I think we’re still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.
If it’s clear a priori that it can’t, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: “what’s the thing that all dogs have in common?”- and you’re trying to tell me it’s misguided to look for some platonic ‘essence of dogness’. Concepts don’t work like that. I do get that, and I agree that most concepts are like that. But from my perspective, your assertion sounds like, “all concepts pertaining to this topic are necessarily vague, so it’s no use trying to even hypothesize that a crisp mathematical relationship could exist.” I.e., you’re assuming your conclusion. Now, we can point to other contexts where rather crisp mathematical models do exist: electromagnetism, for instance. How do you know the concept of valence is more like ‘dogness’ than electromagnetism?
Ultimately, the details, or mathematics, behind any ‘universal’ or ‘rigorous’ theory of valence would depend on having a well-supported, formal theory of consciousness to start from. It’s no use talking about patterns within conscious systems when we don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes a conscious system. A quantitative approach to valence needs a clear ontology, which we don’t have yet (Tononi’s IIT is a good start, but hardly a final answer). But let’s not mistake the difficulty in answering these questions with them being inherently unanswerable.
We can imagine someone making similar critiques a few centuries ago regarding whether electromagnetism was a sharply-defined concept, or whether understanding it matters. It turned out electromagnetism was a relatively sharply-defined concept: there was something to get, and getting it did matter. I suspect a similar relationship holds with valence in conscious systems. I’m not sure it does, but I think it’s more reasonable to accept the possibility than not at this point.
Life, sin, disease, redness, maleness and indeed dogness “may” also be like electromagnetism. The English language may also be a fundamental part of the universe and maybe you could tell if “irregardless” or “wanna” are real English words by looking into a microscope or turning your telescope to certain parts of the sky, or maybe by looking at chicken intestines, who knows. I know some people think like this. Stuart Hameroff says that morality may be encoded into the universe at the Planck scale. So maybe that’s where you should look for “good”, maybe “pleasure” is there as well.
But anyway, research into electromagnetism was done using the scientific method, which means that the hypothesis had to produce predictions that were tested and replicated numerous times. What sort of experiment would you envision for testing something about “inherently pleasurable” arrangements of atoms? Would the atoms make you feel warm and fuzzy inside when you look at them? Or would you try to put that pattern into different living creatures and see if they react with their normal joyful reactions?
Although life, sin, disease, redness, maleness, and dogness are (I believe) inherently ‘leaky’ / ‘fuzzy’ abstractions that don’t belong with electromagnetism, this is a good comment. If a hypothesis is scientific, it will make falsifiable predictions. I hope to have something more to share on this soon.
I think we’re still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.
If it’s clear a priori that it can’t, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: “what’s the thing that all dogs have in common?”- and you’re trying to tell me it’s misguided to look for some platonic ‘essence of dogness’. Concepts don’t work like that. I do get that, and I agree that most concepts are like that. But from my perspective, your assertion sounds like, “all concepts pertaining to this topic are necessarily vague, so it’s no use trying to even hypothesize that a crisp mathematical relationship could exist.” I.e., you’re assuming your conclusion. Now, we can point to other contexts where rather crisp mathematical models do exist: electromagnetism, for instance. How do you know the concept of valence is more like ‘dogness’ than electromagnetism?
Ultimately, the details, or mathematics, behind any ‘universal’ or ‘rigorous’ theory of valence would depend on having a well-supported, formal theory of consciousness to start from. It’s no use talking about patterns within conscious systems when we don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes a conscious system. A quantitative approach to valence needs a clear ontology, which we don’t have yet (Tononi’s IIT is a good start, but hardly a final answer). But let’s not mistake the difficulty in answering these questions with them being inherently unanswerable.
We can imagine someone making similar critiques a few centuries ago regarding whether electromagnetism was a sharply-defined concept, or whether understanding it matters. It turned out electromagnetism was a relatively sharply-defined concept: there was something to get, and getting it did matter. I suspect a similar relationship holds with valence in conscious systems. I’m not sure it does, but I think it’s more reasonable to accept the possibility than not at this point.
Life, sin, disease, redness, maleness and indeed dogness “may” also be like electromagnetism. The English language may also be a fundamental part of the universe and maybe you could tell if “irregardless” or “wanna” are real English words by looking into a microscope or turning your telescope to certain parts of the sky, or maybe by looking at chicken intestines, who knows. I know some people think like this. Stuart Hameroff says that morality may be encoded into the universe at the Planck scale. So maybe that’s where you should look for “good”, maybe “pleasure” is there as well.
But anyway, research into electromagnetism was done using the scientific method, which means that the hypothesis had to produce predictions that were tested and replicated numerous times. What sort of experiment would you envision for testing something about “inherently pleasurable” arrangements of atoms? Would the atoms make you feel warm and fuzzy inside when you look at them? Or would you try to put that pattern into different living creatures and see if they react with their normal joyful reactions?
Although life, sin, disease, redness, maleness, and dogness are (I believe) inherently ‘leaky’ / ‘fuzzy’ abstractions that don’t belong with electromagnetism, this is a good comment. If a hypothesis is scientific, it will make falsifiable predictions. I hope to have something more to share on this soon.