As far as I can tell, consciousness is literally the one thing in the universe that can't be an illusion. Even if, in the extreme case, we're brains in a vat, etc.
Cogito ergo sum!
"I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind."
But subjective experience isn't the light being "on" or "off". Subjective experience is a messy, fuzzy collection of stuff. People do things without intending to, people believe things they've automatically were intentional and reverse. The zone between waking and sleeping isn't set, etc. etc.
If one does the "blind spot" experiment, one realizes one's vision is constantly confabulating to make for vision's imperfections. And so-forth.
So there's no reason no to expect that our experience and memory of consciousness isn't a incomplete reflection of what's actually happening.
Lots of people strongly believe they have a soul. That's clearly anti-materialist and has no basis in reality but it seems like a quite natural illusion (one that the "hard problem" ideology resembles). The "subjective experience exists" statement, if it's taken to mean a single, uniform fabric of experience exists, seems unjustified given the overall messiness I mentioned and if the hard-problem claim isn't this, what is it?
This has no bearing on the hard problem of describing consciousness or how organic material (maybe silicon some day) gives rise to it. It also doesn't indicate how a physicalist picture of the mind could, in principle, capture the phenomena.
Dream, delusion, reality, drugs, schizophrenia, completely fabricated sensory manifold, whatever; the content does not matter for purposes of this question. Is that brain in a jar experiencing something? Is it experiencing at all?
That's consciousness.
Humans always liked egocentric views -- "The Earth is the center of the Universe". Or another version: "Humans are superior because they have consciousness".
If there are many levels of consciousness, one may imagine some extraterrestrial super intelligent beings that are many levels above humans, that would think of humans as non-consciousness beings -- like we think of many animals.
Now, if we go down instead, we can say that all animals with brain are conscious (just as not as we are), can't we?
In fact, I submit that it's the duty of anyone saying that the line separating "conscious" and "not-conscious" animals is here or there has to justify not just why that's where they drew the line, but that there is one in the first place.
The experince of having an experince can be wrong. If the existinece of experience is the content of the experience - and you have written that the content can be wrong. If one mistaken about the very fact of experience, is that valid an experience too?
This has no bearing on the hard problem of describing consciousness or how organic material (maybe silicon some day) gives rise to it.
This is assumes beliefs are entirely separate from experiences but that's counter to the complex experience characteristic of consciousness - one can experience believing many things, including contradictory things if one isn't careful. It's narrative that claims to make things uncertain but actually, implicitly maintains a neat, certain rational narrator on top of sensory experience (sensory experience, right or wrong, is spoken of a mere data evaluated by a separate rational actor). However both neurological research and reflection shows the beliefs, consciousness, experience and so-forth are all meshed together.
We're not talking about the content of our experiences, and as long as you keep insisting that's somehow part of the picture, we're never even having a conversation. "Consciousness," as we're using it, is the simple fact that you're experiencing at all. Nothing else. Not the content. Not the feelings about the content. Not the "neat, certain rational mirror on top of sensory experience". Just the raw, unfiltered, unqualified fact that you are having an experience at all. Full stop.
Everything else is detail, and can very easily be wrong. The fact that there is an experience happening in the first place, can't.
Otherwise, please explain to me how I can be mistaken about the fact that I am experiencing. Not what I'm experiencing — that I'm experiencing.
If you interact closely with people having psychotic breaks and other mental disorders, you can witness someone mistaken about the boundary between themselves and the environment. If you can wrap your mind around that level of malfunction, I think you will begin to appreciate that the very statement "the fact that I am experiencing" is begging the question. The abstract concepts of identity, self, perception, and memory are all intertwined and more nebulous than is comfortable to think about.
Let me borrow a helpful phrase from another reply above: inner life. I recommend some meditation on the possible inner lives of a whole spectrum of creatures. I take the liberty of assuming you would grant humans the richest inner life. What inner life exists in a great ape, dolphin, octopus, monkey, dog, cow, bat, field mouse, tarantula, lobster, honey bee, earthworm, clam, coral, or amoeba? Within any one of those species, how does an inner life vary between a zygote and a fully developed and experienced adult? What about members of those species who have a sensory disability and go their whole lives with a reduced complement of sensory organs or sensory nerves?
Consciousness may be merely an abstraction we place on a typical complex of sensory processing and introspective abilities in our minds. People may have more or less experience with alteration of this complex and form other abstractions such as unconsciousness, trance, daydream, hallucination, blackout, or catatonia.
Outside weird scenarios I mentioned in my previous post, we can only discuss the subset of these experiences which we remember. We don't even know what other qualitative experiences we may be having throughout our lives which are not normally encoded to memory. At risk of returning to my previous topic which you discard as mere "content" of awareness: I would argue that our introspection is just as vulnerable to mistake, confabulation, and delusion as our awareness of the external world. It may be a convenient fiction, much like our visual system papers over the blind spot in our retinas and the motion blur of rapid eye movements.
> If you assume dualism...
Which I don't. My position on this stuff is in the neighborhood of panpsychism or Objective Idealism, but not quite either, and both of which are very much monist notions.
If you weren't accusing me of holding a dualist position, could you please clarify what you're saying here?
> I recommend some meditation on the possible inner lives of a whole spectrum of creatures.
I've actually spent a fair amount of time contemplating the question of the nature of the inner lives of things not-me, thanks. I can't speak to what that experience might be like. Epistemic asymmetry is a thing. What I don't spend much time contemplating is that they have one.
It's interesting, though, that you bring that up — bats, specifically. Please read Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" if you haven't already. It's one of the first papers I'm aware of to meaningfully articulate this question. Dennett, himself — the thinker whose oeuvre, and particularly "Consciousness Explained", frames this discussion — called it "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness."
So, for clarity, my position goes like this: I have an experience of the thing I mean when I say "consciousness" — this "inner life", which, until I'm convinced is somehow a delusion, I will continue to regard as the only direct experience I have. On the principle that solipsism is bullshit, I assume that the other beings like me with whom I share the world also have this 'inner life' thing going on.
Additionally, I see in the world other things which are clearly "beings", but which are, to varying degrees, not like me and the other beings I assume have inner lives. What about them is different, such that they wouldn't have this experience? Is it language? Many have that. Tool use? More than a few. Warm blood? (See: "Do Fish Feel Pain?")
It is, I submit, most parsimonious to assume consciousness of some form on their part, as well. When someone suggests otherwise, they're making a positive assertion, not merely that this imaginary line between "conscious" and "not conscious" goes in that specific place, but that there is a line in the first place, and must justify both.
> I would argue that our introspection is just as vulnerable to mistake, confabulation, and delusion as our awareness of the external world.
Of course it is. I don't think that's even in question. But that's actually my point: when you're introspecting, that's "you", there, in that moment, on that ride. Whether the things you're introspecting about are materially reflective of their antecedents, whether you're thinking clearly or biasedly, whether even your entire narrative in that moment, if not always, is just so much self-serving bullshit, does not matter. You're still introspecting.
That's what I mean when I say the content doesn't matter. Whatever I'm experiencing, true or false, I'm still experiencing.
The question no-one can answer to my satisfaction — all this hand-wringing about its being irrelevant, or illusory, or even incorrect notwithstanding — is how, if the only "things" that matter are reducible to observable, measurable, falsifiable phenomena, it should feel at all.
Because the thing I most want those tools to explain is how I can be here, in existence, having the experience of being here questioning my existence at all.
There is precisely nothing in this kind of reductive ontology that can account for the fact that there is a qualitative nature to my being at all. And yet it is the most direct experience I have. Not what I see, that I see. And, yes, the emotional associations I have with what I see, upon seeing it. Of course that comes from a different part of the brain. Yet I feel that too.
That's the question I want answered — the very thing being hand-waved away.
Yes, I was referencing that being a bat problem. However, what I meant to emphasize was the spectrum of creatures. Most people grant inner lives to familiar animals even though we cannot claim to comprehend them directly. But, many people have incoherent beliefs as they work further down the ladder towards plants, colonies, and other simple life. Their need to find a boundary where the spark occurs is closeted dualism, in my opinion.
I consider a quest for qualia to be essentially dualism in disguise, and endless debates about the term itself to be proxy war on just how to beg the question. When I was lectured by Searle and his views on being a bat and his chinese room, I felt he was begging the question and playing to the peanut gallery. He wants you to assume there is "understanding" that a room lacks. He doesn't want you to dwell on the difference between the room and the system comprised of the room, the rules, the translation state, and the executive functions literally embodied by attendants. I enjoyed a contemporaneous course from Lakoff to consider his metaphorical mappings and category thinking as a counterpoint. We all liked to joke that it might be metaphors all the way down. My reading of these topics may have begun my own gradual turn towards reductionism and behaviorism.
I do not think qualia deserve any special place compared to any other abstraction. I don't think there is anything more real about the sense of first-person experience than there is about a sense of justice or love in a particular human interaction. I think that these are all in the same category of perceptual abstraction. I think ALL abstractions admit or even encourage an ontological failure mode which is to impose discrete symbols over fuzzy realities, and tempt logical deductions over this willful ignorance. This is why I frequently return to topics like identity, memory, and mental pathology which illustrates such failings. I question the "you", the "moment", and the "ride" as all being convenient but potentially misleading abstractions.
Finally, I think that the qualitative experience you seek to explain is tied up in the mind-body problem and has as much to do with introspection of the body and hormonal systems as it does introspection of cognition. I took interest in Rodney Brooks and his subsumption as a possible explanatory mechanism here. To keep insisting that you can discuss the quality of experience independently of the content is, again, a signal of latent dualism to me.
I have no idea if anyone else subjectively experiences anything; everyone else might just be philosophical zombies. I still want to know why I have any subjective awareness of the world, though, and I don't see any way that that question can be answered via any sort of objective measurement or scientific process. You can study my eyes and my brain to explain why I can accurately perceive the color blue, but nobody can truly explain what it's like to see the color blue.
[1] http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.ht...
Especially with such lack of logical rigor as shown when even otherwise decent scientists are talking about consciousness...
Mathematics has much more consistent definitions of categories and similar concepts with real measurable results and applications.
Why is it hard? It's as if evolution had not provided us with the framework to do that. Primitive beings have very simple inputs and minds. As the behaviour needed for survival gets more complex, minds also need to join data from different senses in an integrated image. Also we need pain and pleasure to direct the behaviour. Quantitative changes result in qualitative ones and that's it.
Everybody acknowledges how the brain is such a complex machine and then got surprised that it's able to build perception. That's weird.
You're describing a reason why consciousness might exist, but you're no closer to describing how it exists.
The reason it's a hard problem is that we don't understand the relationship between a purely physical process and awareness. It's not clear how at some point a complicated set of behaviors would equate to the personal experience we ourselves feel - we don't have good mechanisms or tools yet to explain how that jump is possible.
So yeah, it's obvious that the jump happens. But outside of philosophers and scientists like Daniel Dennett, probably the majority of people are already convinced of that part.
The hard problem isn't "why qualia", it's "how qualia".
Soon you will discover that consciousness is an empty word much worse than dark matter or energy in physics, as those describe observable things with clear definitions.
What is a quale? Saying it is a quantum of subjective experience explains nothing because then you have to properly define experience in general. Trivial definitions end up at sensory levels which is probably not what was meant. Advanced definitions like say "symbolic representation of an experience" are more workable but anger philosophers. (it opens practical avenues of research such as: how humans assign symbols, what kinds of symbols they construct, how are symbols communicated, what are neutral correlates of experience that may relate to symbols, how are internal and external symbols discerned) Incidentally, AI may have such qualia in as much as it can self generate symbols.
Or you have to first define what consciousness is, and not in terms of qualia.
Or at least what is subjective without trying to say that is something that cannot be objectively quantified because this is a known lie.
Qualia is experience.
Rocks don't experience things, they perform chemical reactions according to physics. In a world without qualia, there is no such thing as experience. The hard question is how chemical reactions result in something like experience. There's no logical, causal relationship we can find as to why a chemical reaction should result in one.
And even though we don't know much about what experience is or how it works, we seem to be universally aware of it. In fact we seem to have a mechanism to directly observe it. This is another thing that's weird to us and that makes "experience" special and interesting, because it's atypical - usually we can only observe things through external means; sight, touch, etc...
With "experience", this is reversed - almost as if by gaining the ability to directly observe a thing, we lose the ability to externally observe it. There is significant debate over this is an inherent property of the thing or whether advances in our measurement tools will allow us to either inderectly observe the thing, or at least observe its effects.
You're coming into this with the assumption that the ability to communicate about a thing is a prerequisite to that thing existing. It's not. The map describes the territory, not the other way around.
We don't have good definitions of what consciousness is, which is why it's hard and why physicists and philosophers want to study it. It's a thing that we can see and we are trying to learn its properties. As we learn those properties we continue to attempt to map it into another medium - language.
Then why say that it's a hard problem, even that it's a problem at all? We will cross that bridge when we will reach it. And why do you say there's a jump? Or more precisely, which jump are you talking about? I hope you don't mean the jump between subjetive experience and the physical framework that supports it... Wittgenstein showed how that's a fool errand long ago.
From a purely physical perspective, there shouldn't be such a thing as subjective experience.
We don't, strictly speaking, need to solve that problem right now. We could wait and cross that bridge later. We could just leave it at "it's an emergent property, and it works somehow." In the same way we could also say, "well, big objects attract each other, and we're gonna leave gravity at that."
But for various reasons, philosophers and scientists find that kind of answer unsatisfying.
Why?
But for various reasons, philosophers and scientists find that kind of answer unsatisfying.
https://www.sciencealert.com/watch-richard-feynman-on-why-he...
Feynman's response in the video you link is not that it's unreasonable to ask about the mechanics of a thing. Quite the opposite - it's that simple questions are often very deep and very complicated and can't be described in a quick one or two sentences.
What he's not saying is: "Why is the sky blue? Well, why shouldn't it be?"
That's appeal to ignorance.
and we don't have any precedent for something similar happening in other situations
Precedent? Come on, that's like saying atoms shouldn't exist because there is no precedent for them.
We also observe that many properties of subjective experience are counterintuitive
That's vague and terribly subjective. Who decides what is intuitive and what's not in this context?
and seem to contradict what we would expect from an emergent system
Who would expect what? Again you are simply saying that you don't understand it so it must not be possible.
I linked Feynman response just to make you undestand that what you are saying lacks any reference frame. You are using your own intuitions to declare impossible a thing that, to begin with already exists :) and moreover it's exactly what generates you intuitions, so you are falling in a circular reasoning.
Oh and Feynman doesn't say that magnetism can't be explained or that it shouldn't exist, just that it can't be explained in terms of other phenomena, exactly the same as consciousness.
Edit: HN won't allow me to reply to your last comment, so I will put it below, though I won't comment further anyway.
It's not that I'm not interested in how consciousness emerges. What I object to is the characterization of the basis of consciousness as a hard problem. It's just an area of knowledge that we haven't enough information to talk about. Saying it's a problem, even a hard one, it's jumping to conclusions very prematurely.
I... don't think subjective experience is impossible. I think that our current knowledge about how it works is very limited, there's a lot for us to learn, and I'm encouraged when philosophers and scientists research it more. I'm discouraged when people say "it exists, what else do we need to know?"
Are we saying the same thing in different ways?
When I say "jump", I don't mean that there is no explanation for subjective experience. I mean that we do not currently know what that explanation is. It's a jump because it is currently a gap in our knowledge about a phenomenon that exhibits interesting properties and that we don't know how to reliably measure or reproduce.
When we talk about things like consciousness we have to "jump" over that gap. It would be nice to fill in the gap a little. Is it possible you thought that I meant something else?
For a lot of people, basic questions like "what are atoms," or "why is there matter", or "how does a physical process create a subjective experience" are really interesting. And to a certain extent, why should atoms exist? It's not a bad question - we can start talking about electrons, and then we can start talking about forces, and then at a certain point we'll have to say, "well, we don't know about this thing yet. Ask again in a decade and maybe we'll have some theories to propose."
There are large branches of science devoted to these types of questions, and pursuing them has lead to useful theories and practical applications in the past.
Dennett would reply: once I've explained every detail of the physiological system, and in so doing perfectly mapped inputs to outputs, what is there left to explain?
A memoryless and stateful system may produce similar or even same output given identical input. Since you cannot quantity infinite span of inputs, you cannot quite be sure which one you're dealing with.
This is even harder if both systems are noisy.
The mechanistic corollary is that you have to mess with whatever causes consciousness to actually understand it. Inject states, damage components and more. Even then you might make a mistake.
Put another way, it would fail to capture why that system (our brains) produce any experiences at all. I know this is disputed, of course. But I basically think the hard problem is a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
While attractive, it is not logically valid
DD may be different...
Maybe DD is a true zombie.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/
In another well-known article, “Quining Qualia” (1988), Dennett challenges not just our conception of pain, but all of our different notions of qualitative states. His argument focuses on the apparently essential features of qualia, including their inherent subjectivity and their private nature. Dennett discusses several cases—both actual and imaginary—to expose ways in which these ordinary intuitions about qualia pull apart. In so doing, Dennett suggests our qualia concepts are fundamentally confused and fail to correspond with the actual inner workings of our cognitive system.
X (qualia, what we don't know) does not correspond to Y (cognition, what we understand), so X does not exist.
Yes. It is this ridiculous. :)
It's the exact same process that happens in every other science: you don't expand your axiomatic basis unless you have to.
Saying it does not make it so.
> We have no reason to suppose X because Y can explain X as an illusion.
But Y does not really explain X. That is core point. Saying Y explains X is just igoring the question. It is just Dennett claiming "Y explains X" with a flawed argument.
> It's the exact same process that happens in every other science: you don't expand your axiomatic basis unless you have to.
Btw, when talking about axioms, there are rigid formalized versions of physics and math (look up Mizar). Unless Dennet proves his claims with a formal theorem with rigidly defined axioms, I am not buying his arguments. Too much fluff in philosophy when dealing with important problems.
Just the word "illusion" can have n different definitions and maybe the illusion itself is an illusion :D
We have no reason to believe that Y cannot explain X, and ample reason to believe it can. Every previous circumstance of special pleading of this sort has eventually fallen to scientific inquiry.
Furthermore, various observations and theorems in physics, like the conservation of energy and the Bekenstein Bound, suggest strongly that the mind is a fully encapsulated, bounded physical system.
The only way to escape this inevitability is to posit that consciousness is some extra-physical quantity that has no impact on physical matter whatsoever. And what problem does adding this to our axiomatic basis solve exactly? None that I can see except yet another instance of special pleading.
If anything, such a step actually introduces more problems, because how would you explain the fact that we, beings of physical matter, are talking about consciousness if consciousness cannot influence matter?