberggruen?trk=public_post...
You can already see from the glossy website that this is a well funded propaganda magazine, just like Quantaagazine is essentially funded by the Renaissance Fund, which is invested in AI.
Yes, these magazines do have interesting articles from time to time, but the overt materialistic (not monetary, but anti-idealistic) worldview that traditionally only appeared in communist countries suddenly infests all the rich people's outlets.
For anyone interested in this subject, I found this paper to be quite helpful: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545
The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the article succinctly describes this or contributes otherwise
Austin
OK, dualism. Heard that before.
The new hard problem: how do biological brains get so much done on such slow hardware? That's a real physics question. We're missing something.
a) massive parallelism (although the current AI HW is getting there) b) clever structure/organization (we are nowhere near close) c) it is still buggy as hell
> get so much done
Compared to what??
Massive parallel processing.
Hey you give Nvidia a few million years to evolve their chips and just see what happens
The brain is not slow?
Measured signals seem to be at kilohertz, not gigahertz, speeds.
we are caught between an evolutionary need to know that our existence is meaningful and a universe that seems indifferent.
How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations.
He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event.
I highly recommend any and all of his books.
If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article.
One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong.
Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.
I really like your response, but it also can help explain why I really dislike this essay.
I fully understand and appreciate that there are lots of things about quantum physics, and heck, the universe at large, that are unsolved and that we don't understand. I would actually expect that in order for us to understand consciousness better that we'll need to fill some of the gaps of the quantum world.
The reason why I didn't like the article is that I felt like it's misrepresenting the problem, as the comment I linked described. I'll try to explain with an analogy: In the late 1800s before the discovery of quantum physics, many physicists felt that the physics of the universe was solved and fully understood - the universe was basically just like a set of billiard balls set in motion a long time ago, and the future position of all those balls could be known if their states were known in the past. In that "pre-quantum" world, people still understood that emergent behavior could arise from complexity (even just classical complexity). This article just felt really hand-wavy to me by arguing "complexity is enough". For example, if a similar article were written in 1899, but then later we discovered quantum physics and eventually had a good understanding of how consciousness can arise from quantum interactions, I suppose the author could state "See, I was right - just more complexity!" But it would totally miss the point that "the missing piece" was actually the discovery of quantum physics in the first place, not just more classical complexity.
So I felt this article was strawmanning the problem to begin with. I don't have to believe in "magic" or "souls" or religion to believe that the tools we have to describe complex emergent phenomena are not sufficient to describe the subjective experience of consciousness, but Rovelli seems to be saying that "more complexity" is just the answer to everything.
The Order of Time is on my reading list
I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?
I think people focus a lot on the dangers of erasing consciousness as a moral entity, but it strikes me that something which is so loosely defined and for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable carries its own dangers too. Especially given so many of us are happy to kill and eat many creatures that pass many proposed tests of consciousness.
It's probably sensible to use more strongly defined terms like humanity, self-awareness, cognitive capability, empathy and so on. And to treat them somewhat separately rather than trying to bundle it all together.
But people want there to be something special about us which can be defined as something separate from us, in a neutral, universalist sounding way which also happens to be relatively exclusive - I think because there's this desire to make the concept of a soul have an equivalent in scientific realism for the purposes of discussing philosophy in a secular way.
I agree about definition confusion. I like to define consciousness as "capability to suffer".
Can cow/dog/spider suffer? - very important question, even if not answerable.
At least mammals do show recognizable signs of pain and suffering. That is good enough for me; I don't know for sure other people can suffer, but I assume they do based on their behavior I see.
It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.
It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.
It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
If we accept subjective feeling as definitive proof that something exists, that opens a Pandora’s box of entities. People have deeply held subjective beliefs about things like God, afterlife experiences, out-of-body experiences, and many others. It seems unfair to me to dismiss this kind of subjective evidence in these cases, while accepting it without question for experience of consciousness.
This is a religious argument. If you want to go down that path, then sure; but I suspect that's not what you actually believe.
It’s not a religious argument.
It’s a subjective experience argument. As a conscious person, if someone tells me they don’t believe in consciousness, then I’m inclined to believe they have a reason for saying that. They must not be experiencing consciousness the same way I am.
Interestingly, a non-trivial number of people have no internal monologue (https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...). It would be reasonable to assume the experiential side of consciousness is on a spectrum, with extreme edge cases on both ends. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some people are barely experiencing it, and some not at all. It would certainly explain to me (someone who experiences it quite intensely) why some would claim it doesn’t exist. Because for them, it might not.
> It’s a subjective experience argument.
"Earth is flat" is also a subjective experience argument. Yet mostly nobody takes it seriously anymore. I hope "qualia" will be like this soon too.
"Earth is flat" is an objective statement. "I experience consciousness" is subjective, similarly to "I am experiencing pain". If someone tells me "pain doesn't exist" while I know it exists (because I have experienced it), I can be certain that that person is wrong. Even though I can't prove it to him.
I've been thinking the same (that people who claim it doesn't exist don't have it) but it had never occurred to me that it might be on a spectrum. It actually makes perfect sense.
No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.
That's the basis of the p-zombies thought experiment discussed (and dismissed without any real arguments) in the article.
P-zombies cannot be argued about, if you reject their existence your opponent will call you a p-zombie (happened to Dennett).
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.4375
I felt like this paper nailed it years a go, and nobody has followed up properly.
The metric involved is basically impossible to compute fully, but easy to approximate. Any online approximation will model everything it can see have changes until it is satisfied.
The main value of this article is this absolute gold mine of a comment section.
These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".
Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
"Consciousness" is a suitcase word. It has so many meanings that any individual speaker can't even keep them straight, much less a group discussion.
That's the reason it seems like a thorny topic.
Seems like void of any substance if one takes whatever flavor of monism for granted. Just because everything is supposed to be build on the same fundamental building blocks/fluxes/whatever doesn’t mean every phenomenon is caused by constructions of equal complexities.
That is, life referring to something inherently far more complex than inert assemblies remains perfectly valid in many monist perspectives.
[edit: took life rather than consciousness as an example, but the stated argument in the article seems to be equally applicable relevant for both concept, or any concept that suppose that emergent complexity is possible]
Rays of Light going through a me Prism where the Brain and senses can inflict action.
Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.
Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.
His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.
Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.
The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.
"You can't seperate the body from the mind", Tool told me.
There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.
> the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics.
There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.
I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.
With consciousness and AI multiple problems are being smuggled into a single question.
1. How do we determine consciousness?
2. How should we handle moral consideration of a non-biological system?
The first question is a red herring. It cannot be answered. We need to focus on the second question.
Where we are, it is still a matter of belief.
I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.
The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.
They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.
God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.
But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.
Philosophers being philosophers and not advancing the discussion at all.
A lot of science and math and logic originated from philosophers posing questions and even coming up with answers (then those fields graduated out of philosophy)
This is the standard blub programmer but in science. The blub physicists doesn't understand anything more complex or higher-level than his daily abstractions.
https://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
blather. another example of weak blather of the weeeeeeee! I'm so full of words variety, that fails to interesting or memorable, like someone so high on mushrooms that they are claiming to be able to see there own ears, who if asked what consiousness is will give a similar answer, unless you ask how consiousness relates to rubber bands, which will get a similar answer with rubber band anologies.
the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be.
one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.
Many gave that up a long time ago. Welcome to reality, “experts” and “PhDs”.
Utterly asinine article that doesn't understand its own subject matter.
Agreed.
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
This is what the article is positioned against.
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense.
Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling to such ideas (as the article itself propounds), but if you don't understand the underlying laws to a high enough degree I consider this equivalent to ancient Greeks sitting around saying "there is a double of our soul inside the mirror, WE HAVE SEEN IT". We know today there is absolutely nothing at all "inside" that mirror. How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
Unfortunately, this article puts forth an intriguing promise and then completely fails to deliver.
> How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination.
What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
(This is basically just Descartes “I think therefore I am”)
> What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all.
It might not make sense to you now, but that's because of what we know or what we think we know, today (hence my ancient Greeks analogue). Look at the Gazzaniga effect, people seamlessly make up an "experience" narrative out of absolutely nothing. Whatever experience was claimed there probably didn't exist prior to the point of questioning, and then was wholly manufactured. Thus, that particular experience was a fabrication.
> If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
Why does there need to be a who/what being deceived for something to be an illusion? A mirror functions regardless of whether someone is there to pretend there is a soul in it.
We come from a race that took two thousand years (after it was first proposed) to accept the brain as the seat of the mind, over the heart — just because the heart physically reacts in times of emotion, while the brain remains inert.
Whatever the truth is, humanity probably won't know it until enough generations of the old guard indoctrinated in the old ideas have passed on.
Sorry, who make up an experience narrative?
Never heard of Gazzaniga before reading above comment, its quite fascinating.
The brain, its left hemisphere, makes up the narrative.
Sorry my comment was unclear. My point is, the process of “making up a narrative” does seem to imply a subjective experience, doesnt it? My point is, the existence of the experiencer can’t be denied. Even if the experience itself is some kind of illusion, theres no coherent way to say that there is no entity having an experience. Every attempt to do so ends up implying the existence of an experiencer (the one having the illusion of experiencing)
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?
Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".
The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.
> we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world
Feelings/experiences are specific patterns of specific neurons activating. Why is that hard?
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There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.
Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.
You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.
Explain psychedelics, then? Do psychedelics have access to this supposed "separate layer" that mind exists on over matter? If yes, how? If not, how can something that ostensibly only interacts with the matter have any effect on the mind?
Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"
What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.
But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.
Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.
> As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience.
Two things here:
1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind?
2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not a satisfactory answer to you?
I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.
I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.
Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.
> I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.
> How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?
How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
> The simplest answer is that it is not
You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.
> Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water
At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
The only religious argument is materialism. It's real because enough people have convinced themselves that it's "scientific". Even though there is no proof whatsoever, no solid hypothesis, no experiments to prove how matter acquires subjective experience, it's incoherent to the very foundations of its position (that matter is dead), and has not made any progress in answering the "hard problem" (which is just someone pointing out the incoherence). It also makes people argue that they don't have a mind, that asserting they have a mind is a religious statement, or that they have some trouble understanding what a mind is.
> How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
The laws of physics are enough to explain this because no one is arguing that computers are experiencing anything when they play a video or generate a set of numbers that are displayed as natural language.
> At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
Sorry, I phrased that badly by using "you" when I did not mean that. I meant to say that if someone (not you) wanted to argue that simple matter has some sort of experience, then at least the position would make some sense. But materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any subjective experience of any kind.
Anyway, I won't be able to convince you that you have a mind, so I'll peace out.
consciousness is hard because it requires a special kind of belief. we humans believe a lot of things, but this one is difficult. all is one, and that one thing is all. everything contains gender. opposites are the same thing. these are all easy things that are hard to understand/believe.
Dont pretend like you dont believe anything is step 1.
The biggest benefit of term "consciousness" is that when I see something like "LLMs are not conscious" I immediately know that the author doesn't know what he is talking about.
In that case the author is simply saying the LLM is a p zombie, why does he not know what he's talking about?
They are saying something similar to "LLM has no soul", depending on context it might something insightful or (in technical/scientific context) they are making fool of themselves.
Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
Praise be to AI. In 2025, inspired by AI, I feel that I have finally built a complete and unified worldview.
Are we living in a virtual illusion? Are there higher-dimensional rulers, gods, or immortals in the universe? What exactly are the human soul and consciousness?
I feel that these questions now share a single coherent answer. What I have written here is my answer regarding the soul and consciousness.
> What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution
> When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
I don't see how this is different from someone saying that a concoction of random ingredients will turn into a magic potion.
The big question is how a group of cells (or potentially something else) becomes sentient. Accepting "because it would be useful" as valid explanation would be the same as accepting Darwinism as a religion rather than science.
If this comment is serious, then you may have the beginnings of AI psychosis
I would say "AI psychosis" is a very healthy disease to have. I mean, how should people react to seeing a clump of hardware produce coherent text at a level many actual humans cannot? The spread of reactions we are seeing in people-the disagreements, the extreme sycophancy on one end, and the abject denial on the other, is within parameters.
My life was wrecked by religious dogma, the type that is sustained on "big mysteries" and from there goes directly to imposing an odious recipe for life. So there is consolation to be had on seeing a big mystery crumble and on hearing the outcry. May another mystery crumble on my lifetime.
Computers create coherent math results at levels far beyond humans. A world calculator vs. a number calculator isn't that different.
"Praise be to AI" sounds like something you shouldn't reach in the beginnings of AI psychosis. Same with "I've found a simple answer to the nature of consciousness and the question of the existence of Gods". At that point you've got to in be pretty deep.
Haha, right? The lads talking like he’s the only one to have figured this out and it’s the truth! Philosophising with AI is so mid. This guys the general public.
No, we don't even need that. When we realise that we all project consciousness claims on each other from what we observe as zeitgeist now, just to do credit assignment, most of our circular debates will disappear. But this won't happen since many powerful entities in the world ride on the moral ambiguity, and this will hold them accountable.
What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences.
The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
>It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
It's that you can't even measure it, since the way it's defined as a subjective experience, no external measure could ever capture it. This is what gives rise to the p-zombie argument.
To get rid of that you have to accept "functional qualia" as basically equivalent to qualia, which solves the p-zombie issue and resolves half of the hard problem. From there, explaining consciousness is no "harder" than explaining other scale-depedent phenomenon in complex systems like LLMs: still hard, but at least tractable with scientific measurements and experiments.
There's no single proof that after a system do pass some complexity threshold consciousness develops itself and inevitably generates the "I".
Dolphins and other creatures are likely to have similarly complex systems without “inevitably” generating a concept of “I”.
> What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
that's the easy problem
would you care to link together 'complex IO systems inevitably degenerate to seperating self from environment as part of optimizing calculations' and your three questions? it isnt immediately clear why the concept of self answers the idea of god.
Comically wrong.
Quantum holography will someday demonstrate an analog information capacity of the quantum domain far exceeding the spin disposition.
Our minds use this domain by mass entanglement within our very own neurons.
You don’t want to hear it, though our minds may entangle and an entire culture exists among us who can traverse and manipulate the consciousness of others. They are responsible for the “voices in our heads”, and these are related to a great deal of very unscientific activity in our world.
All of that occult demonology you smarties scoff at yet plagues everyone embroiled in “power” is based upon this phenomena. We are not alone in our own minds, and more than a few of you will be forced to confront this at some point in your lives.
Falsifiable? Theories, not existential reality are concerned with what minds may falsify. Science lags behind reality, not the other way around.
As much as I disliked TFA, I disliked this comment, which is so arrogantly self-assured of its own 0-evidence theories, even more.
I was with you thru "mass entanglement". Each of us is a distributed network of quantum-interface nodes. But I'd be very careful about attributing specific describable phenomena to these networks.
To me it seems consciousness is a log file that records the results of brain activities originating from different parts of the brain.
This log file is loaded into working memory.
I have aspergers and that's sort of how I experience my own consciousness, the result of different brain processes, summarised in a log.
People are mainly subconscious and not that many things propagate to consciousness and get recorded in the log, because it's a bottleneck.
Instead of recording the whole process of emotionally tagging things, people just "feel" something without reasoning. Only the emotional tag or intuition is recorded in the log but not the process to get to it.
Non-verbal communication is emitted and processed subconsciously, which is hard for me because of the autism and I arrived to the conclusion that fundamentally human consciousness is a spectrum and how much is recorded into it depends on neurodiversity.