Seems like a reasonable question to beg. Unless you want to claim that CPUs are conscious or that humans are not, something is different.
It may seem solipsist, but if you want to make a rigorous reproducible experiment with empirical observations, we have just as much reason to assume a CPU has some form of animal sentience as we do with an insect or a bird which reacts in simple ways to external stimuli. As of yet there's no compelling reason to believe this is either correct or incorrect.
Occam's razor doesn't even work very well here. Does it require fewer assumptions to say that a machine that reacts to external stimuli is less conscious than an equivalent animal, or does it require fewer assumptions to say that this behavior indicates consciousness regardless of the media it operates on?
We have no idea if something is really different. We only have assumptions.
Are you sure? Perhaps you came up with the idea of qualia?
Qualia is essentially what it feels like to experience data. When we see 700nm light, we experience red. When a computer sees 700nm light through a CCD or CMOS, it experiences #FF0000. Does this mean it has qualia? How do we make this distinction? Just from how convincing it sounds when they put it to words?
If it's merely self-reporting, does that mean people weren't conscious until vocabulary for qualia existed? Because that was about 200,000 years for anatomically modern humans. How about animals? They can't report qualia. We essentially are no closer to explaining or defining consciousness at all thanks to qualia.
If I may hazard a baseless conjecture, I'd bet qualia is an illusion. It's still only data. Just like when a thermistor measures some temperature, it's not really communicating the essence of Kelvin to a microprocessor. It's not communicating the frequency of the movement of molecules which is temperature. It's reporting a difference in voltage, which is read by an ADC, which gets assigned a hexadecimal value, which gets interpreted by all kinds of software in all sorts of ways. This sounds suspiciously like qualia, but of course we can't prove or disprove it any more than we can prove or disprove if other consciousness exists besides our own.
Qualia is just data wearing intangible, spiritual clothes. This is just like the classic stoned college freshmen discussion of whether the colors I see are the colors you see, or if the way you perceive red is my green, or whatever. It produced nothing useful then and it produces nothing useful now. All impossible to prove either way, just like solipsism.
I don't think the notion that qualia is an illusion makes any sense. If it's an illusion, that means that we somehow have the perception of it without it actually happening. But that very perception is qualia. It's like saying that we don't really perceive red, it's just an illusion, we just think we perceive it. But the thinking is the act.
It's different from your stoned college discussion because we know that something is going on. I have the sensation of being me, in a way that known physics can't even address. I'm fairly certain other people have this as well, based on how they talk and behave. I can't quantify it and I can't even really describe it, but it's clearly real. In fact, my own sensation of being me is the thing I know with the most certainty. Everything else could potentially be faked, but not this.
Name one program that is written in the programming language that eventually displaces C/C++ as the system language of choice.
Don't you see how inane this question is? On balance of evidence, consciousness is reducible to an algorithm unless you want to actually allow consciousness into your ontology.
There are tons of things that have been created/observed/proven only in the last 100 years. The fact that Bob from the year 1700 wasn't able to put on a demonstration didn't make them false.
Is there a term for this (is it simply one of the items in the list of logical fallacies), because holy cow I find the need to point this out several times a day, and it seems to be becoming much more common recently.
If one does exist, then that would be truly remarkable.
By the Bekenstein Bound, the human brain is at best a finite state automoton. Unless you wish to appeal to some supernatural element in consciousness, like dualism, consciousness is reducible to an algorithm.
b. The commenter below has a point. We don't know whether consciousness is theoretically reducible to an algorithm or not. All we know is that we can't at the moment, and we don't even know where to begin. So the answer is unknown.
Yes it is. A system with finite volume can only contain finite information. A system with finite information can be encoded as a finite state automoton. Our brain is contained within a finite volume, ergo, our brain is at best a finite state automoton.
> We don't know whether consciousness is theoretically reducible to an algorithm or not.
We do unless you want to rewrite physics. Which some people do with panpsychism. There seems little compelling reason to though.
Can you explain why this would be the case? (Or point me in the right direction.)
ETA: Algorithm will require quantum computations to be feasible though.
It's possible that an algorithm which behaves as a human experiences consciousness identically to a human, as some fundamental property of reality, or it's possible that it does not. We cannot know, because consciousness is not something that we can observe.
It seems as strange to me to imagine that we could have two identically behaving beings, one with consciousness, and one without; as imagining that we could have identically behaving beings, one with eyesight and one without.
(For the sake of argument, I assume that I know my mother so well that her behavior will be indistinguishable for all intents and purposes from my simulation of her in my head.)
> I assume that I know my mother so well that her behavior will be indistinguishable for all intents and purposes from my simulation of her in my head.
Then you are running perfect simulation of your mother and some parts of her environment (such that she'll not freak out finding herself in nothingness) in your brain, so yes, she'll be conscious.
You might suppose that any physically identical entity must necessarily experience consciousness, and that may even be true, but this does not preclude imagining a p-zombie, any more than a knowledge of anatomy and aerodynamics precludes imagining a dragon.
I can only suppose that you imagine someone like you with a textual annotation above his/her head "I don't experience red color", and not trying to imagine what it is like to be such a person.
Doesn't it defy the purpose of a thought experiment? You don't imagine conscious experiences, but imagine descriptions of presence or absence of conscious experiences.
ETA: Using your analogy it is like imagining pigeon with a label "Dragon" above its head, and then concluding that there's no logical reasons that dragons can't fly or exist.
When you imagine a "real" dragon and then ponders on this imagination, you have to conclude that your imagined physics must be different for it to work.
Of course I can't imagine being a p-zombie, because there is no experience of being a p-zombie, that's the point. When I imagine a p-zombie, it is someone else.
>explain why red-p-zombie-you insist on being able to experience red color, while in fact he/she doesn't experience it.
They would say they experience it for the exact same reasons a non-p-zombie does. A chemical process in their brain produces that reaction. The difference is that they never actually have that experience, they just act as if they did.
I say that your label is incorrect and your "p-zombie" experiences everything as we do. Prove me wrong. Imagine being nothing.
Otherwise you are just attaching label "dragon" to a pigeon.
ETA: Have you noticed circularity of the argument? You need to accept that physicalism isn't true to be sure that your label "There's darkness inside" can be true, as you can't really imagine p-zombie. Partial p-zombie just makes it obvious. And physicalism requires less epicycles.
Ah sorry I missed that part of the argument. Yes, I agree that I can't imagine such a thing, because I don't think experience can be subdivided in that way. Anything a consciousness can perceive, it must experience.
I could however imagine a person whose brain perceived and reacted to the colour red in certain ways, but never became conscious of that perception, and merely experiences vision with all red things having the same qualia as another colour. It's quite a weird thing to imagine, but if you're trying to assert that it's impossible, I will do so to disagree.
> You can't imagine p-zombie, you imagine someone with attached label "There's darkness inside" (as Chalmers had put it).
Can you imagine a non-conscious rock? Or does the rock just have a similar label attached? If you believe one can imagine such a rock, then I can imagine such a human in the same way.
If not, then your imagination must be teeming with errant consciousnesses.
So you are adding more epicycles.
> merely experiences vision with all red things having the same qualia as another colour.
Swapped qualia qualia argument. I can answer that, but I think I already know how you will answer.
ETA: Or do you mean you see all greens as greens and all reds as greens? Will it not change your behavior when you'll notice that you are confidently calling very similar colors by very different names and cannot say why are you doing that?
> Can you imagine a non-conscious rock?
I can imagine a rock. I can guess that the rock is not conscious because it doesn't demonstrate any signs of consciousness, unlike you and me. I am pretty sure I can't change whether the rock is conscious or not by the power of my imagination.
Thank you for conversation.
Not really? I don't conceive of consciousness experience as something that can be meaningfully separated from the perception of that consciousness. For a consciousness, perception is experience.
However, I can imagine a perceiving system which does not have any consciousness, and thus experiences nothing.
> Will it not change your behavior when you'll notice that you are confidently calling very similar colors by very different names and cannot say why are you doing that?
In this hypothetical, the "partial p-zombie" cannot distinguish them consciously, so they would not do that. This is the closest thing I can conceive of to what you described.
>I am pretty sure I can't change whether the rock is conscious or not by the power of my imagination.
But the rock exists within your imagination, you have total power over it?
I can imagine a system which is presumably too simple to have any conscious experiences. But the only thing that really matters is the lack of first person experience of such a system. I can't imagine being such system, and that is what matters, if we are talking about consciousness and not about some words which are used as a substitute for a real conscious experiences.
> In this hypothetical, the "partial p-zombie" cannot distinguish them consciously, so they would not do that.
Let's suppose, for simplicity, that I don't experience color differences at all. All I experience is brightness. But my brain works exactly the same as yours. I see two grey cups and hear myself saying "Do you prefer red or green?" Am I not conscious of this discrepancy too? Am I also not conscious of the lack of any clues when I'm asked to select one of the things which looks exactly the same to me? Sorry, sounds like complete bullshit to me. I will prefer physical consciousness over such brain-damaged metaphysical one.
BTW, are you sure you are experiencing colors? You will not notice if your point of view is true.
> But the rock exists within your imagination, you have total power over it?
Sure, I can image a rock which has supernatural soul and conscious experiences. Why all the p-zombie fuss, when it clearly shows that dualism is true? That's sarcasm of course. But why p-zombie argument is any better? You can't even conceive what is really matters in p-zombie - the lack of first person experience. You can only conceive some images like "dark inside" or a textual description of that.
Physicalism is based on intuition too, but as I said it requires less epicycles.
First person experiences exist. First person experiences are uniquely determined by physical processes. The end.
It kind of does. The argument goes: if you can imagine a p-zombie, then in your mind it's possible that consciousness is not tied to physical qualities. Therefore, physicalism would necessarily be false.
It took me awhile to accept this, but the solution is simple: p-zombies can't exist because I can't imagine them. And this is because consciousness must serve a functional purpose, and so p-zombies would be distinguishable from humans.
I mean, yes? I tend to assume physicalism, but I don't take it as axiomatic.
>And this is because consciousness must serve a functional purpose
I don't see why that has to be true?
It must be true if you accept physicalism.
I can imagine a world where there are no physical laws, everything is entirely random, and by an astonishing coincidence it just so happens to behave exactly like the world we observe in every single way.
Does that mean it's possible that there are no physical laws and everything is completely random? Strictly speaking yes, it is possible, but the odds are indescribably remote, and it's a completely useless hypothesis anyway.
I can imagine a p-zombie which somehow comes up with the idea of consciousness and starts discussing it despite having no experience of it, but it would have to be some bizarre random occurrence, and is not really useful to consider.
Just because we experience something that feels like a decision-making process does not mean that experience is part of the process itself.
For all we know, our consciousness is just a spectator along for the ride.
But the point of the idea of p-zombies isn't to describe something that plausibly exists. It's thought experiment to highlight the hard problem of consciousness, by demonstrating how the notion of experience is separable in our conception from any physical process we can imagine. That is, regardless of how our brain physically comes to behave as if it were conscious, we can still conceive of a version of it that does not actually experience consciousness.
This is because, at least to me, conscious experience is something entirely unlike any physical process. I can conceive of it being the result of a physical process, but nonetheless, my conception of that experience is still of a separate thing which happens as a result of that process. And as such, I can always imagine any such physical process occurring without the corresponding experience.
To say that conscious experience "is" a physical process, is to my conception, a category error.
Except it isn't. The p-zombie thought experiment entails the p-zombie world thought experiment, where a universe evolved with nothing but p-zombies, and this world is identical to our own. How do you suppose our p-zombie equivalents would be here debating consciousness in this very moment in a universe in which such a thing doesn't actually exist?
> That is, regardless of how our brain physically comes to behave as if it were conscious, we can still conceive of a version of it that does not actually experience consciousness.
I certainly can't without allowing what seems to be absurdity or inconsistency. I'm not sure how you manage to do it.
> To say that conscious experience "is" a physical process, is to my conception, a category error.
Why?
No? I don't see I need to imagine a parallel universe. I can just imagine a p-zombie existing in our own world.
>I certainly can't without allowing what seems to be absurdity or inconsistency. I'm not sure how you manage to do it.
"absurdity or inconsistency" do not limit my imagination. I do not think such things are realistic, but that doesn't mean I can't imagine them. For a similar example, most ideas of time travel end up inconsistent if you inspect them closely, and yet nonetheless I can imagine them.
I don't think you understand the issue. If the p-zombie thought experiment entails something about consciousness, then the p-zombie world thought experiment does too. And what it demonstrates is that the intuitions that the p-zombie thought experiment seems to entail are absurd, therefore the p-zombie thought experiment is either ill-conceived or missing some crucial element that would explain this dissonance.
> "absurdity or inconsistency" do not limit my imagination.
Except it must if the p-zombie conceivability argument is to have any weight. If we can allow ourselves imagine any inconsistent proposition, then any inconsistent proposition is conceivable, and any inconsistent proposition is possibly true. Which is obviously absurd, because inconsistent propositions are necessarily false if logic is to mean anything.
The only possible resolutions are to invalidate the conceivability argument entirely as an inference rule, or to constrain that which is conceivable so the logical inference holds true.
We've started a conversation in other threads below, but I just wanted to point out that your claim here is actually conjecture. We don't actually know that the experience of consciousness is separate from behaviour. I further conjecture that this claim is outright false because it requires a non-trivial expansion of our ontology for what seems to amount to special pleading that consciousness is special when compared to every other phenomenon that has fallen to scientific inquiry.
Ask yourself why consciousness is really all that different from vitalism which was felled by biology. The same will happen to dualism in good time.
The argument that epiphenominalists put forth is that zombies can also talk "as if" they had consciousness, with all the same arguments that we put forth that they are conscious, that qualia are important, etc. The difference is that they simply aren't conscious, they are just acting out a play, and what they mean by consciousness is not the same thing as what we mean.
If you think then that the concept of consciousness then becomes virtually vacuous, amounting merely to your first person, passive observation of an automoton that is your body moving through space and time, then you're not alone.
The problem, I think, is that we're still so unbelievably far removed from that point (of being able to model and completely probe apart consciousness) that assuming either is just random conjecture.
For all we can prove, the appearance of self-awareness is all that is necessary for consciousness. I could be that if you point a webcam at a computer, then that computer gains some rudimentary self-awareness like an insect might have, or not have, we can't really prove it either way. Sentience is not necessarily sapience.
It could also be that computer sentience is absurd and rendered impossible by some as of yet unknown mechanic. In either case we have no reason to make assumptions about it.
If you are thinking of Chalmers' p-zombie argument, that does not do the job, because it is, at most, a claim that Chalmers sees the logical possibility of p-zombies as plausible, which, even if one agrees, is a long way from an argument that apparently self-aware algorithms must therefore be faking it.
Not that I have an actual example to try this on, which is why the issue is a source of endless debate...
Let the algorithm run for a while and see if it starts asking itself existential questions on the nature of consciousness.
There's an interesting book that uses this argument to advance the idea that consciousness as we understand it now emerged 3000 years ago, as it was only then that humans started to make artworks about pondering on consciousness. (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
It does not help that these same popular articles exaggerate and simplify - they make claims about the philosophical arguments that cannot be sustained by the arguments themselves. As I mentioned above, it is a misrepresentation to state that Chalmers' highly conditioned claim about the plausibility of p-zombies proves that no machine can have consciousness.
if (rand() > .99)
quote (sartre);This is the core of the issue. Until we can build an apparently conscious entity, there will still be people claiming there's something ineffable and magical about consciousness. Probably even after we've done it once, there will still be folks who so claim. But eventually, people will stop wondering about it once it becomes commonplace.
This is also begging the question.
Maybe it can. People presenting the hard problem of consciousness do not usually exclude such a thing. The question is, what causes human qualia? The actual experience of stimulus, rather than merely being a system reacting to them in a certain way.
The only way I can understand someone rejecting this assumption is if they somehow do not actually experience qualia.