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.
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.