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Comment by mekoka | Hacker News Reader

The hard problem of consciousness is actually a misnomer. It should really be the impossible problem of consciousness. The former (mis)leads some people into believing that there's a scientific (i.e. in the realm of nature) solution. There's no way to objectively experience consciousness, by that I mean, you can plug an organism full of sensors to try to map its experience of reality, but you still aren't experiencing what they themself are. It's a philosophical/metaphysical blackbox. There's no way to know if/what an AI experiences. Our current best theories on consciousness, although divergent, suggest that it likely doesn't.

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Let’s assume we find some mathematical models for a causal structure of consciousness that meets many of the criteria described by usual humans and maybe phenomenologists.

We later find some possible physical instantiation.

And here comes some bullsh*t (in the philosophical definition of „unclarifiable unclarity”): an electromagnetic field bend back on itself in a way that it’s mathematically necessary to introduce imaginary time to describe it; also it exhibits information processing capabilities.

We then further find that the biological brain has a process that can plausibly create such a dynamic structure.

Finally we test, and subjects say consistently it seems like they are not there or do not experience, if this structure is disrupted by several clever means.

Would this problem still be impossible? We could check if AI has features that can and do create such structures, no?

That’s at least an old dream of mine. Please pick it apart still! I’d rather learn something important than keep it…

I don't personally see a major problem with your reasoning (sorry to not teach you anything new). Consciousness could be very well due to a process we don't know about yet, and disrupting this process would indeed consistently lead to a lapse in conscious experience.

The only thing is, we wouldn't know just yet if there are other ways for matter to organize itself as a conscious being. Best we can do for now is to learn about the type of consciousness that we animals on earth experience.

My question to you and all people who talk about the hard problem of consciousness : does this problem actually exist?

I mean, the thing I learned when I was a student was to ask: is this a fact? (zero hypothesis I think it was called).

What proof do we have that that type of consciousness/experience exists? I mean, It could be our brain building a story on the fly to explain our senses.

What led me to believe that is a severe asthma that led to hallucinating and NDE 4 or 5 years ago. The loops my brain made me jump through to explain my auditive hallucinations was terrifying when I think about it.

And also it's the simplest explanation.

There have been many proposed solutions to the so called "hard problem" of consciousness. We can easily find some with a quick google search. Even its' existence has been debated by multiple scholars / philosophers - wikipedia has a list with some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

> There's no way to know if/what an AI experiences

Getting the state of neural net, at a given point in time, is easy. There are many ways to see exactly which neurons activate, why they activate, how much they activate, etc. For smaller neural nets, this is actually easy to do - here's a blog post about it:

https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/visualizing-weights/

As neural nets get larger and larger, interpretability gets harder and harder. However, I wouldn't say it's impossible.

It seems you don’t fully understand parent comment and the problem itself. Capturing signals from you eye nerve doesn’t tell anything about your subjective experience of seeing an apple. The only way to understand that you’re seeing an apple from this signal is to train a model on your responses. This is how AI works. It’s a statistical imitation.

The only way for your statement to be true is if you’d be an imitation yourself, not capable of experiencing directly. Which is actually possible, see “pholosophical zombie” concept.

I’m joking of course about you being an imitation. Or do I? :)

> Capturing signals from you eye nerve doesn’t tell anything about your subjective experience of seeing an apple.

I strongly disagree. It actually does tell you quite a lot. For example, if there aren't any signals, you're very likely not seeing anything.

> The only way to understand that you’re seeing an apple from this signal is to train a model on your responses

It seems to me this contradicts your first argument. If such models exist (they very likely do, I'm not familiar with this area of research), they can tell us a lot about a person's experience.

> see “pholosophical zombie” concept.

Searched for “pholosophical zombie” but couldn't find anything, sorry. Just kidding :)

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