But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that we have any experience at all?
It's telling that science has made incredible progress (e.g. in the last 100 years) but on questions such as these above, we know little more than people knew then. Although we do know a lot more about the mechanics of what and how we experiences things.
The answer to "who" just becomes "a specific instance of X" that perhaps has some low probability combination of minor characteristics compared to other Xs.
I think much of what we think is human intelligence is actually crystalized intelligence in the form of language and tools. We got them by default, as citizens of our city.
But that isn't the question. The question it possible that a sufficiently complex program could ever be able to have the experiences in the same way that humans have them (AKA "qualia").
Present and future anger, present and future pain, predicting whether future social cohesion will be maintained based on how a response is made to someone within a social graph. Understanding and assuming that nodes (other people) within a social graph can communicate to each other to update the state of a social interaction that they weren't present for.
I think it is possible.
If pleasure was just a variable on a scale from 0 to 10, and not its own co-processor, and an assumption that some forms of pleasure can influence parts of the social graph, it maybe isn't even that complicated anymore.
I think it would become less distinguishable from consciousness.
Let me send this ball straight back to you.
In the morning when you wake up what happens? You might take something to eat. How would you find the kitchen, how would you recognise the food, or even know you need it? Of course, you are conscious. That's how.
It is possible to be conscious because otherwise your body wouldn't be able to survive. It's essential for avoiding death. We are self replicators in a limited resource environment, after all. This balance between self replication and death evolved consciousness as an evolutionary advantage.
Being exposed to your internal and external environment is the source of consciousness. Even a single cell can seek nutrients or avoid bad places, or decide when to replicate, it has a rudiment of consciousness. But panpsychism? It's one step away from new age babble. Stones are just stones.
This is why I think the hard problem of consciousness is silly and only exists because language is so imperfect that philosophers have invented a problem which they can't even decide is actually a problem or not. Can any of us even agree on what an "experience" is?
You can tell this is so because every conversation about the hard problem of consciousness starts off by trying to convince people there is a problem to talk about and use the same tired examples. We can "experience" red. There is an "experience" of being a bat.
A piece of material is not conscious because it doesn't need to. You see, bacterias are self replicators, humans too. And self replication is resource intensive, while resources are limited. So life becomes a competition. That is why agents need to become more attuned to their state and possible actions and outcomes.
Is that good enough to be called consciousness? Taking sensory inputs, representing your state, taking actions, observing effect, learning from it. Your goal - to exist, to make copies of yourself. If you're not aware of essential information, or don't understand your situation, you die. If you live, it's because you are aware.
It's not interacting with anything else to make those decisions, it's completely autonomous.
> observing effect, learning from it
If something is meaningfully doing that, then we're getting to consciousness. But I'll note that I don't count natural selection as "learning" here.
And observing the results of decisions and learning is not mandatory to survive and reproduce.
It is about having subjective experience aka "qualia". It is about "it being like something to be you", contrasted with, e.g. being a rock (which most people agree, it is not like anything to be).
You are assuming “you” is a unique, atomic thing here.
When your fingers curl due to being immersed in water (which is a neurological thing, not a physical thing!), your conscious mind does not experience the humidity, the finger curling system does. You just experience the effect of the skin curling through sight and touch, afterwards.
There are several other systems in our body that react to an environment that we are barely conscious of, and “barely” is being generous. Those seems like a counterexample of your “we can't not be conscious if we experience”.
The problem is yet again w/ the definition of having an experience, as I said in my reply to the parent. It's just language, and the reason why we find ourselves in some kind of linguistic paradox trying to explain it.
ps. interesting user name.
What makes my experience of seeing red any more special than the experience of a plant reacting to light? The fact that I can type about it on hackernews and the plant can't?
You are apparently a believer in some degree of panpyschism. That's fine. Conscious is like gravity - it's just a part of the universe and there's no explanation for it other than that it is experienced by anything with (mass, for gravity ; ??? for consciousness).
I'm not opposed to this explanation, I'm just not (yet) convinced that it's the right one.
I agree philosophical zombies are impossible, but only because they wouldn't be able to reliably talk about consciousness without a conscious "zombie master". See https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/zombies-sequence
Besides having a way to copy what it learns into the future, self replication also provides a goal, a guiding force - of course, the goal is to avoid death before replication. Another great quality of self replication is its open-endedness. It can become anything as long as it keeps replicating.
For these three qualities I consider self replication the basic process behind consciousness. They create the means by which open ended learning can evolve.
False, we can program a roomba to seek out electricity to ‘survive’. E.g. zombies
_How_ do we have any experience will be more easily answered the more we know about _what_ we actually experience. And _what_ we experience is predicated upon _how_ we experience it. I agree both need investigating.
The _bigger_ question I see the coin representing is _who or what_ is experiencing in the first place? The way I see it, it's not really _a thing_ experiencing _something_ but instead _things_ experiencing _things_ at _times_.
I agree with you about the "things experiencing things at times".
This is debatable. If you subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, then it makes sense as an avenue to the answer.
At this point, I'm not willing to regard consciousness as something like gravity or the weak force, though I concede that it could turn out that way.
Information might be a small piece, and it might be the thing itself, but it's the only tangible avenue we have to pursue, so I don't think it's a matter of them answering or discussing a different question, I think it's them framing the same question with slightly different assumptions.
I don't see how we can be said to know this, certainly not at this point in human investigation of consciousness.
It is only through direct inspection of one's own internal experience that it becomes apparent consciousness is not an illusion. Therefore those who claim consciousness is an illusion are not in fact conscious.
Those who say it is emergent are perhaps conscious but have not looked carefully enough to understand that consciousness is an entirely different category of thing to physical reality.
The problem here is that science as a system of thought operates in a kind of space separate from the space of conscious experience. The intelligence born of that scientific process which is a kind of entity that exists in it's own right - is not itself conscious and hence cannot introspect correctly about consciousness.
So when a person is operating in the mode of scientific thinking they are in a sense embodying that disembodied intelligence that is not aware. Or at least it is not able to introspect about it's own awareness. And so they draw incorrect and non-sensical conclusions that fly in the face of everyone's direct visceral experience.
It really is quite a phenomena.
I say that because of that's what I best understand the neocortex doing (it does that and probably something more). If you buy in what the Numenta people are talking about, then certain neurons in your neocortex configure themselves to be able to predict their inputs better, so they start to form a model of their input. In aggregate, these neurons probably start to learn multiple sequential models of their input.
My guess it that these models in the brain interact with each other. I think some of the larger models that the brain models is us (individually), the environment we find ourselves in, our mind, how we relate to it, the 3D space that we find ourselves in, and such.
This is a simulation to explain what is going on "out there" (the physical world) so that the physical organism can successfully navigate "out there".
This simulated world, body, and such, is what is "real" to us.
You're right, it's not the same question. Dennett answers that question too though: you don't have conscious experience, you only think you do.
Thus, the questions he and these authors address are the only ones worth investigating. In time, exploring these questions will reveal the illusion behind consciousness, just like the progressive elaboration of the biochemistry of life revealed the fiction people tried to spin around how living matter simply had to have something different than non-living matter ("elan vital" in vitalism).
That's what illusionism, the position of Keith Frankish, asserts. Dennett mostly seems to support it, as you note, but more equivocally than Frankish.
For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist (as noted by Descartes).
Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having SE (i.e. is a "phenomenological zombie"), or (more likely, IMO) has not identified his own SE.
I believe Dennett is an eliminative materialist, so he would consider qualia to be an illusion.
> For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist (as noted by Descsartes).
Descartes begged the question. Just deconstruct it: "I think therefore I am" presupposes the existence of "I" right at the very start. Except everybody knows there is no "I", you're just a bundle of atoms, and a bundle that's changing from moment to moment. Where are "you" exactly? The argument is fallacious and implies fallacious conclusions which led to mind/body dualism.
The non-fallacious version is "this is a thought, therefore thoughts exist". This is undeniably true, and yet it does not imply the existence of an "I" or any kind of dualism between mind and matter. A thought would then simply be a specific material structure (edit: or rather, it's a particular logical structure that can be embodied as a material structure).
> Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having SE (i.e. is a "phenomenological zombie"), or (more likely, IMO) has not identified his own SE.
Anyone doubting subjective experience has simply recognized that every prior claim to human specialness has failed spectacularly, that science has repeatedly shown that our obvious and intuitive grasp of perception and truth is fatally flawed in numerous ways, and therefore that we should not in a million years trust anything that we immediately perceive as completely obvious when it can be demonstrated quite easily that these perceptions are vague and often false.
For christ's sake, your senses are telling you that water breaks pencils [1], and that you're burning up when you're dying of cold [2], and you're telling me that your internal perceptions of your subjective experience, arguably the most sophisticated part of your brain, is some kind factual oracle? Sorry, that's just nonsense. You should be immensely skeptical of your perceptions, looking both for justification that they are true or explanations for why you think they are true, you should not be treating them as simply a priori true.
[1] https://scienceathomekids.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG...
[2] https://psichologyanswers.com/library/lecture/read/76624-do-...
> Except everybody knows there is no "I", you're just a bundle of atoms, and a bundle that's changing from moment to moment.
This is begging the question in the other direction.
Perceptions are not experience. Nobody denies the existence of perceptions, the question is whether perceptions carry something "extra", something "ineffable" that we call "qualitative experience", something that cannot even in principle be captured by a third person objective description.
Algorithms and machines arguably have perceptions but not experience. Eliminativism is the position that we don't have experience either, we're only a collection of perceptions arranged in such a way that it leads us to the conclusion that our experience is real.
> This is begging the question in the other direction.
I'm not begging the question because I'm not saying eliminativism is true because matter is all we can measure. I'm simply saying that it's demonstrably true that by every measure currently available, we are just a bundle of atoms changing from moment to moment. The only people who claim otherwise and are given any kind of credibility, are people who cite fallacious thought experiments like Mary's room as "evidence". Not very compelling frankly.
That's correct, mostly, but it also means this position is nonsensical.
What is notable about qualia is that it is possible to have them at all. An illusion is definitionally a qualia. You cannot have an illusion without qualia existing.
Dennett tries to finesse this, but in my opinion fails. I think he wants it to be possible that you can somehow experience things in a non-mysterious way, and this this non-mysterious experience explains the mysterious experience stuff. I think he's wrong.
However, I don't think Dennett (or any human) is actually a zombie. The difficulty, is getting people to recognize their own SE. Our vocabulary, all about material and mechanisms, can't actually define SE. Instead, we have a few ostensions by which an attentive experiencer might recognize his own SE:
[Descartes] SE is that one thing, which absolutely must exist.
[Nagel] SE is "what it's like, to be...". He adds, that all our science is fully consistent with SE not existing. That's why it makes perfect sense for a zombie to believe it doesn't exist.
[Jackson]: Mary knows what seeing red is like, only when she has seen red.
Dennett, however, requires that the mysterious part of his own SE must be explainable by a non-mysterious aspect of SE. He just doesn't have any proposal for what or how that could be. He wants to wave his hands and say, "well, we have detectors for this and that and these predictive capabilities and these modelling systems, and so ... ta-da, we're conscious!"
I don't think this gives Dennett enough credit, because what our instruments are all telling us is that there no single, indivisible "self" at all; we are all made up of constituent parts either none of which have consciousness themselves (eliminativism), or all of which must have consciousness (pansychism), because ineffable qualia cannot simply appear from nothing. This reddit post does a great job breaking down Dennett's position sensibly:
https://reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/shneug/can_someo...
> There's no one thing, not even a collection of things, that can be identified with what we think of as the conscious mind. Instead, we've got a whole bunch of different things, none of which has "consciousness" in a traditional sense, and these come together in a way that makes it seem as though we're conscious.
I just don't buy this at all. This seems precisely as I described it:
> "well, we have detectors for this and that and these predictive capabilities and these modelling systems, and so ... ta-da, we're conscious!"
Also, note the heavy lifting being done by "makes it seem" from the Reddit quote. This goes back to the basic problem: Dennett (and the authors in TFA) are describing what we are conscious of, what makes up our consciousness, but he and they are not addressing how it possible for there to be any subjective experience at all.
I would go a little further, even: the whole reason why there is a sense of self is precisely because there is a singular subjective experience. You can figure out what drives that experience, and even note that it isn't rooted in any kind of singular and/or stable physical system, and that's actually really interesting. But that's not addressing how subjective experience is possible at all.
No, it's actually, "ta-da, we're not conscious! but here's why we think we are!"
> but he and they are not addressing how it possible for there to be any subjective experience at all.
Because neuroscience will do this by elaborating the mechanisms. Like in this paper:
The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
An analogy for tech nerds would be how the illusion of multitasking on a single CPU machine arises from imperceptibly fast context switching. Something similar happens in that theory, where our perceptual faculties are constantly switching between signals from our internal representations and our senses, thus producing a simplified but false conclusion that subjectivity is present.
> I would go a little further, even: the whole reason why there is a sense of self is precisely because there is a singular subjective experience.
And I'd say you're just telling yourself a retroactively edited story that there is a singular subjective experience in order to make sense of our own thoughts and behaviours. In fact, this sort of retroactive editing has been demonstrated multiple times.
So look, "The Intentional Stance" is for me one of the most important books I've ever read in this general area, and I totally buy all the stuff Dennett and others have built up around the idea that what we are conscious of is an edited, self-created, intention-injected model of our own selves (to whatever extent there is a unitary self to be a model of).
But I don't think that any of that addresses "how can we be conscious of anything at all".
In the quote I included above, who is the "you" that is telling and who is the "yourself" that is being told? But more importantly, what does "being told" mean? How does one have an experience (whether it is being told, or being cold, or being old)? It's not enough to say "we're not conscious, we just think we are" - the conundrum of consciousness is not about how humans think, but the fact that we have subjective experience (which may includes lies told to ourselves by ourselves).
This is still begging the question by the use of "who". There is no "who", there is no self, there are only thoughts that refer to a "self", but the referrant does not actually exist in the way that's implied by these thoughts; there's no spirit or homunculus in your mind to which "self" actually refers.
> the conundrum of consciousness is not about how humans think, but the fact that we have subjective experience (which may includes lies told to ourselves by ourselves).
I think the paper I linked is a good start on answering this question. Per my other reply to you, whether this kind of answer is satisfactory depends on what you take "subjective experience" to mean.
If you buy the thought experiments (p-zombies, Mary's room) that suggest some sort of "ineffability", then this explanation will not be satisfactory. Personally, none of those thought experiments are remotely convincing.
> We argue that the attention schema theory provides a possible answer to the puzzle of subjective experience. The core claim of the theory is that the brain computes a simplified model of the process and current state of attention, and that the content of this model is the basis of subjective reports.
Sure, that's all fine. Subjective reports are interesting. But they are not the same as subjective experience. What we say about what we experience is no doubt complex, and has a complex relationship with actual brain behavior. But consciousness, at its heart, is not about what we report, it's about the experience of being something.
And of course the "think" has a quality to it that the hard problem is about. It's interesting how illusionists and eliminativists explain away aspects of SE by invoking (other) aspects of SE. "You merely have an illusion of being conscious" - that illusion is the hard problem, so now explain that illusion. I could be having an illusion of an illusion of consciousness.
Imagine something that doesn't exist in the usual physical sense e.g. a dinner table on the Moon. Does that table exist? Not in the usual physical sense. Your thought or imagination of it does, though. What is that thought or image in your mind's eye "made of"? Sure, you might be able to correlate it precisely with certain neurons and yet you've not answered the question. You might call the mind's eye table an illusion, but you're not gonna deny that the picture of it exists in some sense. Three things exist: the physical table, your neurons and, separately, although not entirely independently from the neurons, (the picture of) the mind's eye table. Hence, the latter is part of the universe and the fundamental substrate of the universe must support if somehow, in a way that's different from the usual physical matter tables and neurons. Is your visual brain circuitry involved in the imagination, perhaps even generating the image in your mind's eye? Perhaps, but this doesn't answer the question. If we're nothing but our perceptions, then what the heck is that imaginary table that I'm visualizing quite well while there's no perception of an actual table? What are the physical laws characterizing such mind's eye objects, somehow coupled to ordinary physical matter and yet not of the same "stuff"?
Models like the one linked don't explain why SE exists in the universe. They posit certain physical/mathematical strucutures and claim that if this or that structure is present, then ta-da there is SE (or the illusion of it, which is the same thing). People in the stone age had a model of that kind: "this piece of matter, structured with two arms and legs - it's conscious". At some point we developed language and the model got a bit more precise by demanding the piece of matter emit certain sounds from a specific location on their body. What we have today is no different in kind. We've just become more precise at locating the pieces of human matter to verify the presence of conciousness (or illusions). None of that says why that configuration of neurons experiences or has illusions, only that it does. Science tells us that experience is in the nature of certain pieces of matter and we just have to accept that without further explanation, like the fact that electric charge exists and follows certain rules. Deeper "why" answers are out of the scope of current science.
I've explained this elsewhere, but will repeat here: this argument relies on a definition of "illusion" that begs the question on the existence of a subject, just like Descartes. Define illusion as "a perception that directly entails a false conclusion", and there is no subject needed, and no hard problem remains.
It's like you're asking me to explain the dinosaur you saw while you were hallucinating. Sure, I agree we should explore the biochemistry and neurology involved in dream-like states that yield distorted perceptions that imply false conclusions about reality. Let's not go so far as to posit that those distorted perceptions are real if there's no corroborating evidence of their existence.
No, it's not like that at all. We're not discussing the dinosaur. We're discussing the existence of hallucinations (and SE in general). The dinosaur is irrelevant; the fact that it was possible to have the experience is the central question.
Again, this comes back to my fundamental argument with Dennett (and one that he graciously conceded in an email back in the 90s; not sure he would do so now): trying to figure out what it is that we are conscious of, rather than how we are conscious of anything at all. I'm 110% ready to concede that everything we are conscious of is an illusion, an error, a projection, an intent-laden stance etc. I'm 110% ready to concede that everything we think we experience as a "self" is wrong.
None of that helps to explain how experience is possible. So you're either denying that SE exists, or like Dennett insisting that mysterious SE can be explained by non-mysterious stuff.
I think that's incorrect, as it relies on a definition of "illusion" that begs the question on the existence of a subject, just like Descartes. Define illusion as "a perception that directly entails a false conclusion", and there is no subject needed.
> I think he wants it to be possible that you can somehow experience things in a non-mysterious way, and this this non-mysterious experience explains the mysterious experience stuff. I think he's wrong.
No, what he's saying is that there is no "you" to experience anything, there are only scattered but correlated thoughts that are stitched together in a way that produces a false conclusion that there is a "you".
There is no "conclusion" here in the sense of "2+2=4". What is at stake is not a reasoned, or evidential analysis of how the world is. It is, rather, that subjective experience exists (we know it exists because we have subjective experience, and whether the experience is of something invented and false does not change the fact that the experience exists).
Regardless of whether there is a singular "you" or, in Minsky's term, a "society of mind" (or self, to line up with Dennett a little more), something enjoys subjective experience, and you call that that "you". It doesn't really matter how it arises, whether it accurately reflects the operations of the brain/body: the existence of subjective experience creates a self.
What is in dispute here is what "subjective experience" means. If we both agree that "subjective experience" is a phenomenon that can in principle be captured by a third person objective description, then we can agree that it exists and that our observations are actually evidence of its existence.
But this is not what most people mean by this term, and it is that term that is a fiction on the eliminativist view.
Now we get to the heart of it (and the reason why consciousness is and has been such a difficult problem): I do not agree that this is true.
> Some of them — Dennett is a prime example — are so in thrall to the fundamental intuition of dualism, the intuition that the experiential and the physical are utterly and irreconcilably different, that they are prepared to deny the existence of experience, more or less (c)overtly, because they are committed to physicalism, i.e. physicSalism.
> "‘They are prepared to deny the existence of experience.’ At this we should stop and wonder. I think we should feel very sober, and a little afraid, at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith. For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy. It falls, unfortunately, to philosophy, not religion, to reveal the deepest woo-woo of the human mind. I find this grievous, but, next to this denial, every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.
[1]: https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Reali...
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
I don't think SE is exclusive to humans, but only humans talk about it, as far as we know.
This view is a bit closed-minded, if you ask me. You may also find that exploring those questions reveals something that you could never have imagined beforehand. You may end up finding out that consciousness is not the illusion, but everything else we perceive is.