Hacker News Reader

>a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint.

These terms are getting at something central to consciousness, the fact that there is a conceptual duality between how we conceive of it from the first-person and how we conceive of it from an objective standpoint. We can't disavow this conceptual duality, a theorist offering an explanation of consciousness that doesn't capture this dual nature of the phenomenon will be rightly considered eliminating the explananda.

But a conceptual duality does not imply an ontological duality. In other words, the fact that we conceive of consciousness in these seemingly opposing ways does not imply two separate phenomena. The term dualism has become a shibboleth to be avoided in serious philosophy of mind, but this is a mistake. A satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as experiencers of sensations. This must then be related to the scientific story of how electrical signals are transformed into behavior. This just is the problem of consciousness. Anything less misses the point.

>For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation [...] is most readily interpreted as an object, closing the door to any process-like interpretation of consciousness.

I agree that the language we use in describing consciousness is unfortunate and has done real damage to what we consider as promising avenues for investigation. We are cognitively biased towards conceptualizing the world in terms of "things" and so we expect our explanations to also be in terms of things. When consciousness isn't found in thing-ness we are tempted to posit a new kind of thing that carries the conscious properties. But we've been lead off course by our initial conceptualization. I'm in favor of seeing objects as processes rather than discrete units. Consciousness is likely in the active dynamics rather than any static property.

>I can easily imagine a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness which would still not lead to a valid answer of "what is it like to be a bat" due to quite obvious limitations of language or the plain invalidity of the question.

Yeah, we will never know "what its like" to experience the existence of another living creature. But this is just a limitation of physical descriptions. This isn't a demerit of physicalism or materialism as a methodology. This is no reason to turn to alternative methodologies that can only hope to offer pseudo-explanations of consciousness at best.

> A satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as experiencers of sensations.

What, in your opinion, would make for a satisfying explanation of consciousness? I think another nontrivial piece of the puzzle is that it's hard to even know what we are looking for. There are many philosophers who argue (convincingly IMHO) that it doesn't make sense to posit a hard problem of consciousness in the first place.

Yeah, its tough to know what a good explanation would even look like. There are so many ways for one thing to resemble another, it's hard to conceive of a new class of resemblance prior to being given an example of it. Resemblance can also depends on one's prior commitments. So its a very dynamic and context dependent property. I don't think there is much hope in identifying what a satisfying explanation of consciousness will look like prior to be presented with one.

That said, I can offer what I take to be a narrowing of the target of promising avenues of investigation. We need a new way to conceptualize existence outside of "thing-based" ontologies. A process ontology would be heading in the right direction. This will perhaps give us the tools to conceptualize a recurrent information-rich dynamical system as a thing in itself (rather than as a collection of individuals with some dynamical behavior). Then we can ask how distinctions are presented to the system on which its behavior and decision-making is determined. A represented distinction is predicated on it being like something or something else to the consumer of the representation such that states can be distinguished. We wouldn't necessarily subjectively resemble this system, but we may recognize our epistemic situation regarding being the target of represented distinctions so that we are confident there is something it is like to be that system.

>are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint

Are you assuming that dualism is invalid? If so, why? There is something to the distinction between physical reality and subjective experience that so far no-one has managed to explain.

>I can easily imagine a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness which would still not lead to a valid answer of "what is it like to be a bat"

Then it would not be a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness. A complete physicalist explanation of consciousness, by definition, would have to account for subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it.

I think one can salvage the distinction between physical reality and subjective experience without positing an abstract ("Cartesian") dualism. It just so happens that most experiences can be categorized as being either external or internal, so we are led to believe that every experience fits into one and only one bucket. But I think that there are plenty of experiences that are not so easily categorized (e.g. feelings).

Demanding that there must be a perfect partition (i.e. assuming dualism) is an additional requirement, but it's not obvious that it should be a good requirement for a sound philosophical theory. In fact I believe it not to be sound, and I believe many philosophical hard problems come from bending over backwards trying to impose this condition.

>Are you assuming that dualism is invalid?

I am only noting a reliance of Nagel's bat arguments on dualist assumptions. Those who reject dualism can then draw their own conclusions ;)

>Then it would not be a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness. A complete physicalist explanation of consciousness, by definition, would have to account for subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it.

For sure a physicalist explanation must somehow deal with these things, but what I mean is that it could turn out that the question "what is it like to be a bat?" is simply incoherent. If a question is in principle unanswerable, self-contradictory or nonsensical, then we can't very well demand an explanation.

> phrases "what it is like to be a bat", or "there is something it is like to be a bat",

> are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a

> plain old dualistic standpoint

philosophers have differentiated these into three different questions

"What is it like to be?" has to do with the nature of consciousness.

"word games" has to do with any use of language, nothing to do with consciousness. You could make a word-game critique of any statement.

"dualism" comes in a number of forms, not clearly related to one another (physical body vs soul/spirit, earthly realm vs heaven; mind-body, consciousness vs quantum chemistry) but all having a similar problem. Any place there is posited a dualism, then what is the interaction between the two duals, how could one even perceive the other?

but declaring "there is no dualism", while eliminating that problem, does not eliminate the question as to why it was posited in the first place: why (or how) does it feel like anything to be conscious, feel pain, etc. Saying "that's what evolved" is just hand waving. What's the difference between being alive and dead? Do rocks have a little bit of consciousness?

My personal preference (lifelong atheist-science type) is that the "abstract" world is all that exists, there is no physical world. Everything we study in physics and chemistry we arrive at via abstract mathematical values, relationships and computation. I think that is the nature of the universe, and while it doesn't "solve" the consciousness problem, I feel like it moves the goalposts in the right direction.

>"word games" has to do with any use of language, nothing to do with consciousness.

I think philosophy of mind is especially prone to these issues because of how deeply the concept of "subjectivity" is embedded into language (not only at the level of semantics but also grammar). You can hardly say 2 words without pulling in a whole bunch of preconceived notions of what a subject is and how subjects relate to each other.

The paper is clearly asking what the difference in experience is between humans and bats. Whether a process is a "thing" or not is kind of beside the point. The core question is can we articulate how the core experience of being human is in comparison to the core experience of another creature that perceives the world in a fundamentally different way.

When I have had conversations with my philosophically oriented friends, I like to talk about what it be like to be a starfish--to experience the whole world in 5-way symmetry.

Even when you phrase it that way, you would seem to posit that an experience has a how it is. How something is is ultimately a judgment made by an experiencing subject. In that case, doesn't the question of comparing two "how it is"-judgments regarding experiences of different subjects become incoherent? On the one hand it implies a single experiencer who has two experiences and compares them, but on the other hand we already know that the two experiences we want to compare have different experiencers.

So (forgive me if I'm projecting too much on your particular phrasing :)) here we are still subtly relying on an implied "thing"-ness of an experience, namely as an object which can be extracted out of its original subject and transposed onto another subject.

I feel like you're being purposefully obtuse to not be able to say the human experience is fundamentally different than a bat's experience, even if it's difficult to articulate a bat's unique experience in a human language.

Edit: let me expound on that, as I'm not just being difficult. What does this questioning actually get you? The question of how a bat experiences the world vice a human gives me a meaningful thought experiment about what is consciousness and what the limits of our perceptions are. Asking whether or not the words are meaningful gives me nothing because the meaning of the article is so intuitively clear. In other words, questioning whether the words have meaning leads to a less meaningful experience vice using my intuition to understand the meaning to my interpretation.

For me, the point is not to avoid having to admit some kind of difference between human and bat experience (clearly they are different!). But I feel like the fact that this question ("what is it like to be a bat?") is hard (or even impossible) to answer is used in support of the thesis that there is something non-physical about human experience. By analyzing what this question really means in a technical and rigorous sense (and if it's even a coherent question at all), I only want to push back against it insofar as it is used to support that conclusion.

It actually supports the opposite conclusion for me, the fact that physical differences causes experiential differences suggests experience, and therefore consciousness has a physical basis.

Bats possess a sensory organ we do not. "What it's like" is just a way of saying they may be conscious of a sonar sensation which we utterly lack, similar to a person blind from birth lacking color sensation. To use technical philosophical jargon, bats have sonar qualia that humans do not, assuming bats are conscious. We cannot say what that sensation is, since we don't have it. This places a limit on our knowledge. Don't let "what it's like" trip you up.

It's a legitimate philosophical problem which is spelled out in Nagel's paper. It's not a problem with language, it's rather a limitation on our experience, which also highlights a limitation of our epistemology.

I don't understand what you mean by sleight of hand. It seems a very straightforward question that makes sense in our everyday use of language, as you admit. Just because it's difficult to rigorously analyze this statement into scientific concepts, it doesn't follow that the question is invalid. In fact the point of the question is to show shortcomings in our current science.

Also, I would dispute the assertion that there is something unique or special about this formulation. There are many synonymous ways of phrasing the question: e.g., describe the subjective experience of a bat.

> I don't understand what you mean by sleight of hand.

He means that it implicitly smuggles in a certain conclusion. For instance, "I think therefore I am" seems logically sound, but actually begs the question in presupposing "I" to then conclude that "I" exists.

Or ask an innocent person a question like, "when did you stop beating your wife?"

> There are many synonymous ways of phrasing the question: e.g., describe the subjective experience of a bat.

If you can describe a subjective experience in a way that is not circularly tied to experiencing it, is it really subjective experience? If you can formulate an objective description, then the subjective experience was an illusion all along, because "subjective" doesn't mean what we think it means, ie. "non-objective".

This is the linguistic game the OP is referring to. Natural language can lead you into all sorts of traps like, thinking there's something there but it's really just a conceptual mirage we've sort of invented.

I'm afraid this is far too clever for me to understand. I know what I mean by subjective experience, and no amount of linguistic hair-splitting will convince me it doesn't exist.

You mean you think you know. If I put an object in your blind spot, you'll also swear up and down there's nothing in front of you.

I think everyone knows what they mean when they refer to their own subjective experience. That is entirely separate from the question of what that experience corresponds to in the external world. If you put an object in my blind spot, I know that my subjective experience will be of no object. I couldn't make that statement if I didn't know what I meant by subjective experience.

When you say, "I know what I mean by subjective experience, and no amount of linguistic hair-splitting will convince me it doesn't exist", you are not simply saying you are perceiving X and that, even if X is an illusion, X at least refers to a persistent and predictable illusion, and so you know what you mean by anytime you refer to X.

You are actually saying is that X corresponds to something real, that you are directly perceiving some aspect of reality, because how else could you conclude that nothing could convince you that X doesn't exist?

It is to that, that I say no, you don't know what you mean by subjective experience.

Are you asserting you don't have any subjective experience? Or that you only feel like you have a subjective experience and it doesn't actually exist?

I am arguing that subjective experience is not what we perceive it to be. The qualities that we perceive of it are deceptive, and not necessarily reflective of anything real.

>The qualities that we perceive of it are deceptive, and not necessarily reflective of anything real.

This claim only makes sense given a particular definition of "real", but if (the qualities of) our subjective experiences are outside of that definition, why should we take (the qualities of) subjective experience to not be real, rather than the definition to be impoverished? What is real should encompass every way in which things are or can be. The qualities of subjective experience included.

The problem isn't with taking subjectivity to be real, but with taking everything that is real to be object based. There are no qualia "things" in the world. But we should not see this as implying there are no qualia.

Would you take a "day job" to be ontologically real? It is a way in which the aggregate of particles that make up your body regularly behave on a semi periodic schedule. That would seem to fit your definition of "encompassing every way in which things are or can be".

If it is real, isn't there still a need to distinguish ontological primitives from aggregate properties like the above? Why shouldn't this be what we mean by "real"?

>Would you take a "day job" to be ontologically real?

I do. I'm quite pluralistic with what I deem "real". Quarks are real as well as chairs and day jobs. Roughly speaking, I take all fundamentals and all invariants in space and time over the fundamentals to be real. Invariants seem to be attractors in conceptual space that are apt to be picked out and labeled by cognitive systems like us. These invariants play various explanatory roles in our conceptualization of the world, and so they are real.

>If it is real, isn't there still a need to distinguish ontological primitives from aggregate properties like the above? Why shouldn't this be what we mean by "real"?

Definitely. I just use the qualifier fundamental to make that distinction. Real is a term that plays a key explanatory role in our conceptualization of the world and so how we define it for the purposes of theory should respect this pre-theoretical usage. The idea of ontological primitives distinct from everyday existence is a result of theory and so should use a distinct term. When people say chairs exist, they mean it in this broad pre-theoretic sense. There's no reason to blow that up.

> When people say chairs exist, they mean it in this broad pre-theoretic sense. There's no reason to blow that up.

I'm not sure switching to, "qualia do not fundamentally exist", really buys us much. Saying they're illusory is already acknowledging the existence of some process that yields a false conclusion.

Pluralistic existence also seems to inevitably run head first into the Sorites paradox.

What you gain is not having to defend your terminology or confusions derived from disagreements on the meaning of key terms. Following Kieth Frankish on twitter, it seems like he spends far more time defending against misconceptions about illusionism than actually defending the content of the theory. And it's an entirely self-inflicted wound. (Though it works for him as it raises his h-index.)

When your terminology results in you saying things like "consciousness is an illusion (doesn't exist)" and "the existence of qualia (features of our subjective experience) is false", you're just undermining your own project. I mean, you're literally engaging in a verbal dispute with the other guys in this thread. I just don't see the point. There would be far more agreement if we could align the usage of key terms with how most people understand them.

I agree there would be far more agreement, in the sense that fewer people would object and less forcefully, but I think it would be because they don't understand the substance.

If I explain that chairs don't really exist because there's no such thing in physics, I get nodding heads all around. If I say the same about consciousness, people are all up in arms.

The challenge here is the implicit assumption that their perception of subjective experience is a direct perception of reality, where they can accept that their perception of chairs is mediated by other things.

This is the assumption that must be challenged and I think your approach just lets people think they understand a position when they really don't.

> I think it would be because they don't understand the substance.

Fair point. This is a danger.

>If I explain that chairs don't really exist because there's no such thing in physics, I get nodding heads all around. If I say the same about consciousness, people are all up in arms.

The difference is that with chairs people immediately know you're speaking in jargon. No one in their right mind would say something like "chairs are an illusion". This isn't the case when it comes to phenomenal consciousness.

>The challenge here is the implicit assumption that their perception of subjective experience is a direct perception of reality

I'm in favor of challenging these kinds of assumptions. But saying phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist isn't a good way to do it. It (correctly) invites such strong resistance that it makes communicating the more subtle point nearly impossible. Although perhaps there really isn't a more subtle point in the case of illusionism. Frankish views seem to have evolved towards a straightforward eliminativist account, which is disappointing. I was originally very sympathetic to illusionism when I first looked into it, but it is much less appealing now. I go into some detail about my problems with it here[1] if you're interested.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/naturalism/comments/zr6udy/a_challe...

> No one in their right mind would say something like "chairs are an illusion". This isn't the case when it comes to phenomenal consciousness.

Au contraire! I did something like this recently by arguing that solidity is basically illusory. It went ok.

Solidity simply doesn't have the properties that we naively attribute to it given our perceptions (even solids are mostly empty space!), and analogously, neither does our qualitative experience. The qualities we attribute to solids simply changed as we understood more of what was going on.

But this is just more jargon. At the end of the day, you're still going to sit on a chair to rest your legs and fully expect that your backside remains off the floor. But you have no expectation that an illusory cup of water will quench your thirst. Your interlocutor knows this and so feels no need to press you on terminology. This is an example of where the jargon obscures the meaning. I feel like something similar is going on with illusionism. Frankish wants to use the illusion jargon, but still make use of the fact that what's being picked out by phenomenal properties has explanatory efficacy in the world (at least before I started to read him as a plain old eliminativist).

> He means that it implicitly smuggles in a certain conclusion. For instance, "I think therefore I am" seems logically sound, but actually begs the question in presupposing "I" to then conclude that "I" exists.

That's not correct.

It means if something-- anything-- is in the act of reflecting about thinking-- that is, reflecting about thinking about anything at all, including questioning existence-- then that thing exists only in that it is an entity capable of reflecting upon its own existence. And only during the act of reflecting on thinking is this true. And, most importantly, this notion is ineluctably cordoned off from any and all evidence-based logic which requires potentially illusory sensory input.

The part in italics came from others who read and critiqued Descartes. In any case, his basic logic is sound. Hume did the clearest job of critiquing it, and even he didn't claim Descartes had made a logical fallacy here.

It's been awhile since I've read it, but Descartes probably implied his notion was more powerful than it turns out to be-- i.e., that he could build an epistemology on it. Nevertheless, the basic notion is certainly not a logical fallacy.

> It means if something-- anything-- is in the act of reflecting about thinking-- that is, reflecting about thinking about anything at all, including questioning existence-- then that thing exists only in that it is an entity capable of reflecting upon its own existence.

Still presupposing an entity. Why would a thought need an entity at all to think it? Don't you see that this is an implicit assumption that hasn't been justified? Why can't thoughts simply exist without a thinker? A thought can certainly refer to itself, much like a mathematical expression can be recursive.

Here's the fallacy free version: this is a thought, therefore thoughts exist. No entity implied or needed.

“ Just because these sentences make sense in our everyday language, does not mean they are suitable for technical and rigorous philosophical discussions. ”

Where would one find the authority to say what is suitable or not for philosophic discussions then? This is where schools of thought arise from, because some are less afraid of the unknowns that arise under various axiomatic constraints.

Every axiom is a mystery of existence itself in any manner.