So the theory purporting to actually solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness needs to shed some light onto the nature and the structure of the space of qualia, in order to be a viable contender from my personal viewpoint.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any such viable contenders, i.e. of any theories shedding much light onto the nature and the structure of the space of qualia. Essentially, I suspect we are still mostly at square zero in terms of our progress towards solving the Hard Problem of Qualia (I should be able to talk about this particular shade of red, and this particular smell of coffee, and this particular psychedelic sound and what they are or what they are made of, so that the ways they are perceived do come through, and if I can’t, a candidate theory has not even started to address what matters personally to me).
As another Camp #2 person, I mostly agree—IIT is at best barking up a different wrong tree from the functionalist accounts—but Russellian [1]monism makes it at least part of the way to square 1. The elevator pitch goes like this:
On the one hand, we know an enormous amount about what physical entities do, and nothing whatsoever about what they are. The electromagnetic field is the field that couples to charges in such and such a way; charge is the property in virtue of which particles couple to the electromagnetic field. To be at some point X in space is to interact with things in the neighborhood of X; to be in the neighborhood of X is (among other things) to interact with things at X. For all we know there might not be such things as things at all: nothing (except perhaps good taste) compels us to believe that “electrons” are anything more than a tool for making predictions about future observations.
On the other hand, we’re directly acquainted with the intrinsic nature of at least some qualia, but know next to nothing about their causal structure. I know what red is like, I know what blue is like, I know what high pitches are like, and I know what low pitches are like, but nothing about those experiences seems sufficient to explain why we experience purple but not highlow.
So we have lawful relations of opaque relata and directly accessible relata with inexplicable relations: maybe there’s just the one sort of stuff, which simultaneously grounds physics and constitutes experience.
Is it right? No clue. I doubt we’ll ever know. But it’s at least the right sort of theory.
If your intuitions about the properties of qualia are the same as mine, you might appreciate this schizo theory pattern-matching them to known physics.
Neutral monism does sound like a good direction to probe further.
I doubt we’ll ever know.
If we survive long enough, we might live to see a convincing solution for the “Hard Problem”.
If we don’t solve this ourselves, then I expect that advanced AIs will get very curious about what is this thing (“subjective experience”, “qualia”) those humans are talking about and they will get very curious about finding ways to experience those things themselves. And being very smart, they might have better chances to solve this.
But groups of humans might also try to organize to solve this themselves (I think not nearly enough is done at present, both theoretically and empirically; for example, people often tend to assume that Neuralink-style interfaces are absolutely necessary to explore hybrid consciousness between biological entities and electronics, but I strongly suspect that a lot can be done with non-invasive interfaces (which is much cheaper/easier/quicker to accomplish and also somewhat safer (although still not quite safe) for participating biological entities))...
That’s for experiments. For theory, we just need to demand what we usually demand of novel physics: non-trivial novel experimental predictions of subjectively observable effects. Some highly non-standard ways to obtain strange qualia or to synchronize two minds, something like that. Something we don’t expect, and which a new candidate theory predicts, and which turns out to be correct… That’s how we’ll know that a particular candidate theory in question is more than just a philosophical take...
As another Camp #2 person, I mostly agree—IIT is at best barking up a different wrong tree from the functionalist accounts—but Russellian [1]monism makes it at least part of the way to square 1. The elevator pitch goes like this:
On the one hand, we know an enormous amount about what physical entities do, and nothing whatsoever about what they are. The electromagnetic field is the field that couples to charges in such and such a way; charge is the property in virtue of which particles couple to the electromagnetic field. To be at some point X in space is to interact with things in the neighborhood of X; to be in the neighborhood of X is (among other things) to interact with things at X. For all we know there might not be such things as things at all: nothing (except perhaps good taste) compels us to believe that “electrons” are anything more than a tool for making predictions about future observations.
On the other hand, we’re directly acquainted with the intrinsic nature of at least some qualia, but know next to nothing about their causal structure. I know what red is like, I know what blue is like, I know what high pitches are like, and I know what low pitches are like, but nothing about those experiences seems sufficient to explain why we experience purple but not highlow.
So we have lawful relations of opaque relata and directly accessible relata with inexplicable relations: maybe there’s just the one sort of stuff, which simultaneously grounds physics and constitutes experience.
Is it right? No clue. I doubt we’ll ever know. But it’s at least the right sort of theory.
As in Bertrand Russell
If your intuitions about the properties of qualia are the same as mine, you might appreciate this schizo theory pattern-matching them to known physics.
The link disappeared, but is available on the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20230706153511/https://www.burntcircuit.blog/untangling-consciousness/
The long paper, On the Psycho-Physical Parallelism, it references is still available: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/psyphy/PsyPhy_latest.pdf?ref=burntcircuit.blog
Yes.
Neutral monism does sound like a good direction to probe further.
If we survive long enough, we might live to see a convincing solution for the “Hard Problem”.
If we don’t solve this ourselves, then I expect that advanced AIs will get very curious about what is this thing (“subjective experience”, “qualia”) those humans are talking about and they will get very curious about finding ways to experience those things themselves. And being very smart, they might have better chances to solve this.
But groups of humans might also try to organize to solve this themselves (I think not nearly enough is done at present, both theoretically and empirically; for example, people often tend to assume that Neuralink-style interfaces are absolutely necessary to explore hybrid consciousness between biological entities and electronics, but I strongly suspect that a lot can be done with non-invasive interfaces (which is much cheaper/easier/quicker to accomplish and also somewhat safer (although still not quite safe) for participating biological entities))...
That’s for experiments. For theory, we just need to demand what we usually demand of novel physics: non-trivial novel experimental predictions of subjectively observable effects. Some highly non-standard ways to obtain strange qualia or to synchronize two minds, something like that. Something we don’t expect, and which a new candidate theory predicts, and which turns out to be correct… That’s how we’ll know that a particular candidate theory in question is more than just a philosophical take...