The nature of our experience of reality remains elusive
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
"Phenomenology bodied-forth most notably in the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir, and, to a lesser extent, that of Sartre and Camus."
In fact, the most significant phenomenologist post Husserl was Heidegger. It was he and Merleau-Ponty who had the most to say about consciousness. The author does not even mention them.
I must be slightly off in one eye, but I don't know which.
Or maybe both eyes are off.
But of course, both eyes are off. There is no redness in the world nor blueness. When I look out through both at the same time I see the "same" colors of things, even though each eye individually reports slightly different colors.
As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical.
Actually, I'm wrong: philosophy does have an occupation these days. It's complicit in the creation of utter nonsense like continental thought and critical theory, all of which amounts of sophistry that justifies us in exercising our world impulses toward magical thinking.
Why bother?
For example, a "model" cannot be "true". A model is a model, reality is a different thing.
>Consciousness is what thinking feels like.
Do you think computers are conscious?
I don't believe "p zombies" exist --- or, rather, I believe we're all p zombies.
On the other hand there is no theory about alien life, only a bunch of speculative hypotheses.
Nonetheless you and I believe if we just wire the memory chips together in the right way and load some specific bit patterns into them, then the pile of memory chips will suddenly go »Holly shit, I am consciousness being inside of an enormous universe!« But the pile of memory chips will not just say this, no it will be truly aware of it.
All humans have very similar biology, so it's reasonable to assume that other humans are conscious. But even there we don't have any hard proof.
I agree with what OP says, but I can't help that majority of consciousness is based in fear. Put it other way: I don't believe consciousness can exist without fear [of being destructed] ever present. And that's the challenge of programming machine with built-in fear: if I fall, then I may die. I'm scared of dying, so how can I do my best not to fall?
Computers are quite capable of executing stochastic algorithms. And neurons can be considered as analog logic units too.
> meanwhile human brain uses chemistry and biological tissue to process.
Yes, and... ?
You and I can understand death without actually having experienced it. Surely a machine could too.
Science is in the business of answering what is. It can't answer normative questions, i.e. those about what ought to be. That, at the very least, is one of the domains that philosophy is still both sensible and productive.[1]
As others have pointed out below, this article was written from the analytical perspective -- the tradition that stands in contrast to continental thought and critical theory.
[1]: Which is only to say that only a single counterexample is needed to invalidate a claim about "all the big questions." There are plenty of fields besides ethics where philosophy inquiry continues to be relevant and productive.
Does ethical philosophy build normative models that describe what ought to be? Sure. Do these models influence actual human behavior? Not a bit. So why bother building castles in the sky?
Ethical views regarding natural rights are the basis for liberal democracy, either (depending on your metric) the largest or second largest form of political organization today. I'd call that "influencing actual human behavior."
Ethical views regarding harm reduction form the basis of modern medical treatment. "Do no harm" is a normative statement, and I know plenty of doctors who seem to be influenced by it.
These are the simplest of examples. Abrahamic religions encourage their adherents to behave based upon duty, another normative staple. Individuals act based on rational self interest, and a great number of philosophers have argued that they ought to do so. The list goes on.
Philosophical systems of ethics have always seemed to me like elaborate rationalizations for what we all know to be right and wrong innately. Since most of us possess this faculty with or without philosophy, the formalization is just self-flattery.
Do you think healers sought to do harm before Hippocrates came around and that the mere phrase "do no harm" ushered in a new era of helpful medicine?
Using the word murder is cheating. Of course an "unlawful killing" is taboo, it's in the definition! Killing humans is definitely not a universal taboo, just look at wars and those that support them. Since all ethical statements have an evaluative piece to them, we cannot say anything is universally taboo.
The evidence for this claim is scant: the Ancient Greeks (and not-so-ancient Western Europeans) extolled the virtues of various forms of slavery, all of which we find morally reprehensible today. Moral views of abortion, homosexuality, and blasphemy have all undergone complete reversals in the last 150 years. Intuitionism alone can't account for these changes.
> Do you think healers sought to do harm before Hippocrates came around and that the mere phrase "do no harm" ushered in a new era of helpful medicine?
Hippocrates formalized and systematized what was otherwise a naggling feeling. Just because doctors happened to perform in a morally acceptable fashion pre-oath does not mean that the system prescribed by the oath is redundant -- it serves to establish why certain procedures are right and wrong, when a doctor might be punished or blamed, and so forth.
This is all correct, which is why I said "intuitionism alone". The reason is the absence of a clear causal connection: our (meaning the general public's) moral intuitions have developed in tandem with political and economic progress, not as a cause or purely as a consequence of it. Combined with the massive volume of political and ethical theory produced shortly before the emergence of the world's first liberal democracies, I'm inclined to believe that the causal arrow goes in the other direction than the one you suggest.
That's an extraordinary claim (which is dubious at best); and we both know the quote about extraordinary claims.
Sure, there's a ton of pseudo-philosophy these days, but to brush all of philosophy with the same stroke is just lazy.
To jog your memory about the "value of philosophy" from one point of view, take a read of this previous thread here (titled: 'Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics'):
It's Carl Sagan, apparently.
Most people don't play around with their consciousness enough to realize that there's such a state as consciousness without thought. You can of course argue that it doesn't exist, but I invite you to actually get there before making up your mind. At that point it becomes clear that you've been overlooking something obvious that is likely to turn your metaphysics on its head.
The closest analogy I can give is lucid dreaming. In a regular dream, you might see a flower and work out all the processes that cause you to see it. When you become lucid, you suddenly see the gaping flaw in your model.
Because there isn't a good scientific explanation yet. Just lots of theories that are very difficult to prove. I tend to agree that we are just "wet computers" -- it seems pretty obvious (to many of us), however that doesn't meet the bar for good science.
How does it feel that way at all? You say there's no mystery, but you're stopping short of the actual questions that make the experience of consciousness intriguing.
You can't reject the premise that we are automatons outright just by saying so. You're standing on the prow of a MASSIVE philosophical ship of people arguing exactly the same... But just next to you is an equally large ship of people arguing the opposite.
Nobody has been able to prove conclusively one way or the other whether or not people are automatons. Nobody has been able to conclude that consciousness is even real. This is just "I think, therefore I am." Maybe it feels good, but it's just another philosophical theory. There's many others.
If you have no interest in participating in them that's fine, but you are participating anyway :p
My contention is that consciousness is Sagan's dragon in the garage though: the reason nobody's been able to prove or disprove its existence is that it's not a concept amenable to disproof, as it's possible to infinitely propose some gap between what neuroscience tells us and what we "feel", even though there's no practical necessity that we acknowledge this gap even exists or needs explaining.
There is an infinite universe of things we could believe without contradiction, but we tend not to believe the vast majority of them. Why should we believe in consciousness?
The problem I have is that you are assuming that we've learned all we need to learn about consciousness and that no more questions will yield useful results. Perhaps if we were devoting more time to philosophizing about consciousness than curing diseases, for example, I would agree that we're wasting our time. But I don't have any reason to believe that there's nothing more to consciousness that can be knowable. Besides, we've only been seriously studying the brain for the last century. It would be a remarkable stroke of luck that we'd have figured out consciousness by now.
A satisfactory answer for consciousness could be that there is some fundamental law to the universe that matter, when configured correctly, produces conscious experience at varying degrees. The reason that could be satisfactory is that that path of questions would be fully followed back to the more fundamental questions about existence in general; even if 1000 years go by and we still conclude that the universe is indeed irrational, that means that we'd have answered most or all the rational questions we have about consciousness, among other things. Gravity, for instance, is usually not accounted for in chemistry because, at that level of granularity, its effects are irrelevant. At a larger level, it's a different story. Now I'm not saying that gravity is a direct analogy to consciousness, but of course we could stop at our current understanding of gravity because there's some infinite gap between the how and the why. We don't have anything else to learn there, right?
Because if it didn't (somehow) exist you couldn't ask that question.
The word "consciousness" is a synonym for "now".
I reject the premise that I need a subjective first person experience. I don't have a subjective first person experience.[0] I have convoluted, poorly-documented internal data processing mechanisms cobbled together by a blind idiot over millions of years. These could, in priciple, be measured with sufficiently good instruments.[1] They could, in principle, be analyzed and translated into a form compatible with someone else's spaghetti-coded wetware. I don't have a subjective first person experience; I have a objective first person experience.[2]
0: And neither do you.
1: And this is likely to be feasable in the next couple centuries.
2: Like a p-zombie.
Everything you mentioned after this were mechanisms, however inefficient or poorly documented, that support your functioning day-to-day and are practically irrelevant for supporting your argument that you don't have a subjective first person experience. If you explained those mechanisms and "documented" them then all you would be doing is explaining one way your consciousness is fed data whilst still leaving the original question on the table.
At the heart of what constitutes you as an "I" is someone who can experience eating chocolate or taking a warm shower. There is a you that feels what it is like to do these activities.
Indeed there is; it's a collection of information made out bits, stored on a substrate made out of atoms[0]. There's nothing subjective about it.
"What/why is subjective experience" is a wrong question[1]. Much like "what's before the big bang" (or, more mundanely, "whats north of the north pole") the 'answer' is that (unless we're manifestly wrong about the observable behavior of the universe) the question doesn't even correspond to any feature of reality in the first place.
0: and photons, loose electrons and ions, electomagnetic fields, and miscellaneous other such junk; ask a physicist if you really care.
1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/og/wrong_questions/ is the least awful explanation of this problem that I've found.
The problem is that those are just superficial statements that don't capture the nature of reality at all. It's like saying "there's ground under my feet, and a sky above me, that's the nature of the universe."
It just seems that you just packed your bags and moved on because the nature of reality and consciousness is not your interest.
I understand the feeling. It's natural to probe. But what if it really is all just ill-defined sentiment? Why should we imagine there is something "more" there, that there is a "nature" of things beyond that which we can measure?
The principle of parsimony demands that we reject extraneous abstractions, and I don't see anything forcing us to acknowledge that the nature of reality is a legitimate object of inquiry as distinct from physics and math.
Going with the principle of parsimony - consciousness is arguably inefficient. I recommend some Peter Watts for fun sci fi inquiry into what a technically advanced species without consciousness should look like. So why have it?
Given that nobody can answer the question of what exactly consciousness is, why it developed, and how we could replicate it, I disagree that the study of consciousness has to be "looking for something more."
If the brain is "a wet computer" (and if you have time I do challenge you to support this statement), why is it seemingly non deterministic? Or is it actually deterministic, and we just don't have the modelling technology to sufficiently grab all the variables? I think I can predict your reaction - "of course it's deterministic! The universe is deterministic, and brains are just a part of the universe!" I think that is the inevitable rational point of view, sure. I'm not saying we need to leave room for a god... I'm saying literally, nobody knows for sure. So why not study these questions?
Why is that? Very unobvious conclusion.
This alongside the idea that bacteria or trees proliferate just fine without it, etc etc. This is the jist of my argument, if you want a way better analysis, please read peter watts, he is smarter than me and the work is already done.
I read Blindsight(3 times actually), and he described some end result there, skipping whole evolution process, in which that alien Intelligence (Rorschach) may or may not compete with conscious creatures.
Additionally the hypothesis that Rorschach doesn't have conscious or not managed or directed by creatures with conscious is just guess of that expedition, which doesn't really understand what Rorschach is.
From another hand, evolution on Earth demonstrates that conscious creatures (humans) completely outcompete all others.
When consciousness lights up during a lucid dream, the sensory perception is real enough so as to be confused for the real thing. Maybe the real thing is something of a dream. When Shakespeare wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of” in The Tempest, that seems to me to have been not far from the mark.
I am slightly perplexed why anyone would make a big deal about apparent non-determinism.
Even if we assume there's no noise, the underlying physics is perfectly deterministic and we are in fact maxwell's demon. Then the brain is still a stateful, chaotic system. Being stateful and chaotic would mean you could never provide the same input twice and expect the same output because its previous state would also be its input. For any observer this would look quite non-deterministic unless you had a perfect model of ever bit of information in the brain. And currently nobody claims to have such a model.
And then let's add the noise, observer effect and quantum effects back in.
So really, it's not very surprising that the brain appears non-deterministic to any physically implementable observer.
But it is not particularly surprising. Not even good old silicon-based computers are fully deterministic. Apart from intentional noise inputs (hardware RNGs) they also experience things like cosmic rays flipping bits, electrons occasionally tunneling out from capacitors or flash storage when we don't want them to and so on. Simply overclock your computer and the rate of non-determinism will go up dramatically, but that does not mean it is zero at stock frequencies, just low enough to be usable.
Is it a fundamental or emergent property of the universe?
What is the smallest/biggest structure possible for a consciousness to happen? (we should be able to tell what is conscious and what is not)
Can/do laws of physics account for it? (consciousness is not a necessary thing in physics, we are all p-zombies for physics laws, but for some reason it is able to affect the causal chain, as we are talking about it)
Like nearly everything else in reality, you’d expect consciousness to be continuous, not integral. We know there are diminished states of consciousness by experience and observation. As such there wouldn’t be any lower limit on size of conscious objects, just smaller and smaller degrees of consciousness.
Yes, the laws of physics of course account for it. Everything that exists arises from physics.
> Can/do laws of physics account for it?
Either you define the word in such a way that they can, or the discussion becomes meaningless.
I think fundamental point often missed when discussing this topic (and similar philosophical issues) is that a thing can be either measurable in principle (even if not with our current understanding or technology), or it doesn't exist and there's no meaning in asking about it. I arrive at this statement through following chain of reasoning: there is no sense talking about things that do not impact observable reality in any way, since the world will be identical with and without them (and thus there's no way to assert those things exist, as opposed to e.g. an infinite family of similar-but-not-quite-the-same things). And if a thing does impact observable reality, then - in principle - we should be able to observe its impact, and that opens it up for measurement and understanding, and thus puts it squarely in the domain of physics.
So for the term "consciousness" to be meaningful, it must be defined in a way that it makes a physical difference in the world. Some bit in a brain must go to 0 if you have a consciousness, whereas it must go to 1 if you are a p-zombie. If there's no possible way to - even in principle - differentiate between a conscious mind and a p-zombie, it implies that both terms are nonsense (and also useless).
INB4 uncertainty principle - it doesn't mean there are things that can't be measured hidden behind some "quantum veil"; it means that this is where our usual conceptual models (like position and momentum being separate qualities) break down and no longer correspond well to reality.
Okay, our whole perception of reality and individuality and consciousness is an illusion. Well, we still live in this illusion: even if at a fondamental level we're deterministic machine, that's not how we feel, that's not how we experience reality.
Even if I know that there's no free will, it won't be a satisfactory answer to people doing dumb shit around me. It won't be a satisfactory answer to me being bored in a purposeless job I hate. It doesn't solve the problem that some things seem right and other seem wrong.
Knowing that the brain is a wet computer is just as useful as knowing that particles are made of vibrating strings: that's interesting but doesn't help me interact with the reality I experience. "morale", "justice", "happiness", "love" might be perceptory illusions but that's still what we experience, and you can philosophize about all of that.
That being said I agree totally that turning to philosophy to determine the "nature of our experience of reality" is a dead-end, it's up to science.
Is it a trick of the brain? Are you simply forced to behave as if things matter when in reality you believe everything is pointless and nobody has any value beyond the hedonistic gratification they can provide you? If someone murdered everyone you cared about, would you claim that your grief stems from an illusion, a mistake?
You’re free to answer “yes” to all of these. I just think it’s a really sad way to live.
And of course someone can then ask: Why is that a really sad way to live?
Thus is the infinite epistemic loop.
There is no "root" in the field of epistemology - it's turtles all the way down. The French existentialists recognized this reality, and the response was: "make your own root and proceed from there." Ok fine, all that does is make the illusion more meaningful individually, it says nothing of the grounding of the illusion.
This of course means that we've only delayed the problem until the point when we meet other minds with different architecture - be it aliens, sentient AIs, or whatever. But that's kind of the point the whole AI risk movement has been making - that values and intelligence are orthogonal; there's no reason to assume that an intelligent non-human mind will automatically share values and moral intuitions with us.
After which Wittgenstein? From Tractatus? Or from Philosophical Investigations? You rather sound like you prefer Tractatus but Wittgenstein still had something to say about philosophy after Tracatus. Are Philosophical Investigations nonsensical? And what about Tracatus?
You sound so certain about philosophy... But how come that we can even dabate about philosophy? How can we understand those nonsensical philosophical questions if they are nonsensical? And how do you define what is nonsensical? Aren't such inquiries purely philosophical questions?
In your comment you used so many purely philosophical terms but you still claim that philosophy is utter nonsense... I guess we should agree that your post is utter philosophy.
You're undermining the hard problem of consciousness[1] by ignoring subjectivity of experience. Even if one day we understand everything there is to know about the brain in a materialistic manner, it's not clear that we'll also understand the emergence of subjective experience from it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
I'll plug my own recent physico-philosophical paper, a 2-page argument that a certain not-too-contrived simulation hypothesis is falsifiable, using an unexpected deus-ex-machina: soft errors :) https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf "A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests we don't live in"
But from scientific standpoint it's pretty fascinating.
If your experience of reality is limited to your senses then what's out there that we can't sense. Dogs have hundreds of times greater sense of smell than us, they have a whole'nother world that were not privy too.
Think of what's potentially out there in reality/physics/the universe that our senses can't access.
I agree how does the wet computer work is a pretty fascinating question. But you have to ask that in tandem to how our sensors work and how physics of our reality works.
Ok, please enlighten me how I make my laptop feel intense pleasure while it is compiling my code.
Problem is, these are vague claims that many would disagree with. It's not that simple. Why does thinking feel like anything? What does "feel" even mean?
The mystery is, why does moving physical particles in the brain sometimes trigger the perception of "seeing green" and sometimes it triggers the feeling of tiredness?
Or what about this thought experiment. You probably believe that a computer program can feel pain. But you can execute the program by hand, with pen and paper. Does this create the feeling of pain too?
> As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical.
I agree with the sentiment. I think most of philosophy is BS, lot of words about nothing and most questions are really about linguistic - once you properly define terms, the problem disappears. But the problem of consciousness is an exception.
And seeing is what vision looks like?
Your statement seems reminiscent of the Homunculus Fallacy
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
Would you also say that it is possible then to model our brains as a function and the IO as arguments?
Does a function have consciousness or is it the application of the function what gives it consciousness?
Is it really necessary to put your prestigious alma mater in the first line?
Not that I didn't find it interesting, just, I feel it could have gotten the job done cleaner.
I think it's crucially needed, as the volume of content out there worth reading is massive. Unfortunately, non-fiction authors are told to write in narrative form (narrative non-fiction) by editors because that seems to be what sells best and is most engaging.
On the other side are mathematical papers which QED and ibid their way to illegibility.
I might be biased though, I've enjoyed reading a fair few Will Self books.