Comment by hax0ron3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hax0ron3 | Hacker News Reader

>Conversely, the main tenet of illusionism is to deny the existence of phenomenally conscious states. For an illusionist there is “nothing it is like” to be in any mental state. Proponents of the theory only accept “quasi-phenomenal” states and properties, which are purely physical, but misrepresented as phenomenal by our introspective mechanisms.

>While it is no longer a question of understanding the magic itself, we still have to explain how it happens. The “hard problem” has been replaced by the “illusion problem”. It consists in explaining why it seems to us that we are phenomenally conscious

Lol. "why it seems to us that we are phenomenally conscious". Maybe because we are phenomenally conscious? The very subjective experience of pondering whether we are phenomenally conscious, or for that matter the subjective experience of anything else whatsoever, is already proof sufficient that we are phenomenally conscious because it is an example of phenomenal consciousness. Granted, maybe there are some good defenses of illusionism out there, but based on this text it seems to me that illusionism is just a sort of hail mary pass attempt to save reductive physicalism by deploying a bunch of hand-waving and deceptive semantics.

There are no other phenomena which we accept as real - where “accept as real” is an ability to correctly predict and manipulate, ie, create technology - based purely on qualia. This is the essence of physicalism. The hard problem of consciousness is therefore broadly acknowledged.

“Reductive physicalism” doesn’t need to be saved; there’s nothing else; physicalism is the fundamental philosophy of science, the prerequisite for a functional, predictive physics.

Consciousness is the quandary, not physicality.

To quote Penrose:

"I don't like the word materialism because we don't know what the material is."

It's all a quandary, no? Wonderfully useful predictive models aside, we have almost as little metaphysical/ontological purchase as we have w.r.t. qualia.

And though it is difficult to argue with physicalism (broadly conceived), there are compelling critiques of reductive physicalism.

Or as the Wikipedia article on Eliminative Materialism succinctly puts it:

>Another view is that eliminativism assumes the existence of the beliefs and other entities it seeks to "eliminate" and is thus self-refuting.

That said, Illusionism should not be seen as a "hail mary pass attempt to save reductive physicalism". From the same Wiki page:

>In the context of materialist understandings of psychology, eliminativism is the opposite of reductive materialism, [which argues] that mental states as conventionally understood do exist, and directly correspond to the physical state of the nervous system.

The last line is a link to the page for "neural correlates of consciousness". The evidence for which, to me, sure suggests that there is a casual relationship between physical and mental events.

The evidence for which, to me, sure suggests that there is a casual relationship between physical and mental events.

I think it's a bit funny to call this a causal relationship. People do it all the time and what is meant depends on the meaning of "cause", but it is a bit ambiguous here if the physical events are other events that cause the mental events.

My mental model of reductive physicalism is that the physical events are the mental events, i.e. the mental event occurs if and only if the physical event occurs.

For me, it's the other way around. I don't feel like there's anything special about "what it's like" to experience a certain mental state that cannot be explained physically/algorithmically. It feels like the concept of qualia is a last-ditch attempt by humans to make themselves feel special.

Nowadays it seems rather easy to have a computer that talks as if it were conscious. Do you think it really does perceive itself the same way we do? I woke up a human today, but someone else woke up an algorithm?

If not, what’s missing?

According to the theory, an attention model. Here's artificial consciousness in three steps:

1. Have a robot build perception models of its environment and itself

2. Have the robot allocate computational resources and sensory bandwidth to the models using attention

3. Have the robot control attention using model predictive control

Because the attention model is less detailed than its actual attention, by virtue of being a model, it doesn't represent the mechanisms of attention or modeling accurately. Instead, it uses non-physical concepts such as "mental possession" to model itself or other agents paying attention to things, or "qualia" to denote the recursion that occurs when percepts we attend to are summarized by the attention model (which in turn can be attended to, and so on).

I don't think there's anything in principle preventing computers from becoming conscious, if that's what you're asking. I'm not convinced LLMs are there yet, although sometimes they do sound like it.

The hard problem of consciousness is hard for a reason. There's no obvious way to link the experience all of us (solipsism aside) are having at each and every moment with the mechanism that generates it. It's a category error to confuse the two, misidentifying the map and the territory. Stating as above, that qualia can be reduced to an illusion of qualia merely restates the problem in an effort to elide it. 'I'm imagining that I have a feeling' isn't qualitatively different to 'I'm feeling the feeling'. Given that it's fairly trivial to link affect and self awareness to concrete adaptive advantages, and that each can be diminished through neurological damage - we know that phenomenology is both useful and organic. What we don't understand is precisely how it comes into being and 'where' it resides - besides using words like 'emergent' in nonspecific and hand wavy ways.

> There's no obvious way to link the experience with the mechanism that generates it

I agree that it's not obvious. I suppose where I disagree with anti-physicalists is that I think it can conceivably be resolved by reference to physical facts. I can imagine reading a computer program that simulates the human brain and thinking "ah yes, that captures everything about what I feel". Whereas I don't think the anti-physicalists will ever accept such a possibility.

I am guessing that you think sperm and eggs have no consciousness. But, humans do.

When do you imagine it started? Does your mental model explain this physically/algorithmically? (Honest question, I consider this often and really have no clue)

Asking if a single-celled organism is conscious kind of feels like asking whether quantum theory is statically typed. Like applying a descriptor from one category to objects in another.

it's commonplace to hold the opinion that an individual particle is slightly conscious

This is a thing... but it is certainly not commonplace.

In philosophy of mind it's not something that would raise an eyebrow

Are you referring to pansychism? I don't get the impression that it's very popular these days.

> There are few explicit defenders of panpsychism at the present time. The most prominent are David Griffin, Gregg Rosenberg, David Skrbina and Timothy Sprigge.

https://plato.stanford.edu/ARCHIVES/WIN2009/entries/panpsych...

But that’s my point! When was it conscious? A million cells? A billion?

My hunch is that consciousness will come to be described in terms of information processing systems, rather than the biological substrate on which they run. Systems with certain properties - possibly including a sufficiently complex model of the environment, model of the self, and a continuously updating internal narrative - may be said to possess a level of consciousness. I'm not a biologist and I appreciate that the above is somewhat vague, but I wouldn't say that sperm or egg cells have the above.

It's the problem of heaps[0] and I think you'll find Michael Levin's fascinating perspective[1] on this topic to be very interesting

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

[1] https://youtu.be/e5GDnD_WA2Q?si=QQfWr3HsHQarhk-H

> It feels like the concept of qualia is a last-ditch attempt by humans to make themselves feel special.

I don't think so, I think fundamentally it's just a concept used to express a more generalized form of perception (i.e. not divided into discrete senses, either internal or external). I'm happy to leave it at that, but YMMV.

The problem is the idea that no amount of physical information can capture or encode qualia. I think this puts qualia into a different category than other kinds of perception.

the point of eliminativism is exactly to eliminate, not reduce.

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