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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> You don't watch someone's dreams from brain imaging.

First, while that's true now, there is no guarantee that it will always be true as technology advances.

Second, neural activity is the physical basis for conscious experience, which, to a physicalist like me, means it is conscious experience, when the neural activity has the right properties (according to IIT, those properties are what "integrated information" is trying to capture). So I don't accept the distinction you are making between "the conscious experience itself" and neural activity.

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> First, while that's true now, there is no guarantee that it will always be true as technology advances.

True, but what does that mean? We get to watch someone else's dream like a movie because neuroscientists will have figured out how to translate the neural activity into a format that can be outputted as video and audio.

That won't work for every sensation. You can't feel that you're having the same dream as being that person's body.

> Second, neural activity is the physical basis for conscious experience, which, to a physicalist like me, means it is conscious experience,

This is similar to an identity theory of mind, with a focus on information. The problem is understanding how integrated information produces smells and pains. Saying the experience is identical is making a claim that seems mysterious. Why would some forms of information be conscious? Did God set that up?

It sounds similar to Chalmers' position on information, except that Chalmers says there is a natural link between rich information and being conscious that is an additional law in addition to the physical ones.

> what does that mean?

What I meant was that future brain imaging technicians might be able to record your brain waves while you sleep and then, when you wake up, correctly tell you what you dreamed about.

However, it is also possible that future brain imaging technicians might be able to record your brain waves while you sleep and then use that data to construct a virtual reality experience that is so convincing that it could make someone else directly experience your dream.

> You can't feel that you're having the same dream as being that person's body.

You have no basis for making this claim except that we currently don't know how to do it. That is a very weak basis for such a claim.

> The problem is understanding how integrated information produces smells and pains.

Bear in mind, I'm not saying I myself believe IIT, I'm just trying to describe what it says. I don't know that "integrated information" is the right way to describe what it is about the neural activity in our brains that produces smells and pains.

> Why would some forms of information be conscious?

If I generalize this to "why would some forms of neural activity be conscious?", the answer is that consciousness has survival value, so neural activity that can produce conscious experiences evolved.

> It sounds similar to Chalmers' position on information, except that Chalmers says there is a natural link between rich information and being conscious that is an additional law in addition to the physical ones.

I will apply Occam's razor to that additional law until there is evidence for it.

More generally, there is a straightforward physical possibility for explaining the subjective and personal nature of qualia, and other aspects of consciousness: our brains are not connected in such a way that language processing is capable of initiating all of the state changes that other sensory inputs can, and so we cannot communicate those state changes directly. This not only accords with our actual experiences, but it is probably just as well, or else we might find it (even) hard(er) to distinguish reality from imagination (and by "reality", I mean concrete, "that bear just noticed me", reality.)

One may, of course, take one's own Occam's razor to this idea, if you think physical constraints on information flow in a brain are less pausible than Chalmer's extra-physical link.

> I will apply Occam's razor to that additional law until there is evidence for it.

Fair enough, but Hume already did that for laws (causality). We don't observe laws, just constant conjunction. B always follows A, so we say law C is the cause of that. Or description, if one doesn't like the implication.

Adopting a Humean approach, there is already evidence that consciousness is conjoined to certain neural activity. But, that can work just as well for IIT as it does Chalmers.

And I have no idea whether causal laws exist or what consciousness is. I guess IIT is as good an approach as any.

I have noticed a tendency, in philosphical discussions in general, for one party to hoist the discussion up from a specific issue to a very general and fundamental level. It is all very well to say that we can have no certainty whether causal laws exist or what consciousness is, but we must recognize that if that is one's argument, then one has effectively terminated the discussion as irresolvable: no matter how much empirical evidence emerges, it is not going to be enough to overcome this response.

If one takes this way to leave the discussion, then there would be more than just a hint of motte-and-bailey equivocation if one were to then re-enter it with a specific claim, such as that Chalmers or Searle or Koch have a plausible argument that consiousness cannot possibly be this or that.

As it happens, I very much doubt that IIT is on the right track, but at least it is (or was, initially) an attempt to find out what consciousness is, rather than what it is not.

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