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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

The only two things I can say with much confidence about consciousness:

1. I definitely have it, some of the time. (I'm not sure if anything else does, but I can't rule it out.)

2. The chances other things have it feels lower as they become more different from me. Another person may or may not have consciousness, and a rock may or may not have consciousness, but the human feels more likely to have it than the rock does.

This feels like the common sense stance for anyone who has considered solipsism in depth, and doesn't want to proclaim a unshakeable faith in things like panpsychism or non-dualism or whatever.

It's honestly a bit frustrating, because I find mathematical platonism otherwise quite compelling, but it's totally possible there's just abstract mathematical objects and oh yeah this weird fairy dust we sprinkle over certain reifications of things to ontologically privilege them. I know, Occam hates me.

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It may be that the tools we have come to rely on so much to define such terms are, almost by definition, inadequate to to define consciousness. The scientific method and rational discourse are used to describe objective reality; I don't know that they can fully answer the "hard" problem of consciousness because it is largely concerned with subjective reality.

> It may be that the tools we have come to rely on so much to define such terms are, almost by definition, inadequate to to define consciousness.

And yet, we are confronted by the fact that we use the concept of consciousness in dozens of different contexts and we understand perfectly well (usually) what people are talking about. That's the basic insight of ordinary language philosophy. These aren't fundamental mysteries, they're webs of concepts tied up in language and careful attention to how they are used, un packing the web and knot of uses, reveals what they mean. The definition is a "rule" or explanation for their use in language, which is not "subjective" (private) but public behaviour.

Mm, I'm still on the "by definition inadequate" side personally. I just don't see any unambiguous way to verify that another being even experiences qualia, to say nothing of actual consciousness.

> I just don't see any unambiguous way to verify that another being even experiences qualia, to say nothing of actual consciousness

That's actually one of the core parts of Wittgenstein's "Private Language Argument"[0]. The problem isn't so much that verification is "difficult", it's that certainty in the specific sense of intelligibly private is a logical impossibility. The implication is that "experiential qualia" have a specific intelligible meaning in language (or even more broadly in behaviour), which is to say that our "subjectivity" is personal but not private. Further implications tumble outward. For instance, Wittgenstein spends a lot of time discussing the "qualia" of pain. It was (and still is, obviously considering the rise of "AI" discussions lately) an enormously consequential argument in philosophy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument#:~:t....

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"Wittgenstein does not present his arguments in a succinct and linear fashion; instead, he describes particular uses of language, and prompts the reader to contemplate the implications of those uses. As a result, there is considerable dispute about both the nature of the argument and its implications. Indeed, it has become common to talk of private language arguments."

Yeah, sorry, I don't have a hundred hours to spend on some dude who decided to write half of an argument in ten different places. Maybe a link to plato.stanford.edu would've been better.

Sure, if you want: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/

But the wiki entry is a far more succinct summation of the main points of the argument. The very first subsection, which you apparently didn't even try to read, in the wiki is "Significance" which summarizes the argument in all of...2 paragraphs.

I think the crux of it is how the OP was talking about making claims "with confidence".

I think you're saying we can get a general sense of what is meant without a formal definition. That's a fuzzy definition; i.e., one with high uncertainty/low confidence. My point is that I don't know that we have the tools to make high-confidence claims. We can't even agree on when consciousness starts, whether it's a toggle switch or a dimmer switch etc. That all speaks to high levels of uncertainty, where we can't agree on a "public" language. I think the limits of language to describe the phenomena is right in line with the "we don't have the right tools" argument.

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