I'm not being sarcastic here. Maybe there are people that don't have subjective experience, just like there are people that can hear colors.
Hold on. Did you just claim that people with aphantasia (ie: possibly an inability to feed causal models from someplace (probably the neocortex? IANANS, just work with some) back to the visual cortex and get the visual cortex's "portrayal" of the conditional simulation embodied in the model) have no subjective experience?
What if someone has no "inner eye", but does have "inner ears", an "inner tongue", "inner hands" and all the rest? Or do you group all possible "inner senses" used for imagining "what something is like" into "qualia" without separating them into distinct functionalities that are in bijection with the available physical senses?
Because you might have actually said something interesting here!
I don't think so. I wasn't talking about imagination (as in: thinking of a cube and rotating it in your mind), but rather about experiencing the input from my physical eyes. It's as if there's someone inside my head that experiences and feels what I physically see. Of course, this doesn't help: the homunculus model is thoroughly debunked. [1]
> Or do you group all possible "inner senses" used for imagining "what something is like" into "qualia" without separating them into distinct functionalities that are in bijection with the available physical senses?
There are qualia like anxiety or restlessness that are not linked to physical senses, so that's a no on the bijection. I have no idea whether those "inner eyes, ears, etc." that link imagination to physical senses are related to qualia – it's so difficult to imagine myself into different minds. Besides, coming up with an objective, clear, non-recursive definition for subjective experience is way above my paygrade.
Another random thought that I just had: People with depression sometimes hurt themselves physically, because that's the only way they can still feel something (according to them). Maybe this is related to a dampened subjective experience, which allows only extreme inputs to be experienced?
No, you only imagine that. And I'm being serious: people who aren't brought up being told that consciousness is like having a little homunculus in your head simply never feel "as if" there was one.
>There are qualia like anxiety or restlessness that are not linked to physical senses, so that's a no on the bijection.
I would normally call those emotions rather than qualia. Hmmm. Would you say the "qualia-ness" of things comes from the internal perception that the "feelings" are external to the person who feels, and impinge on them?
>Another random thought that I just had: People with depression sometimes hurt themselves physically, because that's the only way they can still feel something (according to them). Maybe this is related to a dampened subjective experience, which allows only extreme inputs to be experienced?
But dampened affect (dampened emotional signaling in the brain) is already a known and seemingly somewhat understood symptom of depression.
So you're saying people brought up differently are p-zombies? Because that's the only way I can interpret that.
Feeling like there's a homonculous is fundamentally what experiencing the world is like for me, and has been since long before I was able to understand complex philosophical questions about conciousness.
No, I'm saying that people brought up differently actually identify our selves with our actual, physical bodies, and don't imagine/visualize a tiny little figurine in our head. We have a different experience of the world, not no experience.
To me it seems weirder to say, "When I get bitten by a dog, the little homunculus gets a loud alarm ringing in his little room saying, 'BITTEN BY DOG!'" than "When I get bitten by a dog, its teeth feel sharp and painful."
You're assuming the conclusion that consciousness isn't just processing external stimuli with internal state to generate output signals, just a particular form of it.
Yes, that is my assumption, because that is what I observe (only in my own mind, of course – I don't know how to observe it in others). I'm not alone, many (most? all?) people are claiming to observe that.
1. It isn't a valid observation, because you don't actually observe that consciousness is not part of the process of processing external stimuli. At best, you can observe that consciousness exists.
2. It isn't a valid conclusion even if it were a valid observation. Or do you also conclude that water magically breaks pencils and reconstitutes them when they are removed [1]?
[1] http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000KUS4vG.ZoqQ/s/860...
To me, experience itself is fundamentally a separate thing from any process that might cause it to occur, and I don't know how to conceive of it any other way.
That you cannot conceive of it does not make it inconceivable. In fact, scientific theories [1] exist to explain exactly the functional purpose of consciousness.
[1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
True, but I find it sufficiently difficult to conceive of that I'm not convinced anyone else can. If you claim to be able to, can you explain it to me?
To me, saying experience "is" brain processing is like saying the image on the screen at a cinema "is" projector operation. One may cause the other, but they're still separate things.
> scientific theories [1] exist to explain exactly the functional purpose of consciousness.
But that doesn't explain the mechanism for conciousness to occur, it just explains why it might exist.
It does explain the mechanism actually. The mind builds representations for predictive purposes, it builds a representation of attention because that increases predictive power in achieving goals, a representation of attention is consciousness.
Certainly it's not sufficiently detailed such that you can build one, but that's not really needed to make it conceivable.
You seem to be describing that step as "representation of attention", but I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.
Certainly it's lacking in sufficient detail to build an artificial consciousness, but it's not lacking in empirical data and testable hypotheses. It's also a perfect example of how subjective experience could be an illusion that exists, and yet still convince us that it's in some sense fundamental.
Hmm, what if both, the physical mechanism and the subjective qualia are simply intertwined in a way, that can not be deduced any further?
Maybe it's a little like the relation between gravitational forces and curved space time. Both are basically the same thing. But if you're used to live in one system, it's hard to imagine how it feels to see things from the other perspective.
Still there may be a lot of value to the complementary theory. Much like the GTR opened up a whole new range of physical applications, a physical theory of consciousness may lead to computer systems that we will have to attribute being conscious the same way as we do with our fellow human beings - just because both will follow the same fundamental laws of consciousness.
Now it's possible neither of those things can actually exist, but the fact that I can imagine them demonstrates the distinction I'm making.
Hmm, really? How? To be honest, I can't. Honestly I think this is just a meaningless mind trick. The more I think about it, the less the notion of a p-zombie really makes sense to me. If a p-zombie existed, and I could never really tell the difference from the outside, this gives rise to many blind-alley-models of the world, for example solipsism: Maybe all others are just p-zombies and maybe I'm the only thing that really exists in the sphere of consciousness (=soul?). I can never know for sure. But if it's true, then there's not really much room for any further discussion.
So I have to assume that everything that behaves like being conscious in fact has a consciousness - even if it isn't even aware of its being conscious.
And the point isn't whether such a thing is physically possible in our universe, merely that being able to conceive of such a thing identifies the distinction we're drawing. There is a notion of experience separate from the physical process that may cause it, because for any such process, we can imagine a world where it does not actually experience anything.
Or being able to manipulate learned concepts. Like word2vec turns words into vectors that can be combined in complicated ways. E.g. words for colors will be different based on what the colors are associated with (e.g. red is associated with "danger", or green is associated with "nature", etc.)
Make this process much more complex, and intelligent, and then ask it what it "feels". It will probably give responses very similar to humans. It "feels" complicated internal experiences that it can't completely explain or understand.
It certainly wouldn't feel like it's "just combining stimuli with internal state to get output signals". Being an algorithm doesn't feel like you are an algorithm, from the inside.
Being able to mimic a human's behavior is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having subjective experience.
> Being an algorithm doesn't feel like you are an algorithm, from the inside.
How do you know that? How do you know that an algorithm "feels" anything at all, the way humans do?
I think that's not the point he tried to make. It's just that it happens that we're human and thus it's easier for us to relate to human-like experiences/feelings. An algorithm is not limited to that.
If we accept that our "feeling like something" is just an emergent phenomenon of our complex model of reality I see no logical reason why we shouldn't ascribe any sufficiently complex model of reality an inherent feeling. Due to our limited physical configuration we will never have access to all kinds of feelings. Much like we will never know how it feels like to be a bat.
I am arguing that it is. Once you move past the "giant lookup table" idea to actual algorithms that explain human behavior. In fact once you find the smallest such algorithm, it must necessarily be an exact simulation of a human brain, and all of our internal experience.
>How do you know that an algorithm "feels" anything at all, the way humans do?
It must feel exactly the same way humans do if it produces exactly the same output.
Interesting point, not everyone has an inner eye, see aphantasia.