If belief is construed as some sort of representation which stands for external reality (as in the case of some correspondence theories of truth), then we can take the claim to be strong prediction of contemporary neuroscience. Ditto for whether we can explain why we talk about qualia.
It’s not that I could explain exactly why youin particular talk about qualia. It’s that we have an established paradigm for explaining it.
It’s similar in the respect that we have an established paradigm for explaining why people report being able to see color. We can model the eye, and the visual cortex, and we have some idea of what neurons do even though we lack the specific information about how the whole thing fits together. And we could imagine that in the limit of perfect neuroscience, we could synthesize this information to trace back the reason why you said a particular thing.
Since we do not have perfect neuroscience, the best analogy would be analyzing the ‘beliefs’ and predictions of an artificial neural network. If you asked me, “Why does this ANN predict that this image is a 5 with 98% probability” it would be difficult to say exactly why, even with full access to the neural network parameters.
However, we know that unless our conception of neural networks is completely incorrect, in principle we could trace exactly why the neural network made that judgement, including the exact steps that caused the neural network to have the parameters that it has in the first place. And we know that such an explanation requires only the components which make up the ANN, and not any conscious or phenomenal properties.
I can’t tell whether we’re arguing about the same thing.
Like, I assume that I am a neural net predicting things and deciding things and if you had full access to my brain you could (in principle, given sufficient time) understand everything that was going on in there. But, like, one way or another I experience the perception of perceiving things.
(I’d prefer to taboo ‘Qualia’ in case it has particular connotations I don’t share. Just ‘that thing where Ray perceives himself perceiving things, and perhaps the part where sometimes Ray has preferences about those perceptions of perceiving because the perceptions have valence.’ If that’s what Qualia means, cool, and if it means some other thing I’m not sure I care)
My current working model of “how this aspect of my perception works” is described in this comment, I guess easy enough to quote in full:
“Human brains contain two forms of knowledge: - explicit knowledge and weights that are used in implicit knowledge (admittedly the former is hacked on top of the later, but that isn’t relevant here). Mary doesn’t gain any extra explicit knowledge from seeing blue, but her brain changes some of her implicit weights so that when a blue object activates in her vision a sub-neural network can connect this to the label “blue”.”
The reason I care about any of this is that I believe that a “perceptions-having-valence” is probably morally relevant. (or, put in usual terms: suffering and pleasure seem morally relevant).
(I think it’s quite possibe that future-me will decide I was confused about this part, but it’s the part I care about anyhow)
Are you saying the my perceiving-that-I-perceive-things-with-valence is an illusion, and that I am in fact not doing that? Or some other thing?
(To be clear, I AM open to ‘actually Ray yes, the counterintuitive answer is that no, you’re not actually perceiving-that-you-perceive-things-and-some-of-the-perceptions-have-valence.’ The topic is clearly confusing and behind the veil of epistemic-ignorance it seems quite plausible I’m the confused one here. Just noting that so far that from way you’re phrasing things I can’t tell whether your claims map onto the things I care about )
Like, I assume that I am a neural net predicting things and deciding things and if you had full access to my brain you could (in principle, given sufficient time) understand everything that was going on in there. But, like, one way or another I experience the perception of perceiving things.
To me this is a bit like the claim of someone who claimed psychic powers but still wanted to believe in physics who would say, “I assume you could perfectly well understand what was going on at a behavioral level within my brain, but there is still a datum left unexplained: the datum of me having psychic powers.”
There are a number of ways to respond to the claim:
We could redefine psychic powers to include mere physical properties. This has the problem that psychics insist that psychic power is entirely separate from physical properties. Simple re-definition doesn’t make the intuition go away and doesn’t explain anything.
We could alternatively posit new physics which incorporates psychic powers. This has the occasional problem that it violates Occam’s razor, since the old physics was completely adequate. Hence the debunking argument I presented above.
Or, we could incorporate the phenomenon within a physical model by first denying that it exists and then explaining the mechanism which caused you to believe in it, and talk about it.
In the case of consciousness, the third response amounts to Illusionism, which is the view that I am defending. It has the advantage that it conservatively doesn’t promise to contradict known physics, and it also does justice to the intuition that consciousness really exists.
I’d prefer to taboo ‘Qualia’ in case it has particular connotations I don’t share. Just ‘that thing where Ray perceives himself perceiving things, and perhaps the part where sometimes Ray has preferences about those perceptions of perceiving because the perceptions have valence.’
To most philosophers who write about it, qualia is defined as the experience of what it’s like. Roughly speaking, I agree with thinking of it as a particular form of perception that we experience.
However, it’s not just any perception, since some perceptions can be unconscious perceptions. Qualia specifically refer to the qualitative aspects of our experience of the world: the taste of wine, the touch of fabric, the feeling of seeing blue, the suffering associated with physical pain etc. These are said to be directly apprehensible to our ‘internal movie’ that is playing inside our head. It is this type of property which I am applying the framework of illusionism to.
The reason I care about any of this is that I believe that a “perceptions-having-valence” is probably morally relevant.
I agree. That’s why I typically take the view that consciousness is a powerful illusion, and that we should take it seriously. Those who simply re-define consciousness as essentially a synonym for “perception” or “observation” or “information” are not doing justice to the fact that it’s the thing I care about in this world. I have a strong intuition that consciousness is what is valuable even despite the fact that I hold an illusionist view. To put it another way, I would care much less if you told me a computer was receiving a pain-signal (labeled in the code as some variable with suffering set to maximum), compared to the claim that a computer was actually suffering in the same way a human does.
Are you saying the my perceiving-that-I-perceive-things-with-valence is an illusion, and that I am in fact not doing that? Or some other thing?
Roughly speaking, yes. I am denying that that type of thing actually exists, including the valence claim.
Or, we could incorporate the phenomenon within a physical model by first denying that it exists and then explaining the mechanism which caused you to believe in it, and talk about it.
It still feels very important that you haven’t actually explained this.
In the case of psychic powers, I (think?) we actually have pretty good explanations for where perceptions of psychic powers comes from, which makes the perception of psychic powers non-mysterious. (i.e. we know how cold reading works, and how various kinds of confirmation bias play into divination). But, that was something that actually had to be explained.
It feels like you’re just changing the name of the confusing thing from ‘the fact that I seem conscious to myself’ to ‘the fact that I’m experiencing an illusion of consciousness.’ Cool, but, like, there’s still a mysterious thing that seems quite important to actually explain.
Also just in general, I disagree that skepticism is not progress. If I said, “I don’t believe in God because there’s nothing in the universe with those properties...” I don’t think it’s fair to say, “Cool, but like, I’m still praying to something right, and that needs to be explained” because I don’t think that speaks fully to what I just denied.
In the case of religion, many people have a very strong intuition that God exists. So, is the atheist position not progress because we have not explained this intuition?
I agree that skepticism generally can be important progress (I recently stumbled upon this old comment making a similar argument about how saying “not X” can be useful)
The difference between God and consciousness is that the interesting bit about consciousness *is* my perception of it, full stop. Unlike God or psychic powers, there is no separate thing from my perception of it that I’m interested in.
The difference between God and consciousness is that the interesting bit about consciousness *is* my perception of it, full stop.
If by perception you simply mean “You are an information processing device that takes signals in and outputs things” then this is entirely explicable on our current physical models, and I could dissolve the confusion fairly easily.
However, I think you have something else in mind which is that there is somehow something left out when I explain it by simply appealing to signal processing. In that sense, I think you are falling right into the trap! You would be doing something similar to the person who said, “But I am still praying to God!”
However, I think you have something else in mind which is that there is somehow something left out when I explain it by simply appealing to signal processing. In that sense,
I don’t have anything else in mind that I know of. “Explained via signal processing” seems basically sufficent. The interesting part is “how can you look at a given signal-processing-system, and predict in advance whether that system is the sort of thing that would talk* about Qualia, if it could talk?”
(I feel like this was all covered in the sequences, basically?)
*where “talk about qualia” is shorthand ‘would consider the concept of qualia important enough to have a concept for.’”
I mean, I agree that this was mostly covered in the sequences. But I also think that I disagree with the way that most people frame the debate. At least personally I have seen people who I know have read the sequences still make basic errors. So I’m just leaving this here to explain my point of view.
Intuition: On a first approximation, there is something that it is like to be us. In other words, we are beings who have qualia.
Counterintuition: In order for qualia to exist, there would need to exist entities which are private, ineffable, intrinsic, subjective and this can’t be since physics is public, effable, and objective and therefore contradicts the existence of qualia.
Intuition: But even if I agree with you that qualia don’t exist, there still seems to be something left unexplained.
Counterintuition: We can explain why you think there’s something unexplained because we can explain the cause of your belief in qualia, and why you think they have these properties. By explaining why you believe it we have explained all there is to explain.
Intuition: But you have merely said that we could explain it. You have not have actually explained it.
Counterintuition: Even without the precise explanation, we now have a paradigm for explaining consciousness, so it is not mysterious anymore.
We do not telepathically receive experiemnt results when they are performed. In reality you need ot intake the measumrent results from your first-person point of view (use eyes to read led screen or use ears to hear about stories of experiments performed). It seems to be taht experiments are intersubjective in that other observers will report having experiences that resemble my first-hand experiences. For most purposes shorthanding this to “public” is adequate enough. But your point of view is “unpublisable” in that even if you really tried there is no way to provide you private expereience to the public knowledge pool (“directly”). “I now how you feel” is a fiction it doesn’t actually happen.
Skeptisim about the experiencing of others is easier but being skeptical about your own experiences would seem to be ludicrous.
I am not denying that humans take in sensory input and process it using their internal neural networks. I am denying that process has any of the properties associated with consciousness in the philosophical sense. And I am making an additional claim which is that if you merely redefine consciousness so that it lacks these philosophical properties, you have not actually explained anything or dissolved any confusion.
The illusionist approach is the best approach because it simultaneously takes consciousness seriously and doesn’t contradict physics. By taking this approach we also have an understood paradigm for solving the hard problem of consciousness: namely, the hard problem is reduced to the meta-problem (see Chalmers).
It feels like you’re just changing the name of the confusing thing from ‘the fact that I seem conscious to myself’ to ‘the fact that I’m experiencing an illusion of consciousness.’ Cool, but, like, there’s still a mysterious thing that seems quite important to actually explain.
I don’t actually agree. Although I have not fully explained consciousness, I think that I have shown a lot.
In particular, I have shown us what the solution to the hard problem of consciousness would plausibly look like if we had unlimited funding and time. And to me, that’s important.
And under my view, it’s not going to look anything like, “Hey we discovered this mechanism in the brain that gives rise to consciousness.” No, it’s going to look more like, “Look at this mechanism in the brain that makes humans talk about things even though the things they are talking about have no real world referent.”
You might think that this is a useless achievement. I claim the contrary. As Chalmers points out, pretty much all the leading theories of consciousness fail the basic test of looking like an explanation rather than just sounding confused. Don’t believe me? Read Section 3 in this paper.
In short, Chalmers reviews the current state of the art in consciousness explanations. He first goes into Integrated Information Theory (IIT), but then convincingly shows that IIT fails to explain why we would talk about consciousness and believe in consciousness. He does the same for global workspace theories, first order representational theories, higher order theories, consciousness-causes-collapse theories, and panpsychism. Simply put, none of them even approach an adequate baseline of looking like an explanation.
I also believe that if you follow my view carefully you might stop being confused about a lot of things. Like, do animals feel pain? Well it depends on your definition of pain—consciousness is not real in any objective sense so this is a definition dispute. Same with asking whether person A is happier than person B, or asking whether computers will ever be conscious.
Perhaps this isn’t an achievement strictly speaking relative to the standard Lesswrong points of view. But that’s only because I think the standard Lesswrong point of view is correct. Yet even so, I still see people around me making fundamentally basic mistakes about consciousness. For instance, I see people treating consciousness as intrinsic, ineffable, private—or they think there’s an objectively right answer to whether animals feel pain and argue over this as if it’s not the same as a tree falling in a forest.
And we know that such an explanation requires only the components which make up the ANN, and not any conscious or phenomenal properties.
That’s an argument against dualism not an argument against qualia. If mind brain identity is true, neural activity is causing reports, and qualia, along with the rest of consciousness are identical to neural activity, so qualia are also causing reports.
If you identify qualia as behavioral parts of our physical models, then are you also willing to discard the properties philosophers have associated with qualia, such as
Ineffable, as they can’t be explained using just words or mathematical sentences
Private, as they are inaccessible to outside third-person observers
Intrinsic, as they are fundamental to the way we experience the world
If you are willing to discard these properties, then I suggest we stop using the world “qualia” since you have simply taken all the meaning away once you have identified them with things that actually exist. This is what I mean when I say that I am denying qualia.
It is analogous to someone who denies that souls exist by first conceding that we could identify certain physical configurations as examples of souls, but then explaining that this would be confusing to anyone who talks about souls in the traditional sense. Far better in my view to discard the idea altogether.
My orientation to this conversation seems more like “hmm, I’m learning that it is possible the word qualia has a bunch of connotations that I didn’t know it had”, as opposed to “hmm, I was wrong to believe in the-thing-I-was-calling-qualia.”
But I’m not yet sure that these connotations are actually universal – the wikipedia article opens with:
In philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latinneuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis(Latin pronunciation: [ˈkʷaːlɪs]) meaning “of what sort” or “of what kind” in a specific instance, like “what it is like to taste a specific apple, this particular apple now”.
Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to “propositional attitudes”,[1] where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.
Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was “an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us”.[2]
Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition of the term, and various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia. Consequently, the nature and existence of various definitions of qualia remain controversial because they are not verifiable.
Later on, it notes the three characteristics (ineffable/private/intrinsic) that Dennett listed.
But this looks more like an accident of history than something intrinsic to the term. The opening paragraphs defined qualia the way I naively expected it to be defined.
My impression looking at the various defintions and discussion is not that qualia was defined in this specific fashion, so much as various people trying to grapple with a confusing problem generated various possible definitions and rules for it, and some of those turned out to be false once we came up with better understanding.
I can see where you’re coming from with the soul analogy, but I’m not sure if it’s more like the soul analogy, or more like “One early philosopher defined ‘a human’ as a featherless biped, and then a later one said “dude, look at this featherless chicken I just made” and they realized the definition was silly.
I guess my question here is – do you have a suggestion for a replacement word for “the particular kind of observation that gets made by an entity that actually gets to experience the perception”? This still seems importantly different from “just a perception”, since very simple robots and thermostats or whatever can be said to have those. I don’t really care whether they are inherently private, ineffable or intrinsic, and whether Daniel Dennett was able to eff them seems more like a historical curiosity to me.
The wikipedia article specifically says that they people argue a lot over the definitions:
There are many definitions of qualia, which have changed over time. One of the simpler, broader definitions is: “The ‘what it is like’ character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc.”
That definition there is the one I’m generally using, and the one which seems important to have a word for. This seems more like a political/coordination question of “is it easier to invent a new word and gain traction for it, or get everyone on page about ‘actually, they’re totally in principle effable, you just might need to be a kind of mind different than a current-generation-human to properly eff them.’
It does seem to me something like “I expect the sort of mind that is capable of viewing qualia of other people would be sufficiently different from a human mind that it may still be fair to call them ‘private/ineffable among humans.’”
I know I’m not being as clear as I could possibly be, and at some points I sort of feel like just throwing “Quining Qualia” or Keith Frankish’s articles or a whole bunch of other blog posts at people and say, “Please just read this and re-read it until you have a very distinct intuition about what I am saying.” But I know that that type of debate is not helpful.
I think I have a OK-to-good understanding of what you are saying. My model of your reply is something like this,
“Your claim is that qualia don’t exist because nothing with these three properties exists (ineffability/private/intrinsic), but it’s not clear to me that these three properties are universally identified with qualia. When I go to Wikipedia or other sources, they usually identify qualia with ‘what it’s like’ rather than these three very specific things that Daniel Dennett happened to list once. So, I still think that I am pointing to something real when I talk about ‘what it’s like’ and you are only disputing a perhaps-strawman version of qualia.”
Please correct me if this model of you is inaccurate.
I recognize what you are saying, and I agree with the place you are coming from. I really do. And furthermore, I really really agree with the idea that we should go further than skepticism and we should always ask more questions even after we have concluded that something doesn’t exist.
However, the place I get off the boat is where you keep talking about how this ‘what it’s like’ thing is actually referring to something coherent in the real world that has a crisp, natural boundary around it. That’s the disagreement.
I don’t think it’s an accident of history either that those properties are identified with qualia. The whole reason Daniel Dennett identified them was because he showed that they were the necessary conclusion of the sort of thought experiments people use for qualia. He spends the whole first several paragraphs justifying them using various intuition pumps in his essay on the matter.
Point being, when you are asked to clarify what ‘what it’s like’ means, you’ll probably start pointing to examples. Like, you might say, “Well, I know what it’s like to see the color green, so that’s an example of a quale.” And Daniel Dennett would then press the person further and go, “OK could you clarify what you mean when you say you ‘know what it’s like to see green’?” and the person would say, “No, I can’t describe it using words. And it’s not clear to me it’s even in the same category of things that can be either, since I can’t possibly conceive of an English sentence that would describe the color green to a blind person.” And then Daniel Dennett would shout, “Aha! So you do believe in ineffability!”
The point of those three properties (actually he lists 4, I think), is not that they are inherently tied to the definition. It’s that the definition is vague, and every time people are pressed to be more clear on what they mean, they start spouting nonsense. Dennett did valid and good deconfusion work where he showed that people go wrong in these four places, and then showed how there’s no physical thing that could possibly allow those four things.
These properties also show up all over the various thought experiments that people use when talking about qualia. For example, Nagel uses the private property in his essay “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” Chalmers uses the intrinsic property when he talks about p-zombies being physically identical to humans in every respect except for qualia. Frank Jackson used the ineffability property when he talked about how Mary the neuroscientist had something missing when she was in the black and white room.
All of this is important to recognize. Because if you still want to say, “But I’m still pointing to something valid and real even if you want to reject this other strawman-entity” then I’m going to treat you like the person who wants to believe in souls even after they’ve been shown that nothing soul-like exists in this universe.
Spouting nonsense is different from being wrong. If I say that there are no rectangles with 5 angles that can be processed pretty straght forwardly because the concept of a rectangle is unproblematic. But if you seek why that statement was made and the person points to a pentagon you will find 5 angles. Now there are polygons with 5 angles. If you give a short word for 5 angle rectangle” it’s correct to say those don’t exists. But if you give an ostensive definition of the shape then it does exist and it’s more to the point to say that it’s not a rectangle rather that it doesn’t exist.
In the details when persons say “what it is like to see green” one could fail to get what they mean or point to. If someone says “look a unicorn” and one has proof that unicorns don’t exist that doesn’t mean that the unicorn reference is not referencing something or that the reference target does not exist. If you end up in a situation where you point at a horse and say “those things do not exist. Look no horn, doesn’t exist” you are not being helpful. If somebody is pointing to a horse and says “look, a unicorn!” and you go “where? I see only horses” you are also not being helpful. Being “motivatedly uncooperative in ostension receiving” is not cool. Say that you made a deal to sell a gold bar in exchange for a unicorn. Then refusing to accept any object as an unicorn woud let you keep your gold bar and you migth be tempted to play dumb.
When people are saying “what it feels like to see green” they are trying to communicate something and failing their assertion by sabotaging their communication doesn’t prove anything. Communication is hard yes but doing too much semantics substitution means you start talking past each other.
I am not suggesting that qualia should be identified with neural activity in a way that loses any aspects of the philosophical definition… bearing in mind that the he philosophical definition does not assert that qualia are non physical.
If belief is construed as some sort of representation which stands for external reality (as in the case of some correspondence theories of truth), then we can take the claim to be strong prediction of contemporary neuroscience. Ditto for whether we can explain why we talk about qualia.
It’s not that I could explain exactly why you in particular talk about qualia. It’s that we have an established paradigm for explaining it.
It’s similar in the respect that we have an established paradigm for explaining why people report being able to see color. We can model the eye, and the visual cortex, and we have some idea of what neurons do even though we lack the specific information about how the whole thing fits together. And we could imagine that in the limit of perfect neuroscience, we could synthesize this information to trace back the reason why you said a particular thing.
Since we do not have perfect neuroscience, the best analogy would be analyzing the ‘beliefs’ and predictions of an artificial neural network. If you asked me, “Why does this ANN predict that this image is a 5 with 98% probability” it would be difficult to say exactly why, even with full access to the neural network parameters.
However, we know that unless our conception of neural networks is completely incorrect, in principle we could trace exactly why the neural network made that judgement, including the exact steps that caused the neural network to have the parameters that it has in the first place. And we know that such an explanation requires only the components which make up the ANN, and not any conscious or phenomenal properties.
I can’t tell whether we’re arguing about the same thing.
Like, I assume that I am a neural net predicting things and deciding things and if you had full access to my brain you could (in principle, given sufficient time) understand everything that was going on in there. But, like, one way or another I experience the perception of perceiving things.
(I’d prefer to taboo ‘Qualia’ in case it has particular connotations I don’t share. Just ‘that thing where Ray perceives himself perceiving things, and perhaps the part where sometimes Ray has preferences about those perceptions of perceiving because the perceptions have valence.’ If that’s what Qualia means, cool, and if it means some other thing I’m not sure I care)
My current working model of “how this aspect of my perception works” is described in this comment, I guess easy enough to quote in full:
The reason I care about any of this is that I believe that a “perceptions-having-valence” is probably morally relevant. (or, put in usual terms: suffering and pleasure seem morally relevant).
(I think it’s quite possibe that future-me will decide I was confused about this part, but it’s the part I care about anyhow)
Are you saying the my perceiving-that-I-perceive-things-with-valence is an illusion, and that I am in fact not doing that? Or some other thing?
(To be clear, I AM open to ‘actually Ray yes, the counterintuitive answer is that no, you’re not actually perceiving-that-you-perceive-things-and-some-of-the-perceptions-have-valence.’ The topic is clearly confusing and behind the veil of epistemic-ignorance it seems quite plausible I’m the confused one here. Just noting that so far that from way you’re phrasing things I can’t tell whether your claims map onto the things I care about )
To me this is a bit like the claim of someone who claimed psychic powers but still wanted to believe in physics who would say, “I assume you could perfectly well understand what was going on at a behavioral level within my brain, but there is still a datum left unexplained: the datum of me having psychic powers.”
There are a number of ways to respond to the claim:
We could redefine psychic powers to include mere physical properties. This has the problem that psychics insist that psychic power is entirely separate from physical properties. Simple re-definition doesn’t make the intuition go away and doesn’t explain anything.
We could alternatively posit new physics which incorporates psychic powers. This has the occasional problem that it violates Occam’s razor, since the old physics was completely adequate. Hence the debunking argument I presented above.
Or, we could incorporate the phenomenon within a physical model by first denying that it exists and then explaining the mechanism which caused you to believe in it, and talk about it.
In the case of consciousness, the third response amounts to Illusionism, which is the view that I am defending. It has the advantage that it conservatively doesn’t promise to contradict known physics, and it also does justice to the intuition that consciousness really exists.
To most philosophers who write about it, qualia is defined as the experience of what it’s like. Roughly speaking, I agree with thinking of it as a particular form of perception that we experience.
However, it’s not just any perception, since some perceptions can be unconscious perceptions. Qualia specifically refer to the qualitative aspects of our experience of the world: the taste of wine, the touch of fabric, the feeling of seeing blue, the suffering associated with physical pain etc. These are said to be directly apprehensible to our ‘internal movie’ that is playing inside our head. It is this type of property which I am applying the framework of illusionism to.
I agree. That’s why I typically take the view that consciousness is a powerful illusion, and that we should take it seriously. Those who simply re-define consciousness as essentially a synonym for “perception” or “observation” or “information” are not doing justice to the fact that it’s the thing I care about in this world. I have a strong intuition that consciousness is what is valuable even despite the fact that I hold an illusionist view. To put it another way, I would care much less if you told me a computer was receiving a pain-signal (labeled in the code as some variable with suffering set to maximum), compared to the claim that a computer was actually suffering in the same way a human does.
Roughly speaking, yes. I am denying that that type of thing actually exists, including the valence claim.
It still feels very important that you haven’t actually explained this.
In the case of psychic powers, I (think?) we actually have pretty good explanations for where perceptions of psychic powers comes from, which makes the perception of psychic powers non-mysterious. (i.e. we know how cold reading works, and how various kinds of confirmation bias play into divination). But, that was something that actually had to be explained.
It feels like you’re just changing the name of the confusing thing from ‘the fact that I seem conscious to myself’ to ‘the fact that I’m experiencing an illusion of consciousness.’ Cool, but, like, there’s still a mysterious thing that seems quite important to actually explain.
Also just in general, I disagree that skepticism is not progress. If I said, “I don’t believe in God because there’s nothing in the universe with those properties...” I don’t think it’s fair to say, “Cool, but like, I’m still praying to something right, and that needs to be explained” because I don’t think that speaks fully to what I just denied.
In the case of religion, many people have a very strong intuition that God exists. So, is the atheist position not progress because we have not explained this intuition?
I agree that skepticism generally can be important progress (I recently stumbled upon this old comment making a similar argument about how saying “not X” can be useful)
The difference between God and consciousness is that the interesting bit about consciousness *is* my perception of it, full stop. Unlike God or psychic powers, there is no separate thing from my perception of it that I’m interested in.
If by perception you simply mean “You are an information processing device that takes signals in and outputs things” then this is entirely explicable on our current physical models, and I could dissolve the confusion fairly easily.
However, I think you have something else in mind which is that there is somehow something left out when I explain it by simply appealing to signal processing. In that sense, I think you are falling right into the trap! You would be doing something similar to the person who said, “But I am still praying to God!”
I don’t have anything else in mind that I know of. “Explained via signal processing” seems basically sufficent. The interesting part is “how can you look at a given signal-processing-system, and predict in advance whether that system is the sort of thing that would talk* about Qualia, if it could talk?”
(I feel like this was all covered in the sequences, basically?)
*where “talk about qualia” is shorthand ‘would consider the concept of qualia important enough to have a concept for.’”
I mean, I agree that this was mostly covered in the sequences. But I also think that I disagree with the way that most people frame the debate. At least personally I have seen people who I know have read the sequences still make basic errors. So I’m just leaving this here to explain my point of view.
Intuition: On a first approximation, there is something that it is like to be us. In other words, we are beings who have qualia.
Counterintuition: In order for qualia to exist, there would need to exist entities which are private, ineffable, intrinsic, subjective and this can’t be since physics is public, effable, and objective and therefore contradicts the existence of qualia.
Intuition: But even if I agree with you that qualia don’t exist, there still seems to be something left unexplained.
Counterintuition: We can explain why you think there’s something unexplained because we can explain the cause of your belief in qualia, and why you think they have these properties. By explaining why you believe it we have explained all there is to explain.
Intuition: But you have merely said that we could explain it. You have not have actually explained it.
Counterintuition: Even without the precise explanation, we now have a paradigm for explaining consciousness, so it is not mysterious anymore.
This is essentially the point where I leave.
Physics as map is. Note that we can’t compare the map directly to the territory.
We do not telepathically receive experiemnt results when they are performed. In reality you need ot intake the measumrent results from your first-person point of view (use eyes to read led screen or use ears to hear about stories of experiments performed). It seems to be taht experiments are intersubjective in that other observers will report having experiences that resemble my first-hand experiences. For most purposes shorthanding this to “public” is adequate enough. But your point of view is “unpublisable” in that even if you really tried there is no way to provide you private expereience to the public knowledge pool (“directly”). “I now how you feel” is a fiction it doesn’t actually happen.
Skeptisim about the experiencing of others is easier but being skeptical about your own experiences would seem to be ludicrous.
I am not denying that humans take in sensory input and process it using their internal neural networks. I am denying that process has any of the properties associated with consciousness in the philosophical sense. And I am making an additional claim which is that if you merely redefine consciousness so that it lacks these philosophical properties, you have not actually explained anything or dissolved any confusion.
The illusionist approach is the best approach because it simultaneously takes consciousness seriously and doesn’t contradict physics. By taking this approach we also have an understood paradigm for solving the hard problem of consciousness: namely, the hard problem is reduced to the meta-problem (see Chalmers).
I don’t actually agree. Although I have not fully explained consciousness, I think that I have shown a lot.
In particular, I have shown us what the solution to the hard problem of consciousness would plausibly look like if we had unlimited funding and time. And to me, that’s important.
And under my view, it’s not going to look anything like, “Hey we discovered this mechanism in the brain that gives rise to consciousness.” No, it’s going to look more like, “Look at this mechanism in the brain that makes humans talk about things even though the things they are talking about have no real world referent.”
You might think that this is a useless achievement. I claim the contrary. As Chalmers points out, pretty much all the leading theories of consciousness fail the basic test of looking like an explanation rather than just sounding confused. Don’t believe me? Read Section 3 in this paper.
In short, Chalmers reviews the current state of the art in consciousness explanations. He first goes into Integrated Information Theory (IIT), but then convincingly shows that IIT fails to explain why we would talk about consciousness and believe in consciousness. He does the same for global workspace theories, first order representational theories, higher order theories, consciousness-causes-collapse theories, and panpsychism. Simply put, none of them even approach an adequate baseline of looking like an explanation.
I also believe that if you follow my view carefully you might stop being confused about a lot of things. Like, do animals feel pain? Well it depends on your definition of pain—consciousness is not real in any objective sense so this is a definition dispute. Same with asking whether person A is happier than person B, or asking whether computers will ever be conscious.
Perhaps this isn’t an achievement strictly speaking relative to the standard Lesswrong points of view. But that’s only because I think the standard Lesswrong point of view is correct. Yet even so, I still see people around me making fundamentally basic mistakes about consciousness. For instance, I see people treating consciousness as intrinsic, ineffable, private—or they think there’s an objectively right answer to whether animals feel pain and argue over this as if it’s not the same as a tree falling in a forest.
That’s an argument against dualism not an argument against qualia. If mind brain identity is true, neural activity is causing reports, and qualia, along with the rest of consciousness are identical to neural activity, so qualia are also causing reports.
If you identify qualia as behavioral parts of our physical models, then are you also willing to discard the properties philosophers have associated with qualia, such as
Ineffable, as they can’t be explained using just words or mathematical sentences
Private, as they are inaccessible to outside third-person observers
Intrinsic, as they are fundamental to the way we experience the world
If you are willing to discard these properties, then I suggest we stop using the world “qualia” since you have simply taken all the meaning away once you have identified them with things that actually exist. This is what I mean when I say that I am denying qualia.
It is analogous to someone who denies that souls exist by first conceding that we could identify certain physical configurations as examples of souls, but then explaining that this would be confusing to anyone who talks about souls in the traditional sense. Far better in my view to discard the idea altogether.
My orientation to this conversation seems more like “hmm, I’m learning that it is possible the word qualia has a bunch of connotations that I didn’t know it had”, as opposed to “hmm, I was wrong to believe in the-thing-I-was-calling-qualia.”
But I’m not yet sure that these connotations are actually universal – the wikipedia article opens with:
Later on, it notes the three characteristics (ineffable/private/intrinsic) that Dennett listed.
But this looks more like an accident of history than something intrinsic to the term. The opening paragraphs defined qualia the way I naively expected it to be defined.
My impression looking at the various defintions and discussion is not that qualia was defined in this specific fashion, so much as various people trying to grapple with a confusing problem generated various possible definitions and rules for it, and some of those turned out to be false once we came up with better understanding.
I can see where you’re coming from with the soul analogy, but I’m not sure if it’s more like the soul analogy, or more like “One early philosopher defined ‘a human’ as a featherless biped, and then a later one said “dude, look at this featherless chicken I just made” and they realized the definition was silly.
I guess my question here is – do you have a suggestion for a replacement word for “the particular kind of observation that gets made by an entity that actually gets to experience the perception”? This still seems importantly different from “just a perception”, since very simple robots and thermostats or whatever can be said to have those. I don’t really care whether they are inherently private, ineffable or intrinsic, and whether Daniel Dennett was able to eff them seems more like a historical curiosity to me.
The wikipedia article specifically says that they people argue a lot over the definitions:
That definition there is the one I’m generally using, and the one which seems important to have a word for. This seems more like a political/coordination question of “is it easier to invent a new word and gain traction for it, or get everyone on page about ‘actually, they’re totally in principle effable, you just might need to be a kind of mind different than a current-generation-human to properly eff them.’
It does seem to me something like “I expect the sort of mind that is capable of viewing qualia of other people would be sufficiently different from a human mind that it may still be fair to call them ‘private/ineffable among humans.’”
Thanks for engaging with me on this thing. :)
I know I’m not being as clear as I could possibly be, and at some points I sort of feel like just throwing “Quining Qualia” or Keith Frankish’s articles or a whole bunch of other blog posts at people and say, “Please just read this and re-read it until you have a very distinct intuition about what I am saying.” But I know that that type of debate is not helpful.
I think I have a OK-to-good understanding of what you are saying. My model of your reply is something like this,
“Your claim is that qualia don’t exist because nothing with these three properties exists (ineffability/private/intrinsic), but it’s not clear to me that these three properties are universally identified with qualia. When I go to Wikipedia or other sources, they usually identify qualia with ‘what it’s like’ rather than these three very specific things that Daniel Dennett happened to list once. So, I still think that I am pointing to something real when I talk about ‘what it’s like’ and you are only disputing a perhaps-strawman version of qualia.”
Please correct me if this model of you is inaccurate.
I recognize what you are saying, and I agree with the place you are coming from. I really do. And furthermore, I really really agree with the idea that we should go further than skepticism and we should always ask more questions even after we have concluded that something doesn’t exist.
However, the place I get off the boat is where you keep talking about how this ‘what it’s like’ thing is actually referring to something coherent in the real world that has a crisp, natural boundary around it. That’s the disagreement.
I don’t think it’s an accident of history either that those properties are identified with qualia. The whole reason Daniel Dennett identified them was because he showed that they were the necessary conclusion of the sort of thought experiments people use for qualia. He spends the whole first several paragraphs justifying them using various intuition pumps in his essay on the matter.
Point being, when you are asked to clarify what ‘what it’s like’ means, you’ll probably start pointing to examples. Like, you might say, “Well, I know what it’s like to see the color green, so that’s an example of a quale.” And Daniel Dennett would then press the person further and go, “OK could you clarify what you mean when you say you ‘know what it’s like to see green’?” and the person would say, “No, I can’t describe it using words. And it’s not clear to me it’s even in the same category of things that can be either, since I can’t possibly conceive of an English sentence that would describe the color green to a blind person.” And then Daniel Dennett would shout, “Aha! So you do believe in ineffability!”
The point of those three properties (actually he lists 4, I think), is not that they are inherently tied to the definition. It’s that the definition is vague, and every time people are pressed to be more clear on what they mean, they start spouting nonsense. Dennett did valid and good deconfusion work where he showed that people go wrong in these four places, and then showed how there’s no physical thing that could possibly allow those four things.
These properties also show up all over the various thought experiments that people use when talking about qualia. For example, Nagel uses the private property in his essay “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” Chalmers uses the intrinsic property when he talks about p-zombies being physically identical to humans in every respect except for qualia. Frank Jackson used the ineffability property when he talked about how Mary the neuroscientist had something missing when she was in the black and white room.
All of this is important to recognize. Because if you still want to say, “But I’m still pointing to something valid and real even if you want to reject this other strawman-entity” then I’m going to treat you like the person who wants to believe in souls even after they’ve been shown that nothing soul-like exists in this universe.
Spouting nonsense is different from being wrong. If I say that there are no rectangles with 5 angles that can be processed pretty straght forwardly because the concept of a rectangle is unproblematic. But if you seek why that statement was made and the person points to a pentagon you will find 5 angles. Now there are polygons with 5 angles. If you give a short word for 5 angle rectangle” it’s correct to say those don’t exists. But if you give an ostensive definition of the shape then it does exist and it’s more to the point to say that it’s not a rectangle rather that it doesn’t exist.
In the details when persons say “what it is like to see green” one could fail to get what they mean or point to. If someone says “look a unicorn” and one has proof that unicorns don’t exist that doesn’t mean that the unicorn reference is not referencing something or that the reference target does not exist. If you end up in a situation where you point at a horse and say “those things do not exist. Look no horn, doesn’t exist” you are not being helpful. If somebody is pointing to a horse and says “look, a unicorn!” and you go “where? I see only horses” you are also not being helpful. Being “motivatedly uncooperative in ostension receiving” is not cool. Say that you made a deal to sell a gold bar in exchange for a unicorn. Then refusing to accept any object as an unicorn woud let you keep your gold bar and you migth be tempted to play dumb.
When people are saying “what it feels like to see green” they are trying to communicate something and failing their assertion by sabotaging their communication doesn’t prove anything. Communication is hard yes but doing too much semantics substitution means you start talking past each other.
I am not suggesting that qualia should be identified with neural activity in a way that loses any aspects of the philosophical definition… bearing in mind that the he philosophical definition does not assert that qualia are non physical.