Sounds like it’s mostly an argument about the definition of consciousness. At best I think a definition that is immune to being tested as you suggest is going to rank as the least interesting. It just doesn’t seem very inquisitive.
In that sense it is not like a concept of God or ghosts or aliens - all of which are merely imagined and cannot be tested. The thing with consciousness is - you know it exists. In fact we can doubt many things, if not everything. But you can never doubt you are having a conscious experience right now.
It is not God of the gaps in one fundamental way. God of the gaps arguments attempt to justify something invisible by saying you cannot measure it. Consciousness is something visible - in fact it's the only thing that's visible - yet we cannot measure it, and likely never will be able to.
As Schrödinger put it: "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."
Or to take another grand physicist, Max Planck: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."
Now these are people who thought a lot about both physics and consciousness. I think that when we do justice to both sides - the conclusion that one cannot arise from the principles of the other is inescapable. However, when we only immerse ourselves in materialism or only in spiritual new-age philosophies, we miss this scale of the problem of this mind-body gap the article talks about.
Even after reading all the comments in the thread, I will restate what I said: one must define what they mean by consciousness before discussing it. Even in the example here, you are quoting people talking about consciousness without defining what they mean by it.
It seems that you accept that most things that people would ascribe to consciousness, eg, the ability to perceive their environment, store and retrieve relevant information, to synthesize theories and plans, to incorporate those meta thoughts into higher order thoughts (ie, self-referential knowledge), etc, can be explained by materialistic considerations. But you have another thing that you also call consciousness that is definitionally mystical, something physical explanations can make zero inroads to explaining. Please give some concrete examples of what cannot ever be explained.
Hey, I agree. These were not as much appeals to authority as a reply to "your form of mysticism", just to get the focus off myself.
> Please give some concrete examples of what cannot ever be explained.
We can try it this way. We both look at a red apple. We both say it's "red". Can you device an experiment or some procedure to check wether we perceive red in the same way? Maybe what you see as "red" I see as "blue".
Please note that this is not about which pathways fire upon seeing a light of a certain wavelength. Just assume we are both healthy and same regions are activated when looking at red light. Is the experience of red light the same for both of us and how to prove it, or check it?
I mean, you can. It's just gonna be a loose statement that doesn't bind states of the universe to any meaningful description
Just because you feel in your guts you have consciousness doesn't mean you have it
There are many definitions for it, but for a definition to work the definition has to make sense for the person receiving it. Hence why the descriptions vary and can appear vogue. The first step is an attempt at showing to the other person what the discussion is about. So here is my another attempt: the sensation that appears in your "minds eye" when you see or imagine a red color. The awareness of this color is what consciousness is about. Perhaps it's so intimate that people don't think often about it and so it's hard to point to it, hence the difficulty with definitions.
> Just because you feel in your guts you have consciousness doesn't mean you have it
I can be an extreme sceptic and doubt anything. I can see a cat, close my eyes, open them again and see the same cat standing there. Was the cat there when I closed my eyes? I can certainly doubt that. Maybe it was quickly abducted and returned a moment later in the same place. Maybe some objects disappear when they are not looked at? Maybe there is no cat in the first place but this is a mirage or a hallucination of mine. Maybe I am now dreaming. All this I can doubt. What I cannot doubt is the fact that I am seeing a cat now. And the fact that I have a memory of seeing a cat before closing my eyes. So to the contrary - whatever you think you know can be doubted. The fact that you are having a conscious experience of something cannot be doubted.
BTW, I liked the humorous response to this position from the posted article:
> The ultra-materialists [...] go all in, they take the plunge, they crash the plane into the building: they deny that consciousness even exists! No, really.
> Just shoot them, they won't notice.
What makes you so sure? Just because you 'feel' you are experiencing consciousness doesn't mean other people are. How do you know other people are? By means of objective perspective from your subjective one? By doing so your consciousness already reached out into the material world and so you only validate materialism by acknowledging the presupposed immaterial consciousness of others.
Honestly I don't think either materialism or immaterialism can be argued for without contradictions of some kind because one (immaterialism) argues the validity of the subjective experience while consequently delving in objectiveness, the experiences of others, any time you have to argue its point and relating it to others. Materialism as you, or someone else argued, is rooted also in a subjective experience so materialism can't discount the immaterial either.
But why be either/or? Why can't both be valid? Because humans like to argue, I'd say. We like to compress information and when there's contradictions, we can't validate both because that kind of information doesn't compress well. Same reason we have to find one side to blame, it can't be both sides because that's just too complicated.
In the response to the original reply of this trhead the proposition that we cannot even be sure of the consciousness in others was one of my main points. I just used "you are having a conscious experience" here for the sake of a conversation that followed with a different person.
> Honestly I don't think either materialism or immaterialism can be argued for without contradictions of some kind because one (immaterialism)
I must say I agree, but would add that instead of immaterialism there are multiple other views, like idealism, dualism, phenomenalism - each rival with one another.
> But why be either/or? Why can't both be valid?
Definitely agree here. I am leaning towards a belief that majority of cultures from the past and present around the world had it right: there is a duality between the body and the mind (or "soul"). We just lost the touch with that second part after trying to explain everything in terms of material things. But we probably reached a gate where materialism breaks down.
The problem with that is the bucket was just kicked further away: what does it mean for something to be aware of something else? Bacteria react to their environment (as such there has to be something at least loosely similar to awareness to them), but most people don't think they are conscious
What I dislike a little about the subject is how lots of people act so sure there's a special sauce to their minds, except they never manage to narrow to anything more precise than "it's a feeling that you'll know what it is if you pay attention to it"
For most other topics, saying "you'll get what I'm talking about with some instrospection" would be immediately rejected
Also, how does it work for people with aphantasia and without inner monologue?
>The fact that you are having a conscious experience of something cannot be doubted
Only if you are sure of the loose / hand-wavey definition of consciousness. I'm sure a hypothetical organism that's vastly more intelligent than us, but with the same loose definition, would consider us barely conscious
> Bacteria react to their environment, but most people don't think they are conscious.
This is precisely one of the points. You don't have to be conscious to react, learn, etc. A thermostat can react to changes in temperature and adjust the dials without any consciousness. In the same way many people often find themselves to have done something automatically without them being aware, as in "I was thinking about something and I drove to the wrong place" (or indeed, more often to the correct place, doesn't matter). Have you not had an experience like this?
> For most other topics, saying "you'll get what I'm talking about with some instrospection" would be immediately rejected
You are aware of things and you are aware that you are aware of things. This is something that can be pointed to and discussed. Just like any other concept in the world.
> Also, how does it work for people with aphantasia and without inner monologue?
The same way it works for blind and/or deaf people. They are aware of different sensations. When you have an inner dialogue you concentrate on it and you have a sort of "light" shining on that process, while maybe performing a lot of different tasks at the same time (like driving). This attention/focus/light is the thing. Damaging an organ cuts out signals sent by your body and you can no longer be aware of them, because there is nothing there. But awareness remains and can be directed to other things.
> Only if you are sure of the loose / hand-wavey definition of consciousness
I disagree that it's hand-wavey. It's a concrete thing that is difficult to communicate the first time, but becomes easier after familiarity, like all the other concepts and definitions.
> I'm sure a hypothetical organism that's vastly more intelligent than us, but with the same loose definition, would consider us barely conscious
Intelligence and this definition of consciousness have nothing to do with each other. In fact the opposite might be true. I've had similar discussions in the past, and the most intelligent people often have the most difficulty with understanding this concept. I think this is because they are used to living in their heads and being aware of their ideas and thoughts all the time. What I would say to such a person is to first entertain the proposition that you are not your thoughts, and try to watch your thoughts as they arise and go and then who is the one watching? And when you watch your breath instead, there is no one watching the thoughts, thou they are still happening without you being aware of them. The "watching" part is consciousness.
Or another idea - do a thought experiment. Imagine a universe without any life forms some billion years ago. Rocks and dust and darkness and stars. But no one to observe this. This universe is "dark" in that sense - there is no one watching. Reactions just take place without being witnessed or observed. This is a place with no consciousness. In this place nothing that happens ever matters to anyone else, because no one is there to experience.
Now imagine a future, where general AI takes over and humanity is dead. This AI - we can never measure if it is conscious or not. It is doing complicated computations inside, but is there a "ghost in the shell" watching and witnessing? No one can tell. It can act, optimise, combine, memorise, improve, create new ideas and formulas, and execute them in a stochastic manner. But at the same time it can be entirely unconscious. Again this version of the universe is "dark". Nothing there matters to anyone.
Now imagine an unconscious person, a thing called a philosophical zombie. It is just like a human being, but has no consciousness. When it is afraid the heart-rate rises, the adrenaline pumps, limbs start to shake, it sweats, and a lot of calculations quickly run through the neurons. But at the same time the "ghost" might not be there and theoretically no one might have an experience of being in this state of stress. The being of such a person would be "dark".
Hope these examples help somewhat...
A conscious being experiences quaila. Which just shifts the problem to defining quaila-which I think we can, using the famous “Mary the colour scientist” thought experiment. A congenitally blind person could learn every single possible scientific fact about colour, but they’d still be no closer to knowing what it is like to see it. Suppose they manage to use all this knowledge to cure their blindness - now they’ve learnt something they didn’t know before - but since they already knew every scientific fact about it, the new thing they’ve learnt is not a scientific fact, it is something else - let us call that “quaila”. And now we’ve defined qualia, we can define “consciousness” in terms of it. I know I am conscious because I know I experience qualia. To the best of my knowledge, rocks don’t, so they aren’t.