Hacker News Reader

Another unstated assumption is that one necessarily exists. After all, every last experience we have ever had has been with ourselves being there, experiencing it.

This leads to the idea that we will cease to exist to just be unbelievable, as it's contrary to everything we have ever experienced. From this I think we get the idea of some essence separate from our biology and the idea of its continuation after death.

I have entertained the idea (if you believe in the quantum many worlds) that everyone will experience themselves as aging to infinitely old age, because in the parallel worlds, well, you don't exist.

Saying that something will happen across the multiverse is stating a certainty, so long as it's physically and logically possible. Every absurdly unlikely thing will happen in that sense. Everybody will, somewhere (and somewhen) become purple with flashing yellow spots. That's very different from saying "I expect to experience this happening", which is a statement about what's probable.

If you want a grim take on this looking into the quantum immortality thought experiment. I can't remember who wrote it, I think maybe Chalmers, but the idea is that while the experiencer is immortal, they will still accumulate injuries, old age, etc. It would not be a very pleasant immortality.

>There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing.

This is exactly my objection. I fully believe were mechanical machines, fully believe in determinism, I think human behavior /thoughts will fully be explained mechanically etc but I cannot find any way to deny consciousness or qualia and reduce them to physical properties (lest we augment our definition of physical to include consciousness as a fundamental property. I also contest the notion that doing so would be "mysticism" or any less scientific than having added "mystical" properties like force/energy and randomness into the standard model of physics). It seems the motivation for this has far more to do with desperately trying to cram everything into materialism than following sense.

Until one can give any kind of plausible explanation as to how feeling/qualia can become an emergent property of matter, it is a complete mystery. My thoughts are it is impossible as they are completely orthogonal and complimentary properties. Qualia is the experience of going through the physical process. Pain is the experience of having this mysterious thing called force acted upon pain receptors hooked up to a working neural system. The physical description can explain exactly what happens, but yet it leaves us with an experience that has no physical description. How can that be?

Lastly, there will always be unanswered questions or presumptions in science (how did the universe emerge? what makes up energy?), so while the attempt to do is formidable, the presupposition that consciousness must be explained by science is nonsensical.

Dennet's eliminative materialism isn't some well accepted philosophical position. In fact, its one the most rejected. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation...

We just had a long discussion about this if you're interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234

I think this (qualia) is certainly the heart of the issue, and I personally go back and forth from some kind of quietism (or some kind of mysterianism), and some kind of illusionism. The latter position I would have found utterly topic-changing for the better part of 2 decades, but now I am finding it more plausible as I lose confidence in first-person reports and a series of related phenomena (documented by people like Eric Schwitzgebel).

I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.

Funny enough I completely agree with the eliminative take that folk psychology can be reduced to physical processes. I dont think beliefs, desires, hopes and dreams are all require any kind of consciousness.

Where I disagree completely is qualia. Dennet makes some arguments about how any attribute/description we can ascribe to qualia is contradictory. As I see it, a failure to describe it with language has no bearing on the fact that it exists as a mental phenomenona.

I've long-described myself as an eliminativist about everything but consciousness :) I think there were some really interesting attempts to save classic architectures that were purpose-built to save the folk conception (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97814443104...), but ultimately I think we don't have the sort of neural architectures that support such a view.

Out of curiosity, have you read any of the newer attempts to vindicate the view that most now call illusionism? I doubt you will find it compelling, but leastwise it serves as an update with some pretty new arguments and fresh blood. You might find it amusing: https://philarchive.org/archive/KAMHCY-2

Thanks for the link. Do you understand what they mean by "normative" pain? I cant make sense of it.

The first argument given for illusionism is merely stating physical processes are strongly anagaolous to mental pheneomena. Ok agreed, but this is equivalently supports a panpsychic view. It just states "if one adds anomalousness as a premise for illusion, and then further assumes that illusionism is a possibility, then we have strong evidence of illuionism". Huh?? Cant one make the exact same argument for panpschyism? If one adds a premise that physical properties are anomalousness with conscious experiences, and then one supposes that the possibility of panpsychism is evidence for panpsychism then we ought to believe in panpsychism. Besides, what about a synonymous relationship between two things denotes one is illusionary and a product of the other? All this does is show that a singular criteria of illusion is met.

The second argument is even more bizarre. It starts with the premise that consciousness/conscious phenomena can be explained fully by physical properties (but not right now, but science will obviously explain it surely, one day). Is this so obviously true that zero words are given to it's justification?

Then the rest of the article is an argument to how one cannot treat the "obviousness" of experience so casually...

It doesnt seem to me that illusionists actually deny conscious phenomena. More so, they call it an "illusion" and claim this makes the hard problem equivalent to the easy problem. i.e it becomes reducible to giving it a physical explanation. But if all is meant by "its an illusion" is "its really just a physical process", it doesnt grant any useful pathway. It seems very circular.

All this makes me really wonder if some of us truly are p zombies and thst the illusionists have managed to figure out a test for it.

>Thanks for the link. Do you understand what they mean by "normative" pain? I cant make sense of it.

Normative pain means there are a set of beliefs and actions that are attached to certain states that carry connotations of goodness, badness, etc. I would consider this usage the cousin of projectivism, where we project moral properties onto physical states of affairs.

>The first argument given for illusionism is merely stating physical processes are strongly anagaolous to mental pheneomena. Ok agreed, but this is equivalently supports a panpsychic view. It just states "if one adds anomalousness as a premise for illusion, and then further assumes that illusionism is a possibility, then we have strong evidence of illuionism".

I think this is a good point, but I do see a lot of illusionist and panspychist arguments as attempting to hollow out the middle ground positions. Thus Chalmers "If I were a physicalist I would be a illusionist". I think the arguments can still be interesting if it leaves us with a dichotomy.

Chalmers has given arguments for panpsychism so I dont think hes totally opposed to the idea.

And Im not so sure materialism necessitates reduction of consciousness. It entirely depends on what one considers to be "material". I would hold for example, that if consciousness were a fundamental property of all matter, it would fit any functional meaning of the term "material" as it relates to scientific inquiry.

By "materialism" what we really seem to mean here is "a conservatory position on what constitutes material". If one accepts consciousness as a property of matter, then it becomes a materialist view, no?

I should add that I’m agnostic as to the actual reality of things, and a perspective that has felt useful to me is to remind myself that the fields of science are a map, and that there are portions of the map that are just completely undefined. We know there’s a terrain to explore, but haven’t made much progress in increasing the fidelity of that portion of the map. What I do know is that the fundamental Christian version of beliefs leaves a particularly shaped imprint on the psyche, and my relationship with what I thought myself to be started shifting/expanding when I started diving deeper into these unexamined “mystical” notions and having those notions confront the scientific view. That confrontation is what leaves me agnostic.

As the map gets better and better, it’s seen as more and more acceptable to look at that map as if it provides ultimate answers. But it still has nothing to tell us about primordial existence.

Consciousness sits in the same category of unexplained and possibly unexplainable.

Who knows. Maybe all matter truly is conscious and the spectrum of available conscious states scales with the complexity of the matter’s configuration. In either case, I don’t feel that a purely mechanical explanation is necessarily relevant to the question people often claim it answers.

Looks like a good thread. Thanks.

All possible explanations for existence have a 'well okay, but what created that' issue. Whether you start with a God, or with a quantum fluctuation, one is left asking - okay well what created the God, or what created the void in which quantum mechanics (and who created such a system to begin with) burst forth. There is no answer to these questions, because regardless of the story - it always ends (or in this case, begins) in the same very uncompelling way - 'Well it just always was.'

In any case, the mystical and physical are not fixed. Imagine explaining the consequences of relativity to a skeptical individual of times past. Think of his response to the notion that time itself is a variable and can move at different rates for different people in different circumstances. It sounds like absurd mystical sci-FI nonsense. Except it's real, so now has been promoted from the mystical to the physical.

So what a skeptic of today would label "mystical" will almost certainly change over the centuries and millennia yet to come. Scarcely more than a century ago, state of the art transport was a horse, computers did not exist, quantum physics did not exist, relativity did not exist, human flight was widely believed to be impossible, and so on endlessly. It seems unlikely in just a century that we've even scratched the surface of knowledge yet to come, let alone meaningfully penetrated into it.

I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.

Perhaps you're not over-valuing pain, but under-valuing numbers. There's no reason to think that morality can't or shouldn't center around minimizing a pain metric. That would put it in line with any other trajectory-planning-under-constraints problem. Once you've done a bit of work in trajectory optimization, you start to feel the numbers come alive, and develop a visceral feeling for them. I wince when I see a car scrape to the edge of its traction limit as it rounds a corner at high speed.

Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well.

Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.

Consider whether we should define electrons to be "positive" or "negative": there isn't any fact of the matter, it's merely a convention. But it doesn't seem like experiencing pain works this way: pain feels a particular way. If pain is just a mathematical entity, there shouldn't be any particular way that it feels, since it's just a symbol.

Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.

Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once!

If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.

It shouldn't be that hard: you don't like suffering, right? There you go! Those numbers/matrices are bad because they feel bad.

so all thats necessary for someone to inflict pain is to claim they personally enjoy it?

No, they need to convince a large portion of society that it's good enough to allow. So far the arc of human history has shown this to be a difficult argument to make at scale and at length.

but "they" don't exist to the agent inflicting pain. "they" are just a number, by definition. Just the result of a calculation...

Edit: or if you dont like that explanation, why should a consensus of a calculation have any more merit than an individual calculation?

Well no, the agent's model of the other person is just data, but this model is so convincing that most people don't perceive it as such and they're thoroughly convinced of the realness of the other person.

Consensus matters because if people around you disagree with you they will kill you or put you in prison. At rock bottom this is how all laws and ethical norms are created.

And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something.

It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.

> A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something.

so it's not "just a calculation"? I am NOT trying to make a joke/reference to Clinton, but I think in these philosophical conversations, we have to step back even further and question what our definition of "is" is.

Again, I'm a CS grad who has never taken philosophy, so I'm sure this has been explored to death by people who own this field. But there's absolutely a point in philosophy where you can't even rely on "what is true": slamming my fingers in the doorway IS painful (to me), but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe. Just as Einstein proved, two observers can experience different realities, fundamentally, two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door).

> but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe

What do you mean by "just a calculation" here, and how does everyone else's experience of pain apply?

You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation". You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?

Sure, you could choose to use some process of calculation as one way to measure pain, but this isn't the only way to conceptualize it, nor is it the only way that people experience it.

e.g. mirror neurons are interesting to consider. We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity.

Whatever pain is or isn't, the fact that its effects can be localized to a single person and the fact that it may be calculable in some way seem unrelated to each other.

> two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door)

You hurting your finger in the door and me not feeling the exact thing you experienced are independent facts about the state of the world when the door slamming occurred. Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.

> We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity.

That is an assumption, and a dangerous one at that. What you speak of is a kind of 'empathy', a feeling of emotions by Proxy... not everyone actually has that... some people don't cringe at other's pain, for some: their pupils dilate.

That's a tangent to the current discussion, but yeah... some 'calculate your pain', other's 'calculate the pleasure your pain cause in them'...

But to add to the discussion, pain isn't localizable to one person, not always, at least... so is emotion/feeling mappable a calculation of the neurons? (maybe/probably)

My point wasn't to claim that everyone experiences empathy in the same way, or even that everyone has it, but to point out that pain can't be reduced to "calculations". It's a low resolution substitute for a deeply complex interplay of physical, biological and social phenomenon.

>You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation".

Not exactly. I'm showing the abusrdity of people who think that the brain is just a computer and that its results: "just a number" fly in the face of their reality of experiencing pain. If it's just a number, why don't they slam their hand in the door and show us?

> You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?

By their own definition, "the nature of pain itself" is just a number, just a result of a huge calculation of trillions of neurons with substantially higher numbers of networks. The terrifying sound, the facial expressions, the visceral "gut-feeling", thats all just pattern recognition (on your behalf), there's nothing more to it than a calculation, right?

> Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.

technically correct but only because we could, in theory, both inflict pain on ourselves simultaneously using the doorway.