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Comment by vokep | Hacker News Reader

Think about it like this: What actually is the color green?

sure, a wavelength of around 532nm coming into your eye causes it to happen, but thats just information. Then its processed in your brain and at some point recognized as green. Somewhere in this, you see green, but you seeing it cannot be measured. Maybe the activations of your neurons could be, and maybe that could even be fully reverse engineered to understand how the conclusion of seeing green is reached. And yet, the actual stuff in your conscious experience still isn't there, just a bunch of logic is.

Now maybe we could discover some dynamics of consciousness though. If we create conscious AI or some way to inject new logic into our brain that is directly witnessed, we could probe for what configurations produce what kind of consciousness. So at least we could understand the behavior of it. But the actual stuff of it is not measurable by anything but itself.

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Very few things in science can be directly experienced. I can't see an electron with my eyes, I have to rely on the reports of machines and infer the electron. And even the reports of my eyes aren't, ultimately, direct experience. That our investigation of consciousness has to take place indirectly is in no way novelty for scientific inquiry.

This is different, its the opposite in fact. Experience is ONLY directly experienced is what I'm saying. It cannot be measured. Well, it can, but only from within itself

It can express this measurement in a representational form however, so we can study consciousness's behavior or the behavior of qualia.

You say consciousness can only be experienced indirectly and not indirectly. But I showed in my first post here how to experience it indirectly: just ask other people about their experiences and listen to what they tell you. Do that and you can start doing paradigmatic science on it, as the book I linked to lays out.

I think you may be begging the question when you assume that there must be "actual stuff" that is forever beyond physical explanation.

I suspect that one is more likely to understand "green" by realizing that it is a word (originally, a sound) that you have come to associate with memories of visual experiences. To say something is green is to do a comparison between an aspect of the experience of it, and aspects of some of those memories of prior experiences.

I don't assume that the stuff is forever beyond physical explaination, and like I said we can perform science on the behavior of it. But ultimately the scientific method will always conclude that its ultimately an illusion and that there is only the word green, or the recognition of 532nm light. A word doesn't even need be assigned to it, its witnessed either way.

I use color as an example because its very distant and theoretically could be many different ways (e.g. your experience of green may not be made of the same stuff my green is). However geometry seems far less arbitrary. Visualizing a square is more specific, the way the lines relate to space in the 2D plane if misrepresented will be wrong. I doubt we visualize such things with 100% accuracy, but we must visualize them to a certain common accuracy, and thats important, common. Basically, as far as experiencing the visual concept of a square, we all experience roughly the same object in our conscious experience. Thats where things can be studied a bit, because the behavior of consciousness given certain logic is likely absolute.

I think the difficult part of all this is that "experience" has been irreducible so far and extremely difficult to isolate as some kind of physical substance or variable. We can analyze the "actual stuff" in every dimension we know how, and still come no closer to explaining why it feels like something to experience green (borrowing from Thomas Nagel here). A starcraft-playing neural net can make a comparison between some of its earlier "memories" and what it's seeing now, but that says nothing about its Awareness.

Any more than it is begging the question to assume that there cannot be anything that is beyond physical explanation?

Yes, words are symbols. But when we're talking about consciousness, we're talking about the experience itself, not the association between the word and the experience. And we have no understanding of why or how the experience exists in us.

A willingness to search for physical explanations should not be mistaken for claiming that there is one simply because there must be one, which would be as fallacious as claiming that there isn't one simply because there can not be one. This is a distinct fallacy from the one of claiming that there isn't one because I can't imagine that there could be one, or that it can't be done because it hasn't been done so far.

As for having an opinion, on the other hand, that usually depends on which remarkable circumstance one thinks is less implausible.

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