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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

> For this reason, the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can’t be described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to science. There’s just no way to get there from here.

Chalmers can keep saying this until he’s blue in the face, but it doesn’t make it true.

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Just because you don't like the reality the consciousness is subjective rather than objective does not make consciousness objective.

Many people much smarter than you and I have been exploring this problem since forever, with both ancient thought experiments and modern science. They've not found what you assume is there.

There are plenty of philosophers in this area that disagree with Chalmers

These "thought experiments" don't prove anything. At best, they simply identify which camp you intuitively belong in, dualist or non-dualist.

For a preliminary scientific theory of consciousness, see: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

To the extent that "the what it's like to be conscious" is part of physics - that is, to the extent that it enters into causal relations with the rest of the universe, it can of course be described as such. However, the way by which such casual relations occur is itself of interest, since it opens up other means of description that are not dependent on the inherent limits of an "outside" observer, acting through known physical mechanisms to make her observations.

The breeding behavior of orchids can certainly be described in terms of quantum mechanics. However, I do not have an existence proof of that.

People can keep denying this until they are blue in the face but it doesn’t make it false.

The burden of proof rests on those asserting that something is true.

> The burden of proof rests on those asserting that something is true.

That's nonsense. I'm sure you can re-write most if not all assertions that "something is false" as equivalent assertions that "something else is true," therefore the burden of proof rests equally on everyone asserting anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

So "the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can be described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to science"?

If you would be so kind...?

Prove it.

We are able to report our own consciousness, so it obviously has "classically" physical effects that can be measured.

How does your second clause follow from the first?

Not the OP, but consider the p-zombie world thought experiment: Chalmers would have us believe that we would still be having precisely this conversation about qualia, even if qualia were impossible in such a world, and no human had ever had a true subjective experience. The concept of qualia would still somehow have been invented and triggered precisely the same centuries of disagreement that we have seen.

This is as equally inconceivable as p-zombies are conceivable (to some), therefore I can only conclude that there is some fatal flaw in the p-zombie argument, and so I dismiss the conceivability of p-zombies. Thus, the presence of consciousness must somehow be behaviourally distinguishable.

When people talk about their consciousness, they communicate using things like their mouths and hands. Mouths and hands are physical.

Or do you belong to the school of "People talk about their consciousness not because of their consciousness, but from an entirely different chain of events that just happens to be accidentally correct"?

Within the structure of that argument, how is consciousness different from a pink elephant? I use a physical mouth to talk about a pink elephant; does the pink elephant therefore have classical physical effects that can be measured?

That's correct. Both you and the guy you're responding to are correct.

I’m glad you agree.

It hasn't been falsified yet. It will be interesting to see if it can be. I hope it can, because the interesting path of AI probably requires it.

I tend to agree. I found the article unconvincing. Perhaps Chalmer’s statement is true, but I’m not yet convinced that it is.

The thing that astonishes me is that we really haven't made a dent in the problem.

It's surely something we've wondered about since prehistory, and since then we've made scientific discoveries about things we never even suspected existed. But we still don't know much more about consciousness, except for some additions to the chemical and physical events that can disrupt it.

Dennett's point, or at least the point he was trying to make 20 years ago, is that one of the reasons consciousness confuses us is that it isn't actually quite what we imagine it to be. Our visual experience seems continuous, but we know from eye saccade movements that it cannot be. The way we feel the passage of time seems very straightforward, but the 'cartesian theatre' fallacy shows that our brain by necessity can't be processing things in a specific order.

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