There again is our fundamental disagreement, or talking past each other, or whatever is going on. I claim that a rock has no subjective experience.
That’s good! Before I wasn’t sure whether you claim this, or just claim that there is no reason to think otherwise.
Does a rock have hopes and fears? Does a rock experience its slow disintegration by erosion in the way a human might experience dementia? Does a rock feel pain when water freezing in cracks splits it apart? Is that like the pain of childbirth as it splits into two daughter rocks? I am confident in saying no to all of these.
I agree. But it doesn’t follow that it doesn’t have any kind of experience.
But you seem to be taking the phrase “what (if anything) it is like to be a rock” to mean the physical properties that we can measure about rocks, the ordinary things that geologists study: “what a rock is like”. That is something completely different.
Not sure if I managed to communicate how it supposed to work, so just to clarify: it’s not something different under the assumption that consciousness is existence. If consciousness is existence, if what makes hopes and pain consciousness-like is what rock also has, then the ordinary things that geologists study are about consciousness.
And if you argue against the assumption, say that these things must be different, then why? Your observations are about behavior and that’s accounted for by physical description. You only have an intuition about rocks not having experience and if this intuition is based on you not being able to imagine what it is like to be a rock, then I could say that you imagining what it is like to be you is not the most precise model of your consciousness either—you can’t say at what exact time your experience changed from seeing red to seeing blue.
Reformulations of the Hard Problem only push the bump in the carpet around.
Where is the bump in “consciousness is existence”? That rocks are consciousness? Then yeah, the point is that having consistent non-confusing worldview is worth accepting that bump.
Personally, I regard the physicalist assumption as plausible speculation rather than anything proven. The fact that I do not have any competing speculation does not require me to believe this one. Making that assumption does not solve the Hard Problem. It only promises that a solution exists but leaves us just as much in the dark about what that solution is.
That doesn’t make any sense without additional reasons to disbelieve the physicalist assumption in case of consciousness. You don’t disbelieve it in other unsolved cases, like precise aerodynamics of a branch of a tree, right? So even if you don’t want to call it a solution, if you actually believed the physicalist assumption, it would make the problem easy. And, like, ok, I’m not saying you don’t have reasons to be wary about the physicalist assumption, just the whole shape of the “solution must solve everything” argument is wrong.
To summarize my general point so far: the tradeoff is between your intuition about rocks not being conscious and making the Hard problem not hard. And I think you would agree that it’s acceptable if you believed in the later part. Am I wrong and you already agree with the later part and just really can’t stomach conscious rocks?
To summarize my general point so far: the tradeoff is between your intuition about rocks not being conscious and making the Hard problem not hard. And I think you would agree that it’s acceptable if you believed in the later part. Am I wrong and you already agree with the later part and just really can’t stomach conscious rocks?
My intuitions, and other people’s, about what looks conscious and what does not are the starting point, but not the end point, for any investigation of what consciousness is. This is the phenomenon for which we seek an explanation.
If we actually managed to get some distance towards that goal, perhaps we might find that the underlying phenomenon, whatever it is, is also present in places where we do not attribute consciousness. This would be like the discovery that the process underlying fire is reaction with oxygen, and that this is also present in rusting iron and animal metabolism. While we may analogically speak of these as “fire”, what is important is the underlying unity that was discovered among these processes. The “fire” of rusting iron is a very different sort of thing from a burning building, and most things are not fire at all.
But regarding consciousness, all is speculation. We have made no progress down that road. We cannot even find the road. “Consciousness is existence” is a verbal formula that does not constrain anticipations of future observations, any more than “all is fire” did. We now know from observation and experiment that all is, in fact, not fire, or even oxidative processes.
How might we discover the hypothetical consciousness of rocks, rather than trying to define it into existence or passing off speculation as progress? Compared with, for example, the sorts of observations that people are currently making about bees, crows, plants, and so on, on the basis of which some are attributing consciousness to those things?
I am in fact sceptical of a lot of these attributions. If a machine that we currently (i.e. up to 2022, not a movable feast) know how to make, without even using AI techniques, can duplicate an observed behaviour, that is to me good evidence that consciousness, whatever it is, is not involved.
The kind of hypothetical consciousness that is just a generalisation of reasons for results of observations of bees and crows can be discovered in a rock by inspecting its internal structure and finding there a computer roughly isomorphic to a neural system of a crow. That obviously won’t happen, because rocks don’t have such consciousness in natural encoding.
But that’s not the problem that needs solving. We are not in the same situation as with fire: with fire, once we had a theory that explained oxidative processes, we didn’t say “but why oxidative processes are fire?”. We already knew what phenomenon we want to be explained. We always have been on a road. Not being able to even find a road is not a normal situation you solve by more precise physical description. We already have enough physical theories to be far along the road. The only thing that needs solving here is confusion about where on the road we are. The reasons for thinking that we don’t mostly understand consciousness are not in the category of empirically proven scientific theories or methods. They are in the category of speculations and definitions and verbal formulae. So why do you think anything else is required to make problem easier, when your intuition of hardness of the Hard problem is based just on you not knowing how explanation is possible? Or what are your different reasons for thinking that we’ve made no progress, when we know so much about brains and computers?
So why do you think anything else is required to make problem easier, when your intuition of hardness of the Hard problem is based just on you not knowing how explanation is possible? Or what are your different reasons for thinking that we’ve made no progress, when we know so much about brains and computers?
It’s not just that I don’t know how to explain consciousness. I believe no-one does, including the people who think they do. None of the purported explanations bridge the gap between the stuff we have found out and the question of why there is any such thing as subjective experience. What we know about brains at best only tells us about where consciousness happens. It does not tell us why there is any such thing or how it works. What we know about computers tells us nothing.
Are you conscious? Are you aware of your own presence? Aware of having that awareness?
Are you aware of your own presence? Aware of having that awareness?
Sure, sometimes.
I believe no-one does, including the people who think they do. None of the purported explanations bridge the gap between the stuff we have found out and the question of why there is any such thing as subjective experience.
But why do you believe it? There is no gap under “consciousness is existence” explanation—the stuff we have found out is about subjective experience, because the stuff we have found out is about how things exist and existence is consciousness. There is not much “why” here, admittedly, but that’s expected because we are talking about existence? I don’t get what you don’t like about this explanation, if it’s not “it says rock are conscious”. “Don’t rely on pure verbal manipulations” is just heuristics—can you show some concrete place where there is a gap?
It does not tell us why there is any such thing or how it works. What we know about computers tells us nothing.
How “if I tap this brain region, you will feel pain” is not telling how it works? Computers are probably not that good a point by themselves, but what I meant was something like they provide us with examples of many capabilities we associate with our consciousness—you can code an agent with attention and access to it’s own state as an input and it would work similarly to the brain (in some way) when you ask it whether it’s aware of it’s own presence.
I don’t get what you don’t like about this explanation
That it says that everything is conscious is part of it, but that is just a symptom of the real problem: it is not an explanation. It makes no predictions about what we might observe. It describes no moving parts, no mechanism for how everything is conscious. It only leads us to say “everything is conscious!” but nothing else. We will carry on grinding up rocks for concrete without caring about their alleged consciousness.
How “if I tap this brain region, you will feel pain” is not telling how it works?
If I tap this organ key, a pipe will sound. That tells me nothing about whether there is a direct mechanical linkage from the key to the pipe, or the key is closing a switch that operates an electrical relay, or the pipes are just for show and the sound is electronically generated. Input here, output there, tells nothing about how the thing is done. No amount of speculating about how the thing might be done will answer the question of how it is done.
Ok, what observations does your belief, that no one has an explanation for consciousness, predicts? Or that there is always a gap. What does it even mean for something to be an explanation of consciousness, if you would always say that it doesn’t explain the subjective experience itself? It isn’t just “no one can predict specific content of consciousness to the level of precision that we can do with organs now”, right? And if it doesn’t have predictions, if you just say “yes, I don’t know how explanation would look like”, than why do you thing an explanation that changes your mind about gaps must have anything to do with observations?
Like, there is a mental process inside you that looks at explanation and says “no, it is not an explanation, because it doesn’t predict anything” or “no, it is not an explanation of consciousness, because it predicts many things, but they are not consciousness”. So why do you just trust that whole mental process? What evidence do you have against the theory that this mental process leads you to contradiction when you apply the second part to physicalist explanations and first part to explanations about why you shouldn’t use the second part like that?
And, is it really your disagreement here? That there is no way such thing can be an explanation. Because I honestly can’t imagine myself seeing an explanation that works and dismissing it just because it doesn’t satisfy some heuristics. So I would thing that the part where it works would be more controversial.
Input here, output there, tells nothing about how the thing is done. No amount of speculating about how the thing might be done will answer the question of how it is done.
Sure, treating human brains like black box for ethical reasons makes producing high-quality models harder. But that’s all perfectly predictable normal difficulty considering complexity of the brain, not a reason to doubt even theoretical possibility of precise modelling.
Ok, what observations does your belief, that no one has an explanation for consciousness, predicts?
I am only observing that no explanation I have seen accounts for the existence of subjective experience. An observation is not really a prediction of anything but itself. If I observe that it is daytime where I am, that on its own is not predicting anything beyond what I already saw: the sun in the sky, the bird on the wing, and so forth.
I find your next few paragraphs too incoherent for me to respond to, so I shall just make the following remarks as a conclusion to all this.
Some people believe they have found an explanation for consciousness.
Some people believe that someone else has found an explanation for consciousness.
Some people believe that saying that consciousness is ontologically primitive is an explanation for consciousness.
Some people believe there is no such thing as consciousness.
Some people believe that there cannot be an explanation for consciousness.
Some people believe that there must be an explanation for consciousness.
I am not any of these people. I find all purported explanations that I have seen wanting, because each of them fails to account for the very existence of conscious experience. (Most of them are no more than the “A is B, therefore B is A, in a sense” fallacy.) The claim that it is “ontologically primitive” is no better than saying that it is magic. The claim that it does not exist is refuted by every moment of experience. I have no reason to think that there is no explanation, but on the other hand I am not moved to exclaim that there must be one.
I cannot say what an actual explanation would look like. Everything that we have discovered about the world so far fails to account for the existence of experience, yet there it is, mocking our attempts at understanding.
An observation is not really a prediction of anything but itself. If I observe that it is daytime where I am, that on its own is not predicting anything beyond what I already saw: the sun in the sky, the bird on the wing, and so forth.
It’s technically possible for something to be a pure observation, but what usually happens is you use some aggregate concept to describe your observations and this concept implies some predictions. So...
What do you mean by “accounts for the existence of subjective experience”? “Consciousness is existence” accounts for the existence of subjective experience (or rough description of how brain works accounts for the existence of subjective experience otherwise). It (in combination with physics) predicts that the brain like yours would experience things. And you can confidently predict that when we have better neuroscience it would predict what someone will experience with better precision. You can call it magic, but it’s the same magic you have with the concept of existence anyway, so usual anti-magic heuristics don’t apply (or it should be argued separately that existence is useless/incoherent concept and it would still result in physicalist account of consciousness). Or you can call it fallacy, but then it would be a fallacy that works in real world.
Yes, but they are not separate the same way the consciousness in the brain is not completely separate from outside world, because physical things interact. They are just different descriptions of different parts of the consciousness of the universe.
That’s good! Before I wasn’t sure whether you claim this, or just claim that there is no reason to think otherwise.
I agree. But it doesn’t follow that it doesn’t have any kind of experience.
Not sure if I managed to communicate how it supposed to work, so just to clarify: it’s not something different under the assumption that consciousness is existence. If consciousness is existence, if what makes hopes and pain consciousness-like is what rock also has, then the ordinary things that geologists study are about consciousness.
And if you argue against the assumption, say that these things must be different, then why? Your observations are about behavior and that’s accounted for by physical description. You only have an intuition about rocks not having experience and if this intuition is based on you not being able to imagine what it is like to be a rock, then I could say that you imagining what it is like to be you is not the most precise model of your consciousness either—you can’t say at what exact time your experience changed from seeing red to seeing blue.
Where is the bump in “consciousness is existence”? That rocks are consciousness? Then yeah, the point is that having consistent non-confusing worldview is worth accepting that bump.
That doesn’t make any sense without additional reasons to disbelieve the physicalist assumption in case of consciousness. You don’t disbelieve it in other unsolved cases, like precise aerodynamics of a branch of a tree, right? So even if you don’t want to call it a solution, if you actually believed the physicalist assumption, it would make the problem easy. And, like, ok, I’m not saying you don’t have reasons to be wary about the physicalist assumption, just the whole shape of the “solution must solve everything” argument is wrong.
To summarize my general point so far: the tradeoff is between your intuition about rocks not being conscious and making the Hard problem not hard. And I think you would agree that it’s acceptable if you believed in the later part. Am I wrong and you already agree with the later part and just really can’t stomach conscious rocks?
My intuitions, and other people’s, about what looks conscious and what does not are the starting point, but not the end point, for any investigation of what consciousness is. This is the phenomenon for which we seek an explanation.
If we actually managed to get some distance towards that goal, perhaps we might find that the underlying phenomenon, whatever it is, is also present in places where we do not attribute consciousness. This would be like the discovery that the process underlying fire is reaction with oxygen, and that this is also present in rusting iron and animal metabolism. While we may analogically speak of these as “fire”, what is important is the underlying unity that was discovered among these processes. The “fire” of rusting iron is a very different sort of thing from a burning building, and most things are not fire at all.
But regarding consciousness, all is speculation. We have made no progress down that road. We cannot even find the road. “Consciousness is existence” is a verbal formula that does not constrain anticipations of future observations, any more than “all is fire” did. We now know from observation and experiment that all is, in fact, not fire, or even oxidative processes.
How might we discover the hypothetical consciousness of rocks, rather than trying to define it into existence or passing off speculation as progress? Compared with, for example, the sorts of observations that people are currently making about bees, crows, plants, and so on, on the basis of which some are attributing consciousness to those things?
I am in fact sceptical of a lot of these attributions. If a machine that we currently (i.e. up to 2022, not a movable feast) know how to make, without even using AI techniques, can duplicate an observed behaviour, that is to me good evidence that consciousness, whatever it is, is not involved.
The kind of hypothetical consciousness that is just a generalisation of reasons for results of observations of bees and crows can be discovered in a rock by inspecting its internal structure and finding there a computer roughly isomorphic to a neural system of a crow. That obviously won’t happen, because rocks don’t have such consciousness in natural encoding.
But that’s not the problem that needs solving. We are not in the same situation as with fire: with fire, once we had a theory that explained oxidative processes, we didn’t say “but why oxidative processes are fire?”. We already knew what phenomenon we want to be explained. We always have been on a road. Not being able to even find a road is not a normal situation you solve by more precise physical description. We already have enough physical theories to be far along the road. The only thing that needs solving here is confusion about where on the road we are. The reasons for thinking that we don’t mostly understand consciousness are not in the category of empirically proven scientific theories or methods. They are in the category of speculations and definitions and verbal formulae. So why do you think anything else is required to make problem easier, when your intuition of hardness of the Hard problem is based just on you not knowing how explanation is possible? Or what are your different reasons for thinking that we’ve made no progress, when we know so much about brains and computers?
It’s not just that I don’t know how to explain consciousness. I believe no-one does, including the people who think they do. None of the purported explanations bridge the gap between the stuff we have found out and the question of why there is any such thing as subjective experience. What we know about brains at best only tells us about where consciousness happens. It does not tell us why there is any such thing or how it works. What we know about computers tells us nothing.
Are you conscious? Are you aware of your own presence? Aware of having that awareness?
Yes.
Sure, sometimes.
But why do you believe it? There is no gap under “consciousness is existence” explanation—the stuff we have found out is about subjective experience, because the stuff we have found out is about how things exist and existence is consciousness. There is not much “why” here, admittedly, but that’s expected because we are talking about existence? I don’t get what you don’t like about this explanation, if it’s not “it says rock are conscious”. “Don’t rely on pure verbal manipulations” is just heuristics—can you show some concrete place where there is a gap?
How “if I tap this brain region, you will feel pain” is not telling how it works? Computers are probably not that good a point by themselves, but what I meant was something like they provide us with examples of many capabilities we associate with our consciousness—you can code an agent with attention and access to it’s own state as an input and it would work similarly to the brain (in some way) when you ask it whether it’s aware of it’s own presence.
That it says that everything is conscious is part of it, but that is just a symptom of the real problem: it is not an explanation. It makes no predictions about what we might observe. It describes no moving parts, no mechanism for how everything is conscious. It only leads us to say “everything is conscious!” but nothing else. We will carry on grinding up rocks for concrete without caring about their alleged consciousness.
If I tap this organ key, a pipe will sound. That tells me nothing about whether there is a direct mechanical linkage from the key to the pipe, or the key is closing a switch that operates an electrical relay, or the pipes are just for show and the sound is electronically generated. Input here, output there, tells nothing about how the thing is done. No amount of speculating about how the thing might be done will answer the question of how it is done.
Ok, what observations does your belief, that no one has an explanation for consciousness, predicts? Or that there is always a gap. What does it even mean for something to be an explanation of consciousness, if you would always say that it doesn’t explain the subjective experience itself? It isn’t just “no one can predict specific content of consciousness to the level of precision that we can do with organs now”, right? And if it doesn’t have predictions, if you just say “yes, I don’t know how explanation would look like”, than why do you thing an explanation that changes your mind about gaps must have anything to do with observations?
Like, there is a mental process inside you that looks at explanation and says “no, it is not an explanation, because it doesn’t predict anything” or “no, it is not an explanation of consciousness, because it predicts many things, but they are not consciousness”. So why do you just trust that whole mental process? What evidence do you have against the theory that this mental process leads you to contradiction when you apply the second part to physicalist explanations and first part to explanations about why you shouldn’t use the second part like that?
And, is it really your disagreement here? That there is no way such thing can be an explanation. Because I honestly can’t imagine myself seeing an explanation that works and dismissing it just because it doesn’t satisfy some heuristics. So I would thing that the part where it works would be more controversial.
Sure, treating human brains like black box for ethical reasons makes producing high-quality models harder. But that’s all perfectly predictable normal difficulty considering complexity of the brain, not a reason to doubt even theoretical possibility of precise modelling.
I am only observing that no explanation I have seen accounts for the existence of subjective experience. An observation is not really a prediction of anything but itself. If I observe that it is daytime where I am, that on its own is not predicting anything beyond what I already saw: the sun in the sky, the bird on the wing, and so forth.
I find your next few paragraphs too incoherent for me to respond to, so I shall just make the following remarks as a conclusion to all this.
Some people believe they have found an explanation for consciousness.
Some people believe that someone else has found an explanation for consciousness.
Some people believe that saying that consciousness is ontologically primitive is an explanation for consciousness.
Some people believe there is no such thing as consciousness.
Some people believe that there cannot be an explanation for consciousness.
Some people believe that there must be an explanation for consciousness.
I am not any of these people. I find all purported explanations that I have seen wanting, because each of them fails to account for the very existence of conscious experience. (Most of them are no more than the “A is B, therefore B is A, in a sense” fallacy.) The claim that it is “ontologically primitive” is no better than saying that it is magic. The claim that it does not exist is refuted by every moment of experience. I have no reason to think that there is no explanation, but on the other hand I am not moved to exclaim that there must be one.
I cannot say what an actual explanation would look like. Everything that we have discovered about the world so far fails to account for the existence of experience, yet there it is, mocking our attempts at understanding.
It’s technically possible for something to be a pure observation, but what usually happens is you use some aggregate concept to describe your observations and this concept implies some predictions. So...
What do you mean by “accounts for the existence of subjective experience”? “Consciousness is existence” accounts for the existence of subjective experience (or rough description of how brain works accounts for the existence of subjective experience otherwise). It (in combination with physics) predicts that the brain like yours would experience things. And you can confidently predict that when we have better neuroscience it would predict what someone will experience with better precision. You can call it magic, but it’s the same magic you have with the concept of existence anyway, so usual anti-magic heuristics don’t apply (or it should be argued separately that existence is useless/incoherent concept and it would still result in physicalist account of consciousness). Or you can call it fallacy, but then it would be a fallacy that works in real world.
Does 2⁄3 of a rock have experience? Does every subset of the atoms of a rock have its own separate experience?
Yes, but they are not separate the same way the consciousness in the brain is not completely separate from outside world, because physical things interact. They are just different descriptions of different parts of the consciousness of the universe.