The Hard Problem of Breakfast
nautil.us
nautil.us
That's the best sentence I've read in a long time, despite the fact that the pandemic has me spending too much time surfing HN.
I think the author makes a very solid, implicit, argument regarding the problem of consciousness. The "problem" is hard to pin down. It doesn't seem any more implausible to me that consciousness is an emergent property from our brain bio/chem/physics then that hurricanes and diamonds and stalagmites naturally emerge from their respective environments. Or that massive spaceships emerge from Conway's Game of Life. Of course humans claim that we're special - "My consciousness is more important than a darned stalagmite!" - thinking of ourselves as more important than rocks and hurricanes, as more special, gives us a desire to survive. Our predecessors who genuinely thought they were no more "special" than a stalagmite were ineffective at passing down their genes.
So I claim that the hard problem of consciousness is not such a hard problem, but rather just a case of us humans being obsessed with ourselves.
And it is a hard problem: how do you even define subjective consciousness non-circularly? "Consciousness is the state of feeling like something" - okay, but what is it that's doing the feeling?
It does to me, but more importantly, no one is able to give a coherent model of how consciousness would emerge from complex arrangements of matter.
If eggs are what's for breakfast, fine. Don't make me think. It's too early.
Everything I've read that tackles it from a science perspective seems like side-stepping, weasel words ("emergent property"), or wholesale denial ("it's an illusion"). Not very scientific!
There seems to be a collective hubris at play, where people are afraid to say "I don't know".
In breakfast terms: if it has been fitness-increasing in the past to note that all the other animals go down to the water hole at similar times (thereby freeing up some desirable carcasses for scavenging? or at least making it easier to cross over to far away trees while the predators are busy elsewhere?) we may start to model mealtimes. Once we notice that others have a morning feed that affect our actions ("breakfast" is followed by "rush hour"), it isn't that big a jump for our grey cells to experience our own morning feed in the same category, as breakfast.
What if we do have sensory neurons in our brains, though -- wouldn't that lead to a sense of self? Quite literally. I suspect it's something like that.
We can do better than say "I don't know." We already know that consciousness can be manipulated with drugs, electrodes, accidents, etc. That rules out the metaphysics and quantum voodoo some people think is necessary. It's not a solved problem, but I'm confident we'll find the a perfectly scientific explanation. In that sense, it's merely a hard problem, not "The Hard Problem."
Feeling is just how we experience reward and punishment. It's an epiphenomena of our machinery for interpreting and interacting with the world. An intermediate representation, essentially.
> Feeling is just how we experience reward and punishment.
It is that, but not just that. This behaviourist Skinnerian abstraction doesn't do it justice. It may be an epiphenomenon, but how it arises at all is the question of interest here.
We may be meat robots, but we are social meat robots, so it's not surprising many of us feel a desire to discuss our shared meat robot-ness, aka "consciousness".
>many of us feel a desire
Can you restate that clause without using any synonym for experience, subjectivity, consciousness, etc.? I posit that you can't, and the fact that you can't explain the most basic fact of existence except recursively is itself interesting.
Basically, humans are meat robots whose brain contains a symbolic-experiential map of their surroundings, meaning it (among many other things) associates symbolic concepts with sensations. Since humans self-model as part of their social behavior, the map contains a representation of themselves. The map also contains a sensory input and associated symbolic representation for its own operation; the meat robot calls "the meat robot sensing in the map that the meat robot is modelling itself" consciousness or "being itself". Separately, it calls the concept it associates with itself "I" and the sensory input of operating the map "being".
I'm familiar with the map-territory distinction, but I still don't think that's sufficient. I'll grant that it's possible to define "I" as an arm's-length name for a representation - basically the same as "my body" or "my hands". And we can, without any philosophical complexity, do that with consciousness itself - I can talk about "my state of consciousness" in the third person.
That doesn't, to me, explain subjectivity. The simplest factory robot will have a model of self - likely a much more accurate one than mine. Is it conscious? Does it subjectively experience?
For the closest example, I think there's probably something it is to be like the Linux OOM killer.
If neuroscience provides a detailed scientific explanation for how consciousness works, that'll put it all to rest. Of course, the mysticism camp doesn't believe this is possible even in principle, and there are likely to be some holdouts even after the problem is solved, just like we have flat earthers now.
The truth is we can’t ever be sure our understanding is complete. This is why philosophy exists as distinct from science and always will.
I don't know that I'd go that far. Is there such a thing as quicksort, or is it a term we made up to differentiate certain bit patterns from the rest of the possible bit patterns (i.e., the rest of the positive integers)?
You could write an article like this about quicksort. At what point do you look at a certain positive integer, usually a couple thousand digits long, and say, "Behold, there is quicksort for x86_64"? (What is x86_64, for that matter? Scientists have recently proven it can exist without silicon, and it is well known that silicon can exist without x86_64.)
I'd agree with something extremely close to your point - that consciousness is an abstraction, just like quicksort and x86_64 are - and I'd even happily admit that abstractions are things we've made up, but just because something is an abstraction doesn't mean it isn't real!
I'd claim that if two people agree about measurable facts and disagree about whether something is conscious, they do in fact disagree on the definition of consciousness, just as if they disagreed on whether something counted as NoSQL or scrum. (Though it's been a while since I paid attention to this area of philosophy, so I might just be wrong here - is there an example of two people claiming to agree on the definition of consciousness but reaching different conclusions?)
Honestly maybe this was the brilliance of the article. We don't even need to agree on the definition of "breakfast" to conclude that it's a useful and meaningful term. Nobody would claim breakfast doesn't exist on the mere grounds that it's made up. Of course it's made up, it's an abstraction.
For sure, consciousness is used to put humans over other creatures [1]. But that doesn't mean that consciousness doesn't exist. Why don't you look at it the other way round and assume consciousness wherever possible? Vegans have compassion with animals because they see consciousness. Are they wrong?
Or don't they go far enough and plants and even stones have consciousness? But then, why don't we feel different when we cut our hair and lose some matter, or exchange all atoms of our body during our life?
My point is just that the way we feel about a certain action says almost nothing about the nature of reality or morality, but rather about us as a species. Whether or not stones have a consciousness wouldn't affect how bad we feel about crushing them into dust.
For what it's worth, I tend to lean toward the "not far enough" camp. I see no good reason to assume that there is anything special about any particular arrangement of matter that causes there to be something that it is like to be that matter. I think it is more accurate to consciousness, than to say that we are conscious.
There are still interesting questions to answer about consciousness. One of them being "why does the brain spend so much effort simulating an internally consistent model of what it's "like" to be me?" - and we know that it is, because it flaps my jaws and wiggles my fingers on the keyboard in patterns that are consistent with that It seems like a lot of resources to spend on something that isn't incredibly useful somehow. But those are questions about the mechanics of the brain, not about some mystic property or sensory qualia
Uncounsciousness is often taken to mean the absence of consciousness, but it could just as well be the absence of objects in consciousness. After all, by definition, no one has ever had first-hand experience of their consciousness disappearing, so we don't even know that consciousness can disappear. Likewise for consciousness appearing.
...which begs the question, rather; why are we the only bits of matter to have done this?
Is this the exact symphony that plays in my brain that plays in yours when we look at the same red object? What about when you dream of a red object?
It is no more possible for me to experience as blue what you experience as red, and vice versa, as for me to experience as 3 what you experience as 2. If I experienced it as 3, that is, one less than 4, it would actually be 3. When I dream of three objects, I experience them just like you would. I don't see why dreaming of a red object would be any different.
If your brain can detect 700nm-wavelength light without you having a conscious experience of red, then there certainly is a question. Also, dreaming of red is not perceiving red, since there is no 700nm light. This is why you can't just simply reduce an experience to the stimulus.
> It is no more possible for me to experience as blue what you experience as red, and vice versa, as for me to experience as 3 what you experience as 2. If I experienced it as 3, that is, one less than 4, it would actually be 3. When I dream of three objects, I experience them just like you would. I don't see why dreaming of a red object would be any different.
The question isn't about the quality of your subjective experiences, it's about whether the pattern of neurons firing would necessarily be the same between people. If not, then you can't simply reduced subjective experiences to brain states. This has been a long standing objecting to the identity theory of mind.
My brain can detect three items without me having a conscious experience of three, and I can dream of three items without three items existing. I am simply saying that - whatever it is - your brain also has some experience it correlates with the stimulus of three, and there is no meaningful way to compare or contrast that experience with my brain's experience beyond noting that they're both correlated with the same stimulus.
We think we can imagine, what if my experience of "red" is your experience of "blue," and vice versa? But that's as meaningful as asking, what if my experience of "two" is your experience of "three," and vice versa?
> it's about whether the pattern of neurons firing would necessarily be the same between people
Nothing in my argument has anything to do with patterns of neurons firing or even with the existence of brains themselves. Perhaps my "red" neurons are in one place and your "red" neurons are in another place, sure, whatever. Why should that mean that our experiences are different?
I mean, certainly, the neurons themselves are not the same. Your neurons don't fire when I see red, or vice versa. But that's not enough to settle anything.
Correct, other than it makes an identity theory of mind problematic.
> Why should that mean that our experiences are different?
That's not my objection. You stated in the previous post:
> There is no "experience" of seeing red beyond the simple fact of perceiving 700nm-wavelength light.
I'm objecting to attempts to reduce experience to its physical substrate and then say there's nothing more to the matter. But there is if the reduction doesn't work. And it doesn't in this case, because there are red visual experiences which are not perceptual. Dreams, memories, visualizations and hallucinations can all contain red visual experiences in the absence of 700nm photons. So can directly stimulating the right neurons with a magnet or electrodes in the brain via surgery.
This leaves the hard problem intact.
You cannot identify/designate the experience of seeing "red" any more precisely than "that experience one has on seeing 700nm-wavelength light," just like you cannot identify the experience of seeing "three" any more than "that experience one has on seeing a thing and another thing and another thing."
It's true that you do not need the actual perception in order to have the experience, in either case. But do you believe there is a hard problem of the experience of three? Do you ask whether the exact symphony that plays in your brain plays in mine when we look at the same three objects?
(Maybe yes, and I'm misunderstanding what you think the hard problem is?)
I think there seems to be a hard problem of any experience, be it red, three, pain, etc, because nobody has come up with a convincing way of how to reduce that to the physical.
> Do you ask whether the exact symphony that plays in your brain plays in mine when we look at the same three objects?
I doubt it does as individual brains differ, although there are likely similar patterns of neurons firing. This is why it's hard to reduce experience to brain activity.
> Maybe yes, and I'm misunderstanding what you think the hard problem is?
Making consciousness compatible with physicalism.
This works just as well (better IMHO), does it not ?
"The self is a kind of fiction, for hosts and humans alike. It's a story we tell ourselves. [...] There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you're not missing anything at all."
I could quote Morpheus rhetorically asking Neo what reality is and then answering with, "If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." Which doesn't settle any philosophical discussion on the nature of reality or perception, or render those discussions moot.
Do you not doubt, ergo think, ergo be? Who is reading this sentence?
Consciousness sounds like an extremely beneficial evolutionary trait to me. Imagine an "unconscious human" who shares the same body as us but the brain thinks it can't think, thinks it is dead, thinks that nothing it senses is alive or real including itself and its own thoughts. That unconscious human can definitively exist as an organism but it would have a hard time to coexist in a community of humans.
Please don't nitpick the usage of the word "think" because I'm referring to "machine style" thinking. A computer can think without being conscious.
Of course, doing that removes any sense that humans are special or unique, which was darawk's point.
This path can lead to solipsism, but there are many exit points between "I am the only conscious being" and "all living things are conscious."
The problem with qualia, subjective consciousness, and all their near-synonyms is that they're almost impossible to define non-self-referentially. That doesn't mean they don't exist, though - and all human experience is indication that they do.
Well, what would you expect to be different if you weren't? Presumably you'd still behave the same way that you do now (because by definition qualia aren't the externally observable parts of your experience), so none of the experiences that affect your decision-making process can be part of them - so wouldn't existing without qualia feel exactly the same as existing with qualia? In which case, why are you sure that you're not already doing it?
What if you're not actually conscious, you just think you are?
But that only works for an outside observer. I can't be tricked into thinking I'm conscious, because it's recursive: who, then, is getting tricked? I know that I'm conscious because I'm the one experiencing things. You know that you're conscious for the same reason. Neither of us has a good way of being sure that the other one - or anyone else - is, at least not without some deeper philosophical reasoning.
Again, seriously, how can I tell? There are people who can't visualise things in their head, and largely don't realise there's anything strange about them. I can certainly introspect my thoughts, but I can talk about the results of that, so presumably a p-zombie is also able to do that. I don't think there's any part of my experience that doesn't affect my actions, so I don't think this notion of qualia is valid.
But it just reiterates his first example using breakfast instead of university...
'The first example is of a visitor to Oxford. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquired "But where is the University?"[3] The visitor's mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category "units of physical infrastructure" rather than that of an "institution".'
I disagree, but thats what the article is saying.
Since I think the current scientific treatment of consciousness is rather deplorable (unconscious scientists unconsciously trying to be consciously smart), I like this article.
Oh and I like your interpretation of the article better. Although I'm not convinced I give the author that much credit.
Not that this rules out your theory.
And I thought it was nice philosophers still have something useful to do and talk about these things because science will soon find out what makes breakfast, or if it even exists.
It's great HN is discussing this stuff.
Come to comments, oh, it's just about consciousness again.
How did this pass review?