If we can't even get a solid consensus on what consciousness is we're not going to have a theory for it anytime soon.
Every time this comes up we have a split between actual neuroscience and everyone's subjective interpretation of consciousness.
That is what the damn problem is.
This is like saying since we don't understand gravity full, we should not study it.
How can we test the existence of a wholly subjective/interior experience? This seems to relate to, for example, if it's possible to measure and quantify pain (or pleasure I suppose) objectively.
https://beyond.asu.edu/workshop/unsolved-problems-gravity
We don't go around declaring that "No talk about gravity till we know everything about it and have solved all open problems."
Conjecture!
That fact makes objective investigation very hard. If I don't know whether a person is a p-zombie, I cannot know whether any objective events cause his consciousness. And if it's my consciousness we're talking about, I cannot be there to investigate the objective causes of it.
This is what differentiates consciousness from all other phenomena. Gravity may or may not "really" exist; all I seek to explain is why objects appear to attract. On the other hand, consciousness certainly exists (you can test this out by trying to doubt it, in which case you'll have a conscious experience of doubt), and the only phenomena I can explain it with are objective and thus may themselves not really exist.
We can also note that your argument that "consciousness certainly exists" (which actually only applies to my consciousness) does not validate any particular belief about it.
And do you agree with naasking's claim above that it is meaningful to refute your own consciousness?
But when you say "consciousness exists", you mean something different than when you say "cars exist". We both know cars don't really exist, fundamentally, but if you believe in irreducible subjectivity then you believe that consciousness fundamentally exists in the same way that quarks and fields exist.
So I do walk around and claim to be conscious just like I walk around and talk about the drive to work every morning, but I always know in the back of my mind that these are merely convenient labels, not things that actually exist. They are merely shorthands for a very complicated description of objective reality.
Does it seem to you that anything at all is happening (e.g., that there seems to be a world around you, or that you seem to be having a thought)? Perhaps you're mistaken and it doesn't "really" seem, but only seems to seem. Nonetheless, it is that very seeming that I'm calling consciousness.
If I may ask: do you have significant experience with meditation? I suspect this conversation becomes easier when both parties have spent considerable time in the space between thoughts.
Requiring experience to acquire knowledge is a completely unnecessary assumption. Only sensory perception and an automaton are needed to generate thoughts, at which point we can simply ask, how do we know we are not exactly such an automaton?
This is why I ask: does it seem to you that anything at all is happening? Your answer cannot tell me whether you are conscious (or a p-zombie who is lying), but it may help you see what I'm getting at. If you ask me to be more precise (about "seem" or "happening"), I cannot. I can only trust that you are able to understand me.
If it does seem that something is happening, that is consciousness. If you answer that it's an illusion, and it may not really seem, but only seem to seem, that's still good enough.
So I can't tell you "how" I can be certain that something seems to be happening, and I cannot prove it to anybody else, but it certainly does seem.
I simply do not understand what it means to doubt or deny that it seems like something is happening (though it's perfectly clear to me what it means to doubt that something is actually happening). When I see (and even accept) a proof of it, will I say "well it sure seems like something is happening, but I'm wrong, so it doesn't really seem like anything is happening?"
Perhaps my imagination is limited. I thank you for trying!
When direct perception implies a false conclusion, that's an illusion. What else could "seems" actually mean?
So now we're down to the meaning of the word "perception". I hope you also agree that there's no need to imbue some subjective subtext into this word, so where else can subjectivity hide?
I am not sure that your second question accurately represents naasking's views, but I will say that while things like mood changes and drugs raise questions as to how well I know even my own consciousness, I don't really question that there is something there (I will get to the 'really' bit presently.) That self-knowledge on my part does not, however, extend to your consciousness (or anyone else's.) It has belatedly occurred to me that you are trying to draw a line between everyone's consciousness, as being something that you say certainly exists, and everything else, that might not "really" exist. If so, then you cannot do it: any argument that distinguishes knowledge of the external world from your self-knowledge of your own consciousness puts other people's consciousness on a par with the rest of the external world. As far as I can tell, that makes the position indistinguishable from solipsism. My take on solipsism is that you cannot prove or disprove it: it stands as a demonstration of the limits of reason, and for all practical purposes, you have to take the methodological assumption that it is false simply in order for the conversation to continue - anything we conclude is, at best, only true up to solipsism (or up to being in a simulation, which I think we both agree is, for all practical purposes, equivalent to solipsism in this regard.) This, by the way, is why I included 'really' in "I don't really question that there is something there."
I recognize your point about solipsism. I am not certain (except for practical purposes) about anyone else's consciousness.
Perhaps it would help if I describe what seem to be phases of belief about consciousness (or perhaps it will merely sound presumptuous and not help at all...). One way this progression can happen is through meditation, which I see as the process of consciousness becoming increasingly aware of itself.
1. I can doubt my own consciousness. How do I know I'm not an automaton? This seems to be naasking's position. From past experience, I trust that it's not merely rhetorical. There is genuine uncertainty about any consciousness, and proofs of its nonexistence can be satisfying.
2. "Oh, THAT!" It is no longer meaningful to doubt my own consciousness. I may be wrong about its details, but the sheer fact of experience is indeed a fact and not an assumption. Attempting to doubt my own consciousness is nonsensical, because I recognize that (my) doubt occurs in consciousness.
3. Various features of conscious experience are exposed as illusory. I've never actually experienced the passage of time; it is always now, and a present memory and anticipation only suggest something called "time." I've never actually experienced a self; it used to seem that monktastic was recognizing consciousness, but now it's clear that consciousness is recognizing monktastic (monktastic is, after all, a conglomeration of memories, bodily textures and sights, etc.; whereas consciousness is that which experiences those). These are not merely intellectual understandings.
4. ...
It's remarkably hard to have conversations across these sorts of boundaries. Perhaps naasking is right, and what I am calling a progression is actually a regression. I'll leave that for each to decide for him/herself.
All I mean to say is that in (3), it is not satisfying to objectify consciousness. Yes, we may identify (seemingly) flawless correlations between objective phenomena and consciousness, but they do not constitute any sort of "explanation" for consciousness.
Perhaps all I am really saying is this: we both recognize that any objective explanation of consciousness is only true "up to solipsism / simulation," but for me, that asterisk is a showstopper and not just a curiosity that we can punt on. Not that we should stop exploring these things (and taking them seriously for practical purposes) -- any more than we should stop painting or dancing.
They may perhaps show that our previous expectations for an "explanation" were nonsensical. Compare this debate over consciousness against the history of vitalism. The same progression of ideas posed to justify some special ontological category for life, but where are all the vitalists now? In retrospect, do their arguments seem at all reasonable? How do they compare to present arguments about consciousness? In retrospect, will future people find these perspectives just as wrong?
Time, space, matter, objective reality: these are all inferences that rely on your not paying close enough attention to a remarkable sleight of hand your consciousness is pulling on you. Once you manage to do this, it indeed becomes nonsensical to look for "explanations" of consciousness in terms of the very things it abstracted into seeming existence.
So while I can't refute Last Thursdayism, given it's ontological commitments, it has such a low probability on the scale of possible explanations for reality that I need not concern myself with it (see Solomonoff Induction for justifying this logical ordering of hypotheses).
As for the "feeling" of time passing being some kind of ontological test, I honestly don't know what you think this proves. This "feeling" is just the competition between signals from your perceptions and signals from your memory of your perceptions. Such a comparison is trivially present in any feedback circuit, which entails that something time-like does indeed exist.
If you are truly seeking enlightenment, rather than satisfaction, you probably should avoid a priori positions that rule out a whole class of possible answers from consideration.
Taking a few steps back in the conversation, the reason it seems so silly to doubt that there's an objective basis for consciousness is that we've found an objective basis to basically everything else we've bothered to investigate. I claim that this is a false analogy. Though I'm apparently not good at communicating why, it amounts basically to this: you can be certain of your own consciousness, but of nothing else. Your consciousness and everything else are not on equal metaphysical footing.
That fact doesn't necessarily entail that it cannot be captured objectively. So your conjecture is that our apparent subjectivity is irreducible, that we must simply accept subjectivity into our ontology, and that's a stretch.
In a dream, you may similarly find that certain "objective" phenomena correlate near-perfectly with consciousness. Does this constitute consciousness being "captured objectively" by them? If not, why is the situation any different here, where we cannot be certain we're not in a simulation? (Notice that my argument does not depend on the likelihood of the simulation hypothesis, but just the possibility.)
I think guys like the Buddha were right: for that, I have to sit down for a good long while and allow consciousness to become more fully aware of itself. And if it cannot be communicated to others, that's perhaps just how it goes.
This is a pretty shallow interpretation of your perceptions I think. A Cartesian cogito argument doesn't prove that you exist because it assumes the conclusion (and so does not prove subjectivity exists).
A non-fallacious cogito argument is, "this is a thought, therefore thoughts exist". Where does the subjectivity arise in this proof?
At best, you can prove "this is a thought asserting the existence of subjectivity, therefore thoughts asserting the existence of subjectivity exist". This clearly does not entail that this belief is actually true.
So in conclusion, I dispute your certainty that consciousness exists. Many things seem certain at first blush, but turn out to be false upon closer inspection.
And if you want something more concrete to chew on, I recommend reading [1], which is a neuroscientific theory that attempts to account for our apparent experience of subjectivity.
[1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
Ultimately, either your meaning of "subjectivity" can be captured by an objective description, in which case you and I agree on the nature of subjectivity, or it cannot be so captured and you agree with the meaning of subjectivity in the philosophy of mind.
Finally, the mechanics of metacognition merely require an additional level of indirection, no magical secret sauce like subjectivity is required. We can even perform metalogical reasoning of a similar sort within basic formal systems like arithmetic via embeddings. I don't know why you think a whole new category of cognition is necessary.
http://m.nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/we-need-conscious-...
> In fact, even our sensation of the present moment is a construct of the conscious mind. We see evidence for this in various experiments and case studies. Patients with agnosia who have damage to object-recognition parts of the visual cortex can’t name an object they see, but can grab it. If given an envelope, they know to orient their hand to insert it through a mail slot. But patients cannot perform the reaching task if experimenters introduce a time delay between showing the object and cueing the test subject to reach for it. Evidently, consciousness is related not to sophisticated information processing per se; as long as a stimulus immediately triggers an action, we don’t need consciousness. It comes into play when we need to maintain sensory information over a few seconds.