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Comment by aaimnr | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure your argument makes sense. To say there exists conscious experience doesn't add anything ontologically to 'it's self-evident that there are thoughts'. The self-evidence of thoughts and conscious experience are the same thing.

Your statement "There are just thoughts with 'I am experiencing X' content" could be rightly used as a counterargument to "'I' exist" statement. It could also be used against 'there exists pure consciousness without content' statement. But to say that may be used against 'there exists experience of thoughts as opposed to just eg. electrical impulses' doesn't seem to make sense.

The latter doesn't mean that the experience and thoughts are two different things, is it what bothers you?

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> To say there exists conscious experience doesn't add anything ontologically to 'it's self-evident that there are thoughts'.

So you consider qualia and thoughts to be identical? Because I'm drawing a distinction between them and saying the former doesn't exist, while the latter do exist. They certainly seem qualitatively distinct since there's so much focus on qualia in the hard problem.

The problem with 'qualia' and 'consciousness' is that these concepts seem to reify something existing separately from their content. The other problem here is that 'thought' is a complex and compound entity while 'qualia' seems to imply something atomic. So let's not use this concept.

Just realised that I seriously intended to argue with you about probably the single most mysterious thing known to humanity. Feels stupid.

Anyway, what is a thought in your opinion? Is it just a physical thing? What is 'experience of red'? An illusion? (Again, I feel stupid trying to achieve something here :)

> The other problem here is that 'thought' is a complex and compound entity while 'qualia' seems to imply something atomic. So let's not use this concept.

Funny, I see it as exactly the opposite, as would any materialist I'd hazard. "Qualia" is a term describing a vague, poorly defined concept that's inherently intertwined with our complex perceptual systems and with our internal model of the world, and this dizzyingly complex aggregate leads us to falsely conclude we have subjective experience.

"Thought" is merely a mentally held belief, a proposition inferred from ones perceptions.

Well, when you analyse thought as something you experience, you'll come to realise eg. that it can be verbal or visual (check out Temple Grandin) and is always compound. You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia.

> You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible.

Agreed, but this will necessarily be true of any objective, scientific account of consciousness. For instance, subatomic particles are as abstracted from our everyday macroscopic world as possible.

> Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia.

I don't think we should conflate experience and perception. Materialists of course acknowledge we have perception, they simply deny the subjective experience that non-materialists infer from it.

Of course, this fuzzy boundary is where our natural language often fails us, so when I equate a thought with a proposition, I of course don't mean a proposition in English or any other language, I mean some abstract representation that structurally conforms to a proposition in a given mind.

The structure this thought takes isn't objective, in the sense that it's the same for every person, because the correspondence of that structure to that proposition is determined by the mind that interprets it, just like a program in x86 machine code isn't the same program when run on an ARM processor -- equivalent semantics have different structures on different CPUs, and equivalent structures have different semantics on different CPUs.

Qualia and thoughts are distinct, but to say the former doesn't exist just seems nonsensical to me. Qualia are self-evident by their very nature. I look at something red and I experience the appearance of red, and I don't know how someone who experiences that can say it doesn't happen. I could believe the red thing doesn't exist, and that the experience is caused by something else, but to say my experience of a red thing doesn't exist is just clearly false.

> Qualia and thoughts are distinct, but to say the former doesn't exist just seems nonsensical to me.

I'm sure it does, just like it probably seems nonsensical to deny that water breaks pencils. I mean, just look at it, you can just see it for yourself. How could you possibly deny the evidence of your own eyes? It's obvious to someone who is ignorant of any broader context, that water simply must break pencils and reconstitute them. We are likewise ignorant of the broader context of what constitutes consciousness, and we're all just flapping our gums making exactly these same fallacious arguments.

Like I initially said, "doesn't exist"/illusion has a specific meaning. It doesn't mean that we don't have perceptions or that perceptions don't convey some kind of knowledge, but merely that perception is not truly subjective, and so qualia don't deserve distinguished ontological status. Their apparent irreducibility is an illusion, a mental trick, like the many optical and auditory illusions to which our brain is susceptible.

I highly recommend reading the paper on the attention schema model of consciousness [1] for an idea of how a real scientific theory might explain this trick.

[1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

>I'm sure it does, just like it probably seems nonsensical to deny that water breaks pencils.

But you're not saying that the pencil is not broken, you're saying I can't see a broken pencil.

>but merely that perception is not trulky subjective

I'm not sure what distinction you're making? What would it mean for something to be "truly subjective"?

>I highly recommend reading the paper on the attention schema model of consciousness

Hmm, the paper makes some interesting observations about the nature of awareness as part of the mind model, and it explains how a p-zombie could believe it has a subjective experience of that model.

...but I know I'm not a p-zombie. Even if I can't prove it to you, I know I definitely have subjective experience.

> But you're not saying that the pencil is not broken, you're saying I can't see a broken pencil.

No, I'm saying you're inferring a false conclusion (the pencil is broken/we have subjectivity) from an inherently flawed perception (I see a broken pencil sitting in water/I perceive subjectivity).

For the sake of argument, let's assume the mental model of the paper I linked to. Our pseudo-perception of our own subjectivity is really a false conclusion we infer from a differential between the signal we receive from our perceptions of the outside world, with the signal from our internal model of ourselves perceiving the outside world. The constant switching back and forth as these signals consecutively dominate each other, combined with our slow perceptual response time relative to this switching, yields the illusion of subjectivity, similar to how a uniprocessor computer yields the illusion of real parallelism by context switching processes thousands of times per second. It's still just an illusion though.

> I'm not sure what distinction you're making? What would it mean for something to be "truly subjective"?

Subjective in the ontological sense, in that it cannot be reduced to an account consisting purely of third-person objective facts.

Certainly we perceive a type of "epistemic subjectivity" that's inherent to our distinct perspectives, but that's not true subjectivity in the ontological sense, like qualia.

> ...but I know I'm not a p-zombie. Even if I can't prove it to you, I know I definitely have subjective experience.

Materialistic theories of consciousness necessarily deny the conceivability of p-zombies, so you have nothing to prove. Any system with the same information processing structure as the model described in the paper (or whatever the "correct" model may be) would necessarily have consciousness. There is no non-functional "secret sauce" by which you can construct a p-zombie.

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